{"id":442,"date":"2012-06-22T21:39:00","date_gmt":"2012-06-22T21:39:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/rebeccafrech\/2012\/06\/because-you-just-know-deep-down-that-youve-ruined-her-life.html"},"modified":"2014-08-22T15:48:32","modified_gmt":"2014-08-22T20:48:32","slug":"because-you-just-know-deep-down-that-youve-ruined-her-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rebeccafrech\/2012\/06\/because-you-just-know-deep-down-that-youve-ruined-her-life.html","title":{"rendered":"Because You Just Know Deep Down That You’ve Ruined Her Life"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

11 years ago, I looked at my sweet 4 1\/2 year old daughter and decided to homeschool her.\u00a0 I\u2019d never met any homeshoolers. No one I knew had ever met a homeschooler.\u00a0 In fact, the only person I knew of who was actually crazy enough to do it was that girl who played Blair on Facts of Life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
The only homeschooler I knew 11 years ago.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

She\u2019d said something about it in a People magazine interview a few years earlier.\u00a0 I had thought she was a nut back then and had loudly said so.\u00a0 The irony of my deciding to do this was not lost on me.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not a great teacher.\u00a0 Is it okay to say that out loud? I\u2019m not sure what the ratio is between my actually teaching them and their teaching themselves, but they end up reading it and figuring it out long before I get the chance to tell them anything.\u00a0 Which of course means I\u2019ve ruined them all.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the secret fear of parents, no matter what decisions we make, that we\u2019ve ruined our children. The fear of homeschooling is that we will ruin them and there will be no time left to fix it.\u00a0 We will have literally ruined their lives.\u00a0 There\u2019s not a lot of time for do overs when you\u2019ve raised dumb a<\/strike>\u2026..not bright at all children, and of course I\u2019ve been watching the eldest like a hawk for signs of my failure.\u00a0 I\u2019ve thought deep down that if I could see that I had messed her up that I\u2019d still have time to save the rest of them. (Of course it\u2019s irrational\u2026if that surprises you, then you must be new around here.)<\/p>\n

I also knew that if they were messed up, it was all my fault.\u00a0 Literally.\u00a0 I had talked my husband into this great experiment.\u00a0 I had made the decision to do this.\u00a0 He went along with it, but it was all on me.\u00a0 (A fact of which I am very<\/i> much aware.) It\u2019s really not like me to volunteer for more responsibility, which is probably why I have secretly dreaded the SAT and ACT.\u00a0 I\u2019ve had nightmares about them.\u00a0 They are impartial judges of 11 years of effort on my part, and increasingly on her own. Those scores would show how miserably I had failed.\u00a0 I was so afraid of them that when I dropped her off the first weekend of June to take her first ever standardized test\u2026.I drove down the street, sat in the car, and cried a bit.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Just pure fear. The fear of failing her and fear being a failure.\u00a0 This is my life. I\u2019ve devoted all of my adulthood to educating my children.\u00a0 What if I can\u2019t do it?\u00a0 I wonder it all the time. Still.<\/p>\n

Her scores arrived at the colleges of her choice this morning.\u00a0 (University of Dallas, Texas A & M, and OU)\u00a0 We still don\u2019t know what they are, but the nice lady at UD told me they were high enough for her to be accepted.\u00a0 She\u2019s 15.\u00a0 Somehow\u2026..somehow\u2026..she\u2019s managed to learn enough to score high enough on the ACT to get into all three of these schools, and high enough to maybe get a scholarship at one of them.<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t fail her.\u00a0 She managed to learn it in spite of me.\u00a0 It can only be through Grace.\u00a0 Because there\u2019s no way my daydreaming daughter and her slacker mom did this on our own.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

11 years ago, I looked at my sweet 4 1\/2 year old daughter and decided to homeschool her.\u00a0 I\u2019d never met any homeshoolers. No one I knew had ever met a homeschooler.\u00a0 In fact, the only person I knew of who was actually crazy enough to do it was that girl who played Blair on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1979,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-442","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nBecause You Just Know Deep Down That You've Ruined Her Life<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"11 years ago, I looked at my sweet 4 1\/2 year old daughter and decided to homeschool her.  I'd never met any homeshoolers. 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