Control the Controllable
As a parent, you spend a lot of time asking yourself if you’re “doing it right.”
Is this a good thing for my child?
Is this good for me?
No parenting book or website will tell you. You have to figure it out on your own. This trial and error method is perhaps the most nerve-wracking of all.
You’ll won’t know whether something worked out (or failed miserably) until years later.
The decision to homeschool our children felt like one of those trial and error moments. We were on the backend of a summer road trip staying in Eugene, Oregon.
Still in our bubble of isolation, the real world was creeping in—in less than four weeks, we would send our kids back to the classroom.
Or would we?
My wife is much more in tune with what’s happening in the world as it relates to the pandemic. I suppose her phone’s algorithms point her to the latest and not-so-greatest news about it.
By late summer, her sources were saying that children were coming down with the illness, which meant more transmission, and therefore more risk for all.
She had begun researching home school options in our area and had narrowed down a few as a backup in the event the news kept getting worse.
But as we’ve all learned over these past few years, the news only gets worse.
Where I was on board to send them back to the classroom with masks on, she wasn’t. We went back to our motto: “Control the controllable.”
Dads often need little convincing when mama bear has her mind made up, and so, I agreed. I began to lean into a decision that would fundamentally change the way we educate our children.
Our first meeting with their teacher a few weeks before school started was on Zoom. Familiar territory. But weeks later, once the boxes of books and lesson plans arrived, and how we transformed a bedroom into a classroom, it became crystal clear where we were headed: into uncharted waters.
Like those first native explorers, paddling their way down the never-ending coast of the new continent, we began our journey.
And so it goes.
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This post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: Unsplash
