One day at a time
Sep 25, 2002 Parenting
If you’ve read my 100 things post then you know that Brett is sober. He doesn’t 12-step for a variety of reasons I won’t get into here but we both spent time 12-stepping. I personally got a lot out of Al-anon almost entirely in the form of pithy sayings that actually keep me motivated.
There’s a line from the AA poem Just For Today that says: “Just for today I will try to live through this day only, not tackling all of my problems at once. I can do something at this moment that would discourage me if I had to continue it for a lifetime.”
I use this line a lot. I used it today.
We’re three days into “official” homeschooling now and my enthusiasm is already flagging. Noah woke up this morning and began leaping around asking for our “reading time”, which is how I’ve decided to start our day. I’m using that Five in a Row curriculum as our starting point and this week we’re reading The Story of Ping. I really thought he’d be sick of the book by today and instead he asked to do another “thing about Ping” like we have the two days before. I guess this stuff works. Anyway, in honor of Ping’s “mother and his father and two sisters and three brothers and eleven aunts and seven uncles and forty-two cousins” we made a family tree. I tried to keep my side of it simple by leaving off one half-sister and shoving the other two off to the side of my dad. My dad’s colorful marital history is something that seems to come to Noah in bits and pieces. Today he said, “Who is Grandma married to?” and then he was surprised to learn that Grampa is not married either, which must seem weird to him because he knows my two youngest half-sisters must have had a mother. He’s met my former stepmother but I don’t think he remembers her.
Anyway, as I sat helping him sift through the pictures I thought, “I cannot do this for the next 12 or 13 years.” But then that line in the poem came back to me. For one thing, I know homeschooling will change as Noah gets bigger and for another thing, I don’t have to think about doing it for 12 or 13 years; I have to think about doing it for today. Just today.
I immediately felt calmer.
I use this same thinking for lots of stuff. Like I said, it comes in handy. Break it all down to small parcels and suddenly it’s not overwhelming. I say, “I don’t need to write the whole article, I just need to read this one book.” And next thing I know, I’m writing the article. Or I say, “I don’t need to do anything except finish this one lap.” And then I find the energy to do two. I put my blinders on and go to whatever is before me and sooner or later, I’m on the other side.
It’s not the actual homeschooling that’s the problem, it’s all the anxiety. I’m sick of worrying about it. I’m sick of looking over other people’s shoulders at their methods and wondering if I should incorporate some of it. I know this is normal homeschooling jitters, however. My friend K. was a mess last year when she started HSing her son and this year she’s the picture of calm. I also know that it’s common to go totally overboard about stuff, which is why I’m keeping to one activity a day for now and then letting the rest happen.
It’s interesting how stuff “happens” that naturally relates to what our “official” activity was anyway. Like yesterday we went to the park and it happened to have a pond and there happened to be ducks and we were noticing how they reflect in the water just like in Ping and today Noah was much more interested in the pictures. Pretty nifty.
September 25th, 2002 at 11:38 am
That’s a great way of thinking about life! One day…I gotta remember that.
September 25th, 2002 at 12:52 pm
I’ve done my 12-step time, too, and Just for Today remains one of my guiding lights.
Dawn, I’m glad you’re trying to relax. I am trying to ease into a more structured day with the girls, since I am Mrs. StructureWhatsThat? and my main obstacle to getting some is that I try to do too much at once. So I am starting out small. Josie is only 5. I figure her main job is to play at this age. So I’m trying to give her all kinds of opportunities to do that.
While I get my act together, she’s busy learning stuff. Today she was able for the first time to tell me what time it was from the digital clock (almost–she said it was 8:30 when it was 8:53–but she was close!). She is displaying a lot of pre-reading behavior, too. And I’m not doing anything special.
Of course, Josie isn’t as studious a child as Noah, from what you’ve said. He sounds like a very focused, rather melancholic kiddo. Josie is sanguine with a dose of choleric.
She has a naturally dreamy disposition and is very strong-willed at the same time. Nothing like a challenge, nu? 
September 26th, 2002 at 3:22 pm
My husband has always pushed me to homeschool our two boys, but I guess I’m reluctant to sacrifice the mental peace.
Plus, the kids have both developed an astute ability to “push my buttons” and it’s my notion that giving us time away from each other every day is LESS dysfunctional.
I also think, from being the type of Mom who is always hovering around the public school classroom, that there is an optimum age to send a child away to school, and it’s no early than about 6 years of age.
I feel sorry for little kids who are sent to preschool or all-day kindergarten, because many of them are in a haze due to the developmental inability to process what’s going on in their lives. The youngest children OUGHT TO be at home with Mom, in my opinion.
September 27th, 2002 at 11:11 am
If it’s any consolation to you, I think it gets easier after a few weeks… uh… years…
You need the decompression time, too, and you need to, as you put it in a past entry, “deschool” yourself.
I found that trying too hard to do everything the way I saw other people doing it (which usually was for show, anyway) made me crazy. We’re more relaxed now about stuff, and the kids are learning. And I’m learning too. One thing I found out after we pulled Cody out of school: I had forgotten how to learn, really learn. I knew how to extract knowledge, but I’d forgotten how to learn. It’s starting to come back to me now, in our third year of doing this… good luck!