How to listen

My feelings toward homeschooling have been all over the map lately.

I feel restless. It’s odd that I recently reaffirmed my sense that my full-time job right now is being a mother and educator to my children — only to begin wrestling with the desire to bring this phase to a close. I do a good job of providing some things that they need — a rich imaginative and spiritual world, minimal screen time, books and stories, hands-on science and nature study, strong relationships within the family, and a richer social world than incarceration with a pack of same-age kids would allow. “You are doing a superior job with these kids!” says my father, marveling at their industriousness. (It means a lot, coming from a retired 36-year public school teacher.)

But there are other things I don’t do a good job with at all. Scheduled enrichment activities. In-depth opportunities in their areas of interest. Playdates. Deep expertise in math and science (I am not looking forward to calculus and frog dissection). Lately I’ve begun to wonder as well how to facilitate the transition to adulthood. How does a middle-schooler who spends so much time around Mom find the space to explore who she is?

Today we took a nature walk, then stopped at the store to pick up Pillsbury pie crusts and a few other things. (My Thanksgiving contribution is going to be the desserts, but pie crust is not my spiritual gift.) I remembered the other things but forgot the pie crusts, so I headed back out. The girls did math in the back seat and retraced the well-worn path of whose pencil was whose, and how the size of the eraser made it all too apparent, and how the pencil had better be returned to its proper owner or else. It was pitiful. They shouldn’t have to be dragged around and do math in the back seat. (Yes, I usually save errands for after school. But this was urgent. You never know when there may be a run on pie crust during Thanksgiving week.) Suddenly I felt very tired. All I could think was, “They’d be better off in school.”

But later in the afternoon, after the math and grammar and writing and all that good stuff was completed, they surrounded me on the couch and I read to them. Then we all read silently. The house was quiet, the air was thick with concentration, and I realized how much the girls enjoy one another and care about one another. I drank in the satisfaction of the experience of quietness together, that unique balance of privacy and togetherness we were sharing, and how it happens often because we have the time and freedom to build it into the structure of life together. And I thought, “They’re better off here.”

Then there’s me, and the question of purpose. I have certain gifts and abilities and desires. There’s no question that foremost among them, in these years that our children are growing up, is the desire to be available to the girls, and not to exhaust or divide my energies so that I’m emotionally absent to them. But I’ve been thinking about different possibilities for working outside the home, too… and wondering what all my calling involves, and when.

I pray about this a lot. But I’m truly not sure how to hear God’s answer. My usual method is to imagine myself in different situations, which reveals how I feel about this or that. But God speaks in a still, small voice, somewhere beneath the noise of my always-assertive emotions. I don’t want to be led by my emotions. I don’t want to be led by my reasonings — at least, not exclusively. I don’t want to be led by fear of the future, or awareness of need. I want to be led by God. Maybe it’s my perfectionism, and the desperate desire not to make a mistake. But maybe, just maybe, it’s that I do in fact trust him — trust him to have a better plan than I in my small-mindedness could come up with. An “immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine” kind of plan.

Somewhere, there is a balance between faith and feeling, between trusting God and using common sense. I’m not sure I’ve ever really been certain of finding that place of assurance. I’ve made lots of decisions, usually by assembling all of my emotions and reasoning and then, experimentally, knocking on a door. It’s easier for God to steer a moving ship than a becalmed one, after all.

But how is this any different from the way someone who doesn’t believe in God makes a decision?