I'm putting together an outline for a series of articles or maybe a pamphlet or maybe it will turn into an ebook. Who knows? But I'm thinking through my walk through grief which impacted every single area of my life, one of them being homeschooling. I darn near gave it up. Seriously, I was *this* close to calling it quits and dropping my kids off at the local private school which would have required me to go back to work because private schools require a private fortune! Can I get an amen? That's how burned out I was. I was willing to work a 9 to 5 job outside my house in order to NOT homeschool my children. It was a hard time.
But at the last minute, after the decision had been fretted over and prayed over (more fretted than prayed, if I'm being honest) a co-op opportunity was dropped into my lap and it was the answer to every one of those fretful prayers. So I'm still a homeschooler! But the better thing is that I *want* to be a homeschooler. THAT'S the real miracle here.
What I've discovered as I've walked through five years of multi-layered grief, which was primarily the illness and death of my mother but there were other ugly side issues swirling around lapping at my ankles regarding a pedophile at our church and the subsequent fallout from that, is that it's OK to not be OK. It's not a lack of faith or a lack of holiness to curl up and say, "I'm going to need a minute." And those are the sorts of things I want to write about in my series/pamphlet/ebook. I want to talk about what it looked like for me, what my coping mechanisms were, how it affected my marriage and other relationships, and the guilt and feelings of failure that accompany it all. But mostly I want to talk about what it feels like coming out on the other side.
It's been 18 months since I lost my mother. I'm getting better, more myself, my passions are slowly returning. Colors are brighter, food tastes better, and I smile a lot more than I used to. I'm not there yet but I'm confident I'll get there. In the meantime I want to write about what I've been through and how I navigated that tumultuous time especially as it relates to homeschooling in order to hopefully help some other hurting mom who is in a deep, dark pit of grief and thumbing through the local schools section of the yellow pages. I want that depressed, wiped out, exhausted, sad homeschooling mom to know that this is not forever. The sun does come out again and the Lord heals wounds. Scars remain, but healing does eventually come.
Stay tuned!
