Revelations and Reality

Some keeper posts from Cindy of It is About the Journey -- so many times, her thoughts speak to me! I could have easily listed more -- but these ones particularly made me think.

And Cindy, I really will try to get around to the Ten Random Facts! -- thanks for tagging me!

Revelation

I imagined myself at age 13. I thought about what it would be like to be homeschooled with a mentor/parent who was interested in life and felt her mission was to help me explore life.

Visiting my parents in Alaska recently, my revelation has been that I DID have such parents and I owe them a debt of gratitude every day. No, we didn't homeschool. There was no such thing, really, back in the 70's when I was growing up. Nor do I believe my parents would have been unschoolers -- my father benefited so much from a structured academic education that it affected everything else in his life. But everything my parents did was about learning, its beauty and value. Oh, I only hope I can live up to their example! they were not perfect, but they were commited -- not just to us, the kids, but to living a good life, a life pleasing to God.

A homeschool "confessional" article by Tammy Cardwell

Um -- if I wrote my homeschool true confessions they would be different, for sure, but the basic theme would be the same.

'I' had done nothing at all. . .not anything to speak of, that is.

Unique-ity

I think the wisest people are the ones who know, deep down, that every family is different and can take all the great ideas and advice and filter it.. or just know deep inside that it will not all fit. And when they dispense advice, they do it in a way the sets that as the undertone.. such as.. "Well, this is just how it works for us.." et. al.

Cindy's word "real" has rung with me so strongly in the past couple of years. We are all so different. She has two teen boys; I have six boys and one daughter. I live in the CA Sierra mountains. What works for others might be difficult or impossible for me, and vice versa.

I know I have a tendency to compare myself negatively with others. St Therese of Lisieux speaks to me on this:

JUST AS THE sun shines simultaneously on the tall cedars and on each little flower as though it were alone on the earth, so Our Lord is occupied particularly with each soul as though there were no others like it. And just as in nature all the seasons are arranged in such a way as to make the humblest daisy bloom on a set day, in the same way, everything works out for the good of each soul.

Looking out my window I can see tall cedars, thriving young sequoias, lots of manzanita bushes and granite boulders. I can see our beat-up Suburban, our one and only vehicle, which has over 150,000 miles on it. We bought the Suburban in 1998 because Aidan was due to be born and our 7-seater van would no longer be able to hold us all. We gave away the van to friends. Many, many of those 150,00 miles were spent on medical trips -- back and forth to San Francisco and to our regional children's hospital.

You can see right there that our family will have its own unique dynamics and imperatives -- as Cindy quotes John Paul II: "Families, become who you are!" We are shaped by our circumstances, but transcend them too by God's graces.

St Therese writes:

GOD REJOICES MORE in what He can do in a soul humbly resigned to its poverty than in the creation of millions of suns and the vast stretch of the heavens.

and finally, Faithful Personal Assistants -- aka binders~!

I can always use more help with this kind of thing! My notebooks aren't nearly so consistent and easily located as Cindy's and other people's -- but mine too have been indispensible to my homeschool. If you did an archaological dig through my closet -- not something I would recommend! -- you would find notebooks suiting whatever my "plan" was for that year. The year my oldest was preparing for college, there were carefully archived grades and transcripts; other years have carefully planned literature units and booklists -- this year my mainstay has been spiral "commonplace books" -- I use an artist's sketch spiral with heavy paper -- where everything up to the kitchen sink finds a home -- quotes from saints, scripture verses, notes on "to do's", medical records for my younger children, lists of books read or ones that I think my kids would like to read. Not very systematic, but it is working for me this year. It's helping me face my tendency to create a system that's artificial for me -- that does not really support what I am doing, but what I wish I was doing.

The discussion on What's Real also helped me to think through how we might appear to others as compared to what we really are. Elizabeth writes:

I find that my wrestling with how to live a real life can still take place in this community, but it's private emails and phone conversations with a trusted few that yield the fruitful growth much more than the public, polished pieces on the blogs. The blogs might spark the conversations and the introspection, but they aren't the final word.