So I'm Not a Homeschool Mom

I recently went to hang out with a friend at the local college while her children completed mandatory competency testing to renew their homeschool funding. When I arrived, I was delighted to meet another local homeschool mom who was there for the same reason. We shot the breeze for awhile and talked about normal mom things: willful children, crockpot recipes, the joys of grocery delivery…

I asked this new friend about her life and grew to admire her on a number of levels. She’s got her proverbial ducks in a row. She and her husband own a farm. They grow their own food. Their children know the value of hard work and hard play. They run around freely in the great outdoors. They can ride horses and dangle from rope swings and catch frogs and skip stones in the creek. They learn on their terms and at their pace, and if I had to guess, they’re miles ahead of the average north Idaho student in most of their academic competencies.

They don’t know words like “non-binary” or even “gender identity” because they’re kids, and she’d like to keep them this way, as is her right. There’s something beautiful about preserving and protecting childhood innocence as long as possible. Lord knows, I wish I could recall such a time for myself.

And as she spoke, I grew increasingly self-conscious and insecure about my own mothering skills. I made a mental note that I hoped this woman would never have occasion to see the inner workings of my daily life. She lives on a beautiful farm; I live in a double wide. She meal-plans; I feed my family Costco pizza for dinner once a week. She writes sophisticated lesson plans for her children; my kids are enrolled in public school, where I can’t even complete my 8th grader’s math homework. I started getting down on myself, and not in a jealous way—just in the sense that I owe my kids so much and so rarely feel like I’m meeting the baseline standard of solid motherhood, especially as reflected by the light of this powerhouse woman.

By this point in the conversation, my toddler had grown antsy, so we decided to push him around the college hallways in his stroller. I paused at a rainbow sticker on a professor’s door. “I am a safe person,” it read before proceeding to list off a litany of virtue signaling declarations designed to alert the wide world that this man was a wonderful, decent human.

I rolled my eyes back as far as they would go and muttered something under my breath about how “safe spaces” for everyone else are demonstrably unsafe spaces for women. My new friend nodded in emphatic agreement and joined the chorus, and a full blown conversation about human sexuality ensued.

Then she blurted out, “I’m really glad I was born before this craziness took over,” she said. “I mean, can you even imagine having to tell your husband about that one time back in college when you (insert pet sexual sin)? That would be so humiliating!”

I shrugged my shoulders and replied, “I mean, that’s just the tip of the iceberg of my history of sexual experiences,” I confessed. “It actually wasn’t hard for me to tell my husband any of it at all because we’ve both screwed up royally, and we’ve both been redeemed. It doesn’t define us.”

I wasn’t trying to shock her or rebuke her or really make her think anything one way or the other. I was just telling the truth because I’ve learned, over time, to refuse to give shame any real estate in which to hide in my psyche.

She first looked shocked and then embarrassed. “Oh I’m sorry,” she stammered.

I told her not to feel bad, and I genuinely meant it. She wasn’t wrong, but neither was I. There’s something beautiful and healthy about presenting yourself pure and spotless to the person with whom you intend to spend the rest of your life. Abstinence saves people a lot of heartache, and I’m fully onboard with encouraging it in romantic relationships.

But there’s also something beautiful about clothing yourself in Christ’s spotlessness and refusing to be defined by the sins He no longer holds against you. At a certain point in your redemption story, when you say you’ve been forgiven, you’ve got to make a choice to live as though you actually believe what you’re saying.

I thought to myself in that moment that I would much rather sit day in, day out, in my understanding than in hers. That’s not ego speaking; it’s candor. God’s grace became so much more amazing for me once I was forced to contend with the brutal reality of just how desperately I need it. My own big, public, capital “f” failures have taught me not to fear other peoples’ mess. And this, I think, is a much greater gift to humankind than many realize—the ability to see and love people where they are, warts and all.

As a private school kid myself, my venture into the real world was about as graceful as a swan dive off a cliff. I did everything completely wrong. I Bible-thumped. I condescended. I wore my performative holiness like a super-hero cape to disguise my incompetency with normal, everyday people who were not raised according to the same playbook I was. I saw people in black and white: saved and sinner, and it was my job to fix everyone in the latter camp by pointing out their shortcomings so they could fix them and adjust to my standards. I never dreamed I had anything to learn from the experiences of someone outside my faith perspective. It was so gross. It was so ignorant. And it was so sincere.

I saw a bit of this in play in my conversation with this woman. My life was a lot messier than hers, and she didn’t instinctively know what to do with it or where to place me. And I think the principle extends even to our parenting choices about things like where we choose to educate our children.

I’m fully aware of the myriad risks involved in sending your kids to public school. Indoctrination is real. The spiritual war is rampant. I enter it with both eyes open. But I think there’s a less understood but very real risk associated with sheltering your kids too much, and I think too few people are willing to name it. It leads to awkward situations like the one I experienced at the college recently.

It’s all well and good to insulate your kids from harm, but at some point they’re going to be confronted with real people and real sin, and they’re going to need some tools in their toolbox besides retreating and shouting “Unclean!” Do they know how to love well? Do they know how to listen? Do they know how to bind wounds? When they grow up and start families of their own, will their spheres of influence extend beyond themselves? Are you actively cultivating relationships and exposure to people outside your own in-group? If you’re Christians, what are you here on this earth to do? Where are you shining your light? Who is being drawn to it?

Because as idyllic as a life apart, unscathed by broken culture may seem, I don’t think it’s necessarily what we are called to. It’s one thing to let your kids play in the dirt; it’s another thing entirely to teach them to wrestle in it on behalf of others. I don’t want my kids to be 18 before they know what the word “gay” means. If a friend comes to them in high school with a confession of sexual sin, I don’t want them to respond by making her feel like damaged goods. I want them to remind her of her worth in Jesus, who makes all things new.

I want them to be gritty and bold and confident, not surprised, scared, or unsure. I want them to have language for the ideologies they see playing out around them. I want them to be equipped to navigate them in both truth and love.

My kids might not be winning 4H competitions, and I might not be winning any motherhood contests, but this morning my 12-year-old started fielding a series of harassing emails from a boy in her class who was trying to badger her into going to the upcoming school dance with him. (Her email is connected to my phone, so I see all incoming and outgoing messages.) She politely declined a number of times, but he kept pushing. I was about to intervene when she finally pushed back, “Leave me alone. I do not like you. You need to stop bothering me, or I will tell a teacher.”

And in that moment, I felt like friggin’ mother of the year. Because she’s 12, and she’s already learned to draw much clearer, firmer, unapologetic boundaries than I had by 30. And it means, by God’s grace, I’m doing something right.

We each must walk (and parent) by the light we’ve been given. There are an infinite number of ways to screw things up, regardless of where your children receive their education. But there are also a lot of ways to intentionally get things right. And I really believe equipping your kids to engage the culture (instead of just running from it) is one of them.