Homeschooling Decision Evolved Over Time

Life is full of ironies.

For example, I have to force my children out of bed on school days, yet they conveniently wake up at 6 on weekends and in the summer.

Or, when I was younger and had nothing to do, I would stay up until the wee hours of the morning, but now that there aren’t enough hours in the day, I’m crawling into bed before 10.

Or that I used to teach public school, and none of my children will ever attend one.

Life is funny that way. In the summer between teaching sixth and eighth grades, I was in South America on a missions trip with a homeschooling mom who was incredibly overbearing and overprotective. In the back of a Caracas taxi, she must have made a snide remark about public school, and I immediately shot back, “I would NEVER homeschool.” Maybe what I meant was, “I would never homeschool like you,” but I just didn’t know it then.

I’m not entirely sure when we made the decision to homeschool. It was more of an evolution of thought which likely started when they handed me that first baby. Of course, that moment is fuzzy from the shock of the pain I’d just endured, but I’m fairly certain something clicked there. Though it might have been even sooner.

I found out I was expecting my first child in the middle of that eighth-grade year. It was a year of turmoil in which I experienced a fight in my classroom, a few in the hallway, a drug bust, pregnant 13-year-old students and filing assault charges against a student who had served time for attempted murder.

Did I mention this was eighth grade? The day I drove away from that building, I thanked God the whole way back to my apartment that I was alive. It was over. I was not going back.

Maybe in that moment I also determined that this precious little guy growing inside me would never have to endure what I had.

Oh yes, I know Ledyard schools are wonderful. I’m a product of them, as are my brother and sister. It’s nothing personal.

Except that it’s intensely personal. (Again with the irony!)

I know that hardly a fifth of what happened in that South Texas middle school would happen in Ledyard or the other towns in which we‘ve lived. But neither my husband nor I wanted to take that chance with this first little person. Or the second, third, or fourth.

So somewhere in there, when our oldest was about three, we simultaneously came to the concrete conclusion that we would homeschool, come what may.

Quite a leap in thinking for a former public school teacher. But not for a mom.