Last September I was stressing out about homeschooling my kids. The pandemic gave me two harsh choices: remote learning or legit Pearl-in-charge homeschool.
Here is where I was: in a big city, not the safest neighborhood. Removed from my comfortable worldview; my only friends, folks who didn’t even speak English as their first language. They were reliant on whatever education our local school had to offer, and none of them could afford to quit their jobs, let alone “work from home”. They welcomed iPads with open arms; at least their kids would have a checklist when they were left with grandma or the neighbor, or if, forbid it, they were on their own for the school day.
One day a week I still rubbed elbows with people who looked more like me: an upstanding church crowd, wearing their Sunday best, forever befuddled with my family’s choice to send our kids to public school. I was an enigma to them, and they to me, and for the life of me I couldn’t explain how sad I was–the tragedy of being shut off from my public school community, this idea that kids were being literally abandoned to their iPads. So much for learning to read. So much for social interaction, and so much for volunteering at school.
The options weren’t great, but we were all doing what we had to do. The pandemic dealt the cards, and time forced our hand. Move, or be moved. Jump, or be shoved. It’s no secret I picked homeschool after quite some deliberation. I just couldn’t bear the idea of scheduled, intentional screen time with someone outside our four walls calling all the shots. Stick a fork in my eyeball–I know my kids, and I know the addiction of screen time–I couldn’t do it.
So I set out to do what is for me, the impossible: select curriculums, organize our space and our life, create routine, inspire greater learning. Math, penmanship, science, English. The task shouldn’t be so hard. We’d already been home, isolated in the city for six months by then. I could grin and bear it, right?
Alas, I couldn’t. My absent-minded ways were no match for my greatest intentions. My kids, too smart and fast. They read textbooks like comics, rocketing through projects and leaving hurricane-sized messes. Where I wanted them to slow down, they sped up. When I needed calm and deliberate, they gave me intensity and pell-mell. They memorized minute war details and chemical reactions, human body science, how seeds germinate. One boy disappearing to the basement and resurfacing the next morning, eyes bleary, declaring he didn’t really like Lord of the Flies but supposed it was worth reading in one shot. Their noses hidden in books until in a burst of frenzy they’d rush out to the trampoline and ram one another into the net, again and again. Always hungry for new information, followed by releasing the pent-up energy, never pausing to perfect penmanship or color in the lines. Sprinting, then panting, then sprinting again.
It is hard to lasso a tornado. Chalk it up to restlessness, giftedness, lacking executive function or whatever baloney that frames a child as more special than the next. My management skills were woefully inadequate for this job.
One month in, and my heart began racing. I felt the heat in my chest, the faint thrum of an oncoming anxiety attack. Everything required more of me than I could give. It wasn’t a surprise when my immune system started going haywire. But it was a shock.
I immediately turned into a miserable person. Moment by moment my skin crawled. I scratched myself bloody. There was no relief. I visited urgent care clinics. I saw my regular physician. Blood testing for allergies, appointments with a dermatologist.
It was chronic hives, my introduction to a backfiring immune system. A festering itch that began on a Wednesday evening after an innocuous walk in the park and bloomed and flared into red-hot screaming madness, welts and bumps up and down my arms, trunk, scalp, legs.
I curled up into a ball on the couch and begged it to go away. The madness of constant itching from my head to my ankle (mercifully not my feet) coupled with the expectation of keeping kids home for schooling was too much.
One afternoon I phoned my dad. The big kids were at music lessons and the little ones played at the playground while I slumped on the park bench, disconsolate.
It rang twice and he picked up. He’s been living with chronic illness since I was a baby (and gives solid advice on weaning oneself from prednisone).
He understood my condition. I blurted out my madness, my fear I was losing control of my body, the relentless, unwelcome urticaria that was beginning to dominate every waking minute.
He was quiet, thoughtful. Then he said,
“Well, Pearl, have you talked to Jesus about it?”
I bit my lip so no sobs could escape.
“Of course,” I said, “I asked Him to take it away.”
