Returning to Our Roots
"This is what the Lord says: 'Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls.'"
— Jeremiah 6:16
This school year marks our 10th year homeschooling.
A decade.
I must know something by now, right?
Well... I know more than I did ten years ago. But I'm also still learning right alongside my children.
I often tell them,
"I only know what I know. That's why I read so much... and why I write."
This story is one of those lessons.
When our oldest was six years old, I found myself waking a toddler and a newborn every morning just to make it to kindergarten drop-off and then waking the toddler and newborn again during naptime for kindergarten pick-up. We were also preparing for another military move, and one morning I remember thinking, there has to be another way.
So we stayed home.
We filled our days with slow mornings, copy work, read-alouds, crafts, and long afternoons together.
But I also knew something about my oldest daughter. She was wonderfully extroverted, while I was perfectly content spending my days at home. I knew our family needed community, so after we moved to Florida, we joined a Classical Conversations community.
For nearly a decade, Classical Conversations became a gift to our military family. Like a warm hug after a long, hard day.
From Florida to Louisiana, back to Florida, and eventually Hawaii, every community welcomed us with open arms. My children found friends almost immediately wherever the Army sent us. I tutored. I directed. We experienced every level of the program as our children grew.
Leaving was never part of the plan.
Then last year happened.
During our third school year in Hawaii, our community met on two full days each week. Between teaching at home, tutoring at community, packing lunches, preparing lessons, managing five different academic needs, and managing our carefully curated extracurriculars, I also found myself spending nearly fourteen hours each week away from home.
At first, I assumed I simply needed to become more organized.
Surely a better planner would solve the problem.
But the longer the year went on, the more something inside me began to unravel.
By Christmas, I realized I no longer wanted to read aloud to my children.
If you know me, you know that sentence alone should have stopped me in my tracks.
Reading together has always been one of my greatest joys.
Instead, I was surviving.
My husband noticed before I did.
One day after Christmas, he quietly booked me a hotel room and said,
"Please just go. You need to go now."
For three days, I rested, prayed, journaled, and asked God a question I had been avoiding:
Why isn’t this working?
I expected Him to show me a better homeschool schedule.
Instead, He gently showed me something much deeper.
I had not been honoring the way He made me.
As an introvert, I had spent more than an entire year living almost exclusively in output.
Teaching.
Talking.
Managing.
Driving.
Preparing.
Giving.
Over and over again.
There was no space left for the quiet and stillness that restores my soul.
As I looked honestly at our year, I realized something else.
The problem wasn't Classical Conversations.
The problem wasn't homeschooling.
The problem wasn't even our schedule.
The problem was the math.
Every yes is also a no.
Every hour spent somewhere is an hour unavailable somewhere else.
With five children spanning kindergarten through high school, fourteen hours outside our home each week wasn't just fourteen hours.
It was family conversations that never happened.
Afternoons we never shared.
Books we never read together.
Quiet moments that disappeared before I even noticed they were gone.
The math simply wasn't working anymore.
For our family, staying home wasn't retreating.
It was returning.
Returning to conversations around the kitchen table.
Returning to slower mornings.
Returning to shared work.
Returning to the relationships we wanted homeschooling to cultivate in the first place.
I didn't know it then, but that quiet hotel room became the beginning of an entirely different way of thinking about home.
Over the months that followed, God slowly began rebuilding our home—not around more curriculum or better planners, but around a few simple principles that honored both the way He designed our family and the way He designed me.
In the end, we weren't creating something entirely new.
