Mother’s Day is this weekend and without a doubt, everyone is gearing up to tell you the “5/10/15 gift ideas for Mom this Mother’s Day” or “How to Show Your Mom You Care this Mother’s Day”. Your timeline is about to be saturated with cute Mother’s Day photos and perfect family pictures. Yes! Mother’s Day will be great. Yes! Everyone will celebrate you and demonstrate their love for you and it will be amazing. Most of us will only be celebrating how amazing motherhood is this Sunday.
The moment a child is born, the mother is also born. She never existed before. The woman existed, but the mother, never. A mother is something absolutely new.
-Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
Before that happens and before I too “get cute” lol, I want to talk to you about something I didn’t do so well. Why? Because let’s be honest motherhood is not full of smiles, obedient children, tasks that are carried out immediately (like upon request), and we for sure aren’t truly the poster mothers of “I have it all together”, at least not in real life.
Don’t worry “Imma let you finish” your festivities but first walk with me down memory lane.
I remember as Arrow began to grow she didn’t do things exactly as Beau had done them. Beau was reading phonetically at 2.5. Arrow would barely sing her ABC’s with me. She just wanted to play. Beau was all into filling his head with knowledge and regurgitating facts that he had absorbed either on his own or through what we were going over. Again Arrow just wanted to play.
I felt like I was failing, I wondered if I needed to send her to school, I compared her in so many ways to what Beau had done and it wasn’t fair. It took their pediatrician telling me that Beau was the one that wasn’t “normal” for me to realize that the expectations I had placed on Arrow were simply unfair. What was really hurtful was that as strongly as I believe in letting them have control over their own education I was failing her. Not failing her in the sense that she wasn’t learning. On the contrary, she was gaining a wealth of knowledge. I failed her because I had forgotten how important it was for children to just play.
I had spent hours studying the Montessori and Charlotte Mason methods. I had watched them play for days on end and assessed what they knew. I knew learning through play was working for my children. They were confident, articulate, and super sharp. Yet somehow I allowed society and my own story and experiences with an entirely different child set the bar for my daughter who was her own person. I mean, the whole reason for us deciding to homeschool was so that we could intentionally disciple our children and teach them how to connect Christ and involve him in every aspect of their lives and also so that they could be in control of their education and learn what they want to learn at a pace in which they were comfortable with. Arrow was trying to take control of her education and I intervene because it didn’t look like how I thought it should.
Fast forward to today and she’s reading, she loves math and science, and she loves to learn. Thank God I realized that I needed to step back and let her come to me albeit different from Beau it was what was necessary. Stepping back and allowing her to explore and just be little allowed her to flourish. She’s very confident and she lets me know when she wants to dig deeper and explore further. Learning new concepts and retaining information comes so much easier for her. I am obsessively grateful for how God leads us and speaks to us in those quiet moments. We spend so much time stressing over things and the answers are often in the observation. We just have to be still long enough to hear them. It took me a good half of a year to realize that my baby girl was just fine.
I know I say it often but give yourself some grace and remember comparison is the thief of joy.
*Disclaimer*
I never aim to persuade you one way or the other in regard to public versus private versus homeschool. This is just part of our story and please remember it is ours. Your story may be different and although I love homeschool and in this present moment I don’t ever see anything different for our family everyone has to do what works for their family. We’re all trying to figure this thing out in our own way. Never lose sight of that.
Now onto all of the Mother’s Day Celebrations! Happy Mother’s Day to all of the Mama’s out there!
