Last week – or was it the week before I wrote this post, I think I said at the time that as I was feeling very crap at the time it might well not say precisely what I actually wanted to articulate but I wanted to get at least some of it out and that post was the result. Re-reading it this morning I can read between my lines and know that what I was really posting about being fed up with was motherhood. Now I don’t know if everyone feels like this from time to time, I imagine they do, I bloody well hope they do. I think motherhood is probably very similar to (a happy) marriage (or indeed long term, committed relationships 😉 ) in as much as whilst you spend the vast majority of the time very happy and revelling in the security, companionship, passion, shared history etc of that relationship there are times, sometimes only brief when it becomes constricting, it can make you feel trapped to be so tied to someone else, it is tiring to have to consider someone else, meet needs other than your own, live in the gilded cage. I guess that is true of pretty much all relationships – we could choose never to form any and live like hermits but we’d miss out on all the great stuff about having people around us. I often wax lyrical on the joys of having siblings, how the positives outweigh the negatives but that there are indeed negatives attached. I also think that if I’d never had children my life would be far less rich but because I’d never known the joys of having children I perhaps wouldn’t have missed them and would be bound up in the positives of not having children – more money, more time, less responsibility, less guilt, more freedom etc. Very base level but exploring all that wasn’t actually the reason for this post.
Where I was coming from was explaining that actually that post was not really about Home Education, it was about my own tiredness with being at home with small children. And how Home Education can compound that and also means you seem to lose the right to complain about it. I’ve been reading a blog this morning which is defending working mothers, saying how they are not less of a mother if they choose to work, choose to use childcare, do not take great pleasure in surrendering themselves to childcare and housework and it’s the same thing really. It seems to be that once we have made a choice, particularly if it is a contensious or ‘against the norm’ one then we need to shut up and put up about it, complaining about the challenges and the difficult days is not acceptable when you made the choice in the first place. If you choose to work and use childcare then it’s your own bloody fault when your kids end up delinquent, if you choose to stay at home then you’ve no one to blame but yourself when you get empty nest syndrome and are totally unemployable at 40 something because you came out of the workplace, if you choose to eshew the perfectly acceptable, free, state education then what the hell are you doing complaining about it when you have no money from losing a second salary, having no time to yourself or getting fed up with being around small children from time to time.
I think it makes things stronger if you question and challenge them, I enjoy sitting sometimes thinking about what life would be like if I wasn’t with Ady, I speculate on different possibilities at various life crossroads, I ponder some of the choices I’ve made and whether life would have been better if I’d made different decisions along the way. The answer is unfailingly always that I am actually very happy with what I have, I am great at counting my blessings, I am a generally very content person. If I was not then I would set about making the changes to make me happy again. Clearly when you have children unless you are prepared to walk away from them (which I know plenty of people, including Ady’s own mother, have done) if it is parenthood which is making you unhappy then you have something of a dilema. This was not the case for me, but certainly the ‘nothing but Home Educator’ was becoming not enough for me and I have managed to recognise it and take appropriate steps to deal with that. The easy answer would have been to stop Home Educating but actually that was not the issue at all, although the amount of time spent with the children and our lifestyle because we Home Educate was compounding a problem.
This has turned into yet another of my posts where I started it in my head, got half of it written in draft and have since been out for a whole day, come back, having talked about it to a real life person and worked through some of what I was going to say already so I’ll stop here otherwise it will be even more disjointed than it might already be. But all I really wanted to say was that actually I love Home Education, it is totally what I want to do for my children and with my children. I believe in it and it is only this faith in it which has meant I have continued. I guess what I was trying to say was that Home Ed for us this past year has been an against all odds type of situation – along with some ‘brave and honest’ (as someone said having read it) and rather brutal account of how I sometimes feel about parenthood.
“And how Home Education can compound that and also means you seem to lose the right to complain about it….It seems to be that once we have made a choice, particularly if it is a contensious or ‘against the norm’ one then we need to shut up and put up about it, complaining about the challenges and the difficult days is not acceptable when you made the choice in the first place.”
Yes, well, you aren’t going to get any argument from me about that since that feels pretty much like my life in just about every way. Nicely put.
I get tired of motherhood too, it isn’t just you. And beads. Not FImo, not yet, but there is time. Still rather be being a mum than stuck in an office, still rather be working my butt off so i can spend my own money i carved out of an idea than anything else though. But everyone deserves the right to have a whinge 🙂
You completely sure we aren’t twins?
That was all very interesting. I think I need to go out to work and so does D. We set things up that way when P was a baby and have stuck with it right through. We’d have more money coming if one of us had decided to work full-time and build a career and one had stayed at home full-time, but we’d both go loopy doing either!
For us home ed, parenting and life in general is all about getting the balance right. We think about it all the time.
I’ve been worrying about the balance recently and feeling like we were too busy racing about- and every moment was work of one kind or another for the adults. Strangely it has been making more personal effort with the HE (family)side of life, and offering and being positive about activities with my children, that has improved things for me.
I think home ed, and small kids in general, need more energy than we can always spare. I also need re-assurance and validation of my choices which I get from D but also from the fab home ed community locally. I could easily crack if I didn’t know so many great autonomous home ed families locally.
Glad you’ve found the time to think all this through – it is really helpful to read someone else’s musing on these questions.
for me, our best balance came when we both worked part time, and it is soemthing I’d have prefered to carry on doing, it just didn’t turn out to be an option. [though I pushed the limits with my compressed hours]
Its all a headspace issue isn’t it! says she with no headspace free at the moment.
I think one of the problems is the amount of pressure many HErs put themselves under. Not saying you do, Nic! I have no idea how much pressure you put yourself under, lol. But I ofetn see people irl who think home educating their children means nearly 24/7 input, effort, worry etc. Well fine if that what they really want to do, but I’ve found my children learn more the more I don’t bother them! They’ve really benefitted from me not feelng pressured to constantly do things with them. I dunno, maybe my family are the oddballs, but as soon as I realised this, a few years ago, I realised that frees me up to kind of home-educate myself, which has cured a lot of the ‘what am I doing with my life?’ angst that I may have had before. But all this varies according to what you need, what your children need, what outside pressure you’re under and lots more factors probably too. Glad you’re happy on the whole anyway! And love reading your blog 😀
So we’re agreed then, it’s ok to be yearning to have the chance to spend time away from the children, if only so you can miss them? 😉
I think you’re right Gill – and actually when I do leave the children alone that is when they seem to be doing better, but I think it’s finding the balance between them choosing to be left to it and knowing you are available if they need you and just ignoring them even when they do want you that I sometimes fail to strike the balance on. I also think we’ve just had too many days at home with nothing particular going on which doesn’t seem to suit us.