I wrote this several months ago at the end of a homeschool day that didn’t go well, in the middle of a homeschool season that has been hard. I thought you might need to hear it now. This was when my children went to school two days a week and I taught them at home the other days. Now they’re home full time, like most of your children. I want to let you know it’s okay if it’s hard.
This would have been a day to call home and cry over the phone to my mom–if we had that sort of relationship. As it is, I sob behind the bed, soaking tissues with tears and snot as I recount to myself all the ways this day failed to deliver. My hopeful plans for a day’s worth of work getting done in a day were all crashed to the ground and stomped under the feet of the day that actually happened. The kids that didn’t listen well. My brain that couldn’t come up with any sort of helpful direction. The pinto beans for sensory play that mockingly assaulted my senses me from every corner of the school room floor. The helpless dustpan and brush nearby.
I wanted just one Thursday that went well. One Thursday where we completed every bit of school by 4 PM. And today it was actually a possibility. But here I am, crying on the floor in the middle of the afternoon. I really feel like my life is mocking me, like some unseen force is knocking me down just when I thought I could walk tall for one day.
As I curl up in my bedroom I am pretty sure that all that is wrong with my day is all that is wrong with me. This is my home school life. This is my parenting. This right here is probably what is getting in the way of me living into my calling. This thing that is wrong can be summed up in one sentence–I can’t, for the life of me, do what I set out to do.
That is my grief. That is my shame. Some of its power leaves when I name it. I calm slowly, my tears spent. I light a candle at my desk, stare at the flame and wait as words begin to form.
I sit still in the light of a candle. I'm held in the glow as the world spins without me for a few minutes. I breathe and breathe the again the peace that exists so big that all my frantic flailing and failing cannot move it.
May you, my friend, find peace today in the middle of your weariness and grief, whatever it is.