I’m not sure I should include a newsletter about dysfunction so early on in this home education journal. But there are plenty of pretty, flowery documentations of homeschoolers around the world out there, and you, my readers, might be looking for a little more honesty on all aspects of choosing to home educate your children. And maybe because you’re nosy, you aren’t just wondering about how home educators generally struggle — you’re wondering how we personally struggle.
I don’t blame you. I want to see other people having a hard time of things sometimes, too, so I know I’m not alone in my struggles.
There was a morning a few weeks ago that inspired this post, and a few since then, too — in fact, this occurrence is probably about once a week — where the day begins so bleakly, I question everything I’m doing in my life. In our house, we are not morning people. Well, the children are of course! But David and I have never managed to progress into early risers. We are still very much night owls who come alive in the quiet hours to enjoy our evenings out with friends that we take turns giving to one another. We also hit that second wind after girls’ bedtime even if it is just to eat an uninterrupted meal or takeaway together, watch telly, or catch up with one another. I personally use the night times to be creative, write, and process things. My mind-churning is work — it’s exhausting, but I love it. Sometimes, we aren’t “morning people,” because we haven’t been able to express ourselves the evening before, and exhaustion and work meant we were swallowed up in the life/work grind instead of simply getting “to be.” Or we refused not to get this time we love so much and did it anyway after hours when we should have been asleep. Or sometimes mornings suck because David worked an overnight.
We haven’t shamed ourselves for not changing our personalities and tendencies. The whole point of our choosing to home school is not to arrange our life to accommodate a traditional “school schedule” but to make our life what we want it to be: child-free night-time hours for ourselves, slow mornings for reconnecting into our responsibilities and functioning in this crazy weird society we have around us. We’re also navigating our awareness and acceptance of David’s autism diagnosis (and my HSP traits, which are apparently also defined as neurodivergent). To be clear, the ways in which mine and David’s brains work — and the ways in which they so often do not work very well together — are not new to us. We have been “battling” each other for basically all the years we’ve been together (20+). But our acknowledgment of and the language we now have for our brains’ functions has recently informed the way we war with and work out our differences. It’s impacted the way we parent and homeschool as well.
So what do I mean about dysfunction? “Disruption of normal social relations” is how Google defines it. My bloody shouting is a disruption. Shouty mornings. I mean the raging. The shouts that render everything and everyone immobile. David’s often disconnect from my emotions is a disruption. The girls then also experience our unsettled dynamic. My chronic health issues are a disruption. These kinds of interruptions lead to the broken mornings where no one is connected to anyone else, breakfast is a chore, and it’s painful to get out of the house or continue with the day.
So what do I do about this dysfunction? I am embracing it. Don’t get me wrong: I loathe these mornings. I don’t enjoy feeling so uncertain, but I' no longer allow them the power of guilt and of making me feel like a failure. Even if we weren’t home educating, we’d have dysfunctional mornings. Life is trail and error.
The compulsion to rid myself of dysfunction stems from the institutional behaviour modification I saw in the traditional school system. So if I am unschooling myself, it also means stripping the endless pursuit of perfection away from my ideas of how my life should look.
What the dysfunction brings instead of failure is awareness. I understand myself and my family a little better each time. I own the feelings and actions the raging produced. I talk about that with David and the kids later on. Sometimes, the disruption means I get stuck and whatever we had planned for the day feels impossible, so we stay home. Sometimes, I carry on anyway.
Each time, we doubt ourselves and our ability to manage our life and nurture our family. David will tell you the same. Often on these mornings, he ends up hearing hurtful (though sometimes true) things from me about himself. Not a great way to start the day. Doubts about the worthiness of home educating always arise: “Should I just send them all to school? Both of us just get full-time jobs and stay away from each other except evenings and weekends? Is that the easier way?”
By the end of these days with dysfunctional mornings, we are most often recovered. Occasionally they do require more days for us to find our way back to each other. But we always come back to the connection, the conclusion for our family, that doing the often times perceived-by-others idea of “doing it harder a way” is actually not harder at all for us — that living without the freedom to be ourselves (our very raw and messy selves) and choosing our own weedy, overgrown paths we find in home education would be harder for us than following the paved road of traditional education. Divergent and “dysfunctional” after all.