What I Want You to Know About Homeschooling

I ran into an old friend a few weeks past. I hadn’t seen her since Addy was first born. She had asked about Addy: how old? what grade? what school?… In the conversation, I mentioned that I was homeschooling Addy.

“Oh! I could have never done that. I just don’t have the patience.”

This is the response I most often hear when I say we are homeschoolers. I think I have heard it at least 3 times since.

It seems like 75% of the population views homeschoolers as good and holy saints, full of patience, meekness, and humility and always soft spoken. Maybe even as women who don floral aprons and whose homes smell of fresh-baked apple bread. Women with burlap-covered chore charts and aspirations of no less than 7 kids.

I feel like I need to set the record straight. I can't speak for everyone, but I am not patient. I am not humble or meek… and I am definitely not soft-spoken when Jed decides he simply cannot wait five minutes for a snack and boycotts my lesson. I struggle with organization, and I might just be the world’s worst procrastinator.  I only wish I owned an apron, my clothes would thank me (anyone else a super messy cook?).

I have had it pointed out before that I used to be a teacher so homeschooling must come so naturally to me. I may have been a teacher before I had kids, but did I ever tell you about how when I was a substitute in a local school district I declined all assignments kindergarten thru third grade because I do not like teaching young kids? I may have been a teacher and teaching might be one of those talents God placed inside me, but I am great at teaching things like literary analysis, historical context, and algebraic functions. I assure you teaching phonics, handwriting, and basic arithmetic baffles me. Can I also just say that it hardly comes natural to deny my selfish desires and dreams to sit at home and educate my kids from whom, truth be told, I would like a break from every now and again.

I have this sinking suspicion that while I might not be a patient, meek, or humble person yet, homeschooling requires that I learn how to be. And let me tell you, homeschooling grates against every single one of my shortcomings. I am being refined.

I want you to know that the reason I homeschool has almost nothing to do with my abilities or my strengths. I do it, simply because when I weighed public school, private school and homeschool, and I laid it all before the Lord, this was the very thing God put on my heart.

Can I tell you sometimes it terrifies me?

Can I also tell you that {most} mornings I wake up with this distinct feeling that I am doing exactly what God made me to do? Each morning I wake up and surrender, press my rough-edged self into the potter’s molding hands. I know I am in His hands. This is where I belong. I know my kids are in His hands in spite of my failings. I know this is where they belong. That is a good feeling. I could ramble on about what I see in my family and Addy and Jed and just how much it means to watch us cross milestones together.

What I want you to know is that if you want to homeschool, you can. No, really, you can. We serve a God who gives strength to weak things. You don’t have to be patient to homeschool. Though I quite guarantee, a few years in and you might find yourself a good deal more patient.

What I want you to know is that if you don’t want to homeschool, that’s okay. Follow Jesus wherever He leads your family, please. Homeschooling isn’t holier or better. Wherever God places you and your family is full of benefits and, yes, shortcomings too that require you, momma to lean on God. The only thing that could ever make a person holier is weakness leaning on the strength of the Lord. Homeschooling can be a tool, but it’s only a tool. It is not holiness itself.

Correct me if I am wrong, but I bet it is with the same amount of terrifying surrender that I open my lesson books and take my kids’ educations upon myself that a momma releases the hand of her child to walk onto a school campus and entrusts education for six hours a day to someone else. It all requires bravery, camaraderie, and trust in the Lord.

I think it’s easy to compare. We stand and watch from a limited outside perspective and torment ourselves with our skewed imaginings of other’s lives. We do things like brush over pastor’s wives or homeschoolers or teachers with whatever idealistic notion we might have attached to that role. We play judge, and we play it horribly. But truth is, we are all just moms. Flawed, struggling, and finding ourselves holding our breath when we look at the child that was once a tiny baby fresh and new… and aching and proud over how much that child has grown and changed and wondering where the time went. We see the talents and the struggles, the gem under the rough surface. We love big and hard, and we love so much it hurts to our very core. And we fear how we might fail. We are moms, walking with fear and trembling. We struggle with releasing our kids to the Lord, with trusting. And we struggle with holding on to our kids who in so many ways never stop wriggling from our grasp. We are moms who need to know we all walk with a limp and the only way to walk whole is to lean on Jesus.

I am standing here humbly, telling you, sister, that I am cheering you on… and in however you are deciding to educate your kids. I am encouraging you to press into the One who molds and shapes, yes, every one of those imperfections. And, this girl? Well, I have certainly not arrived and will not cease to need encouragement until the day my heart is truly Home.

By Grace,

Amanda Conquers



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