The line was silent. Then,
“Well,” he said, “in my experience you have to give Him a choice.”
“What do you mean?” I asked him, miserable.
“‘God, You can take this away, or…’” he began.
“‘Help me deal with it?’” I said.
He didn’t answer.
“I don’t think I can deal with it, Dad,” I admitted, letting a few tears loose.
“I know, Pearl,” he said. “I know.”
His advice was that I lay on the couch some more (“stop trying to do it all”). He assured me my kids would be fine (“they’re the smartest kids I know”). He told me how to handle the prednisone and how to talk with an immunologist (“they need to see how miserable you are, so don’t put on a brave face”).
Thankfully, mercifully, I found a doctor who was able to help me. He did more blood tests and gave me medicine that subdued the hives.
God didn’t choose to take the problem away, but He did help me deal with it.
And that was a gracious thing, because in the interim it was the toughest year of our lives. More stressors presented and compounded over the months, to a point where we asked God to take things away, or… Point us in another direction, God, or…
(Someday I will tell that story, too–once there is more ground between here and there.)
For school, I let kids read books. I laid on the couch until the library notified me we had a new stack ready, and then we’d drive up, park, and open the back hatch where the gloved and masked worker loaded us up with heavy paper bags, fresh pages to peruse.
That was the bulk of homeschooling. I’d push it now and again, insert a few minutes a day on multiplication tables, or building a diorama, or gathering science experiment supplies. I signed one kid up for an online math course. I bribed another with candy to practice his handwriting. We watched musicals and YouTube tutorials.
I refused to step in the gap and do it all. I purposefully ignored the urge to turn out perfection. I blocked all the opportunities to compare myself to anyone else.
Every time the lump would rise in my throat or the hot feeling in my chest, I stepped back, sat on the couch, and remembered the consequences of letting hopelessness and fear manifest in my body, the misery of hives flaring again all over me.
And this is what I’ve learned from the experience:
God gives us a choice, too.
Humble yourselves, under God’s mighty hand, so that in due time He may exalt you. Cast ALL your anxiety on Him, because He cares for you.
1 Peter 5:6-7
We can choose to humble ourselves, acknowledge we are inadequate for the task. We can choose to hand over ALL our worries, or we can try and manage them ourselves. We can play proud and toy around with a few worries, pretending we’ve got what it takes to manage. We can brag on our measly victories, put on a facade that we have it all together when we don’t. We can hide our insecurities and failures and poor relationships behind a big fake smile.
Or we can admit we aren’t fit for the job, and we need all the heavenly help we can get.
My big boy got off the bus yesterday (they are back in school! and riding the bus!) and he came up the steps, solemn, a piece of paper behind his back.
“Mom, I need to show you something. Now. In the back room.”
I sensed he’d gotten in trouble and needed me to sign a slip. I was a little worried.
He whispered so no one could hear him. I braced myself for the worst.
“Mrs. K made the whole class lemonade today. It was, um, really good. And so, um, I asked her if she’d let me copy down the recipe. Here,” he said, thrusting it into my hands.
“Is that it?” I asked.
“Yeah, I thought we could make it sometime. Don’t tell anybody,” he said, and rushed back into the kitchen to fix a snack.
I have talked to Jesus again and again this year. I’ve stopped asking Him to erase my problems. Instead, I just hand my worries over to Him, because that’s what He’s told me to do. I pour out my anxieties to Him like a five gallon bucket of water on a raspberry bush. I give Him a choice to fix it or to help me deal with it, but mostly I hand it over because I cannot physically take on any more.
He woos me every time. He is interested in my kids, their education, my job, my marriage, my health. He uses sickness to produce wisdom and endurance in my life. He cares for me.
I’m not sure I would’ve seen exactly all the ways he cares if it hadn’t been for a horrid, blessed last year.
He provides the lemons and then He hands me the recipe for lemonade (via a kid who is doing just fine in sixth grade, nevermind the last year of pell-mell homeschooling).
It’s up to me to make it.
