We're not all the same!

Full disclosure: I made the initial push for homeschooling our kids this year.  Super-Smart Hunky Husband (SSHH) was skeptical at first... after all, homeschoolers are weird, hyper-religious nutjobs who are paranoid about the big, bad world.  Why would we want to sign on for that?

But the beautiful thing about homeschooling is that the only one who decides what your experience is like - is you.  There are as many different ways to homeschool as there are families who do it, and the family down the road who seems a little "odd" has no bearing on what you do with your children.  The whole point is that you, the parent, are in the driver's seat, and your child's educational experiences are what you choose for them.

We were recently chatting with some friends who homeschool, and who have chosen a far different path than ours.  Their children rarely use the internet and were only recently allowed TV.  Their reading and friends are closely monitored.  Their girls wear skirts and keep their shoulders covered; their boy wants to enter the seminary.  Their lives revolve around their faith and their homeschool.  The kids are happy, polite, social, and well-adjusted.  They've loved being homeschooled.  The oldest two are in college with numerous scholarships.  They've taught their children very successfully.

But their life isn't our life.  We watch mindless shows and listen to top-40 music; we enjoy off-color jokes sometimes and have let enough four-letter words slip around the kids that we've occasionally heard them repeated.  We read books from all sources and have friends from all places.  I've been known to wear a bikini at the pool (okay, not since kid #2) and SSHH listens to rap music.  And we have no problem with our kids doing the same at an appropriate age... Sprout may still end up a priest in spite of his family - since we're fine with him turning his room into a church and making a messy "altar" on his bed!

But both of our families are trying to raise well-educated, faith-filled kids and we both believe that the best way to do that is in the family.  And today SSHH hit upon it brilliantly: we are all called to live out a similar vocation in different ways.  A cloistered Carmelite nun is no more or less holy or Catholic than a Jesuit missionary.  She's just called to live the same faith differently.  Neither would look at the other and say, "you're doing it wrong."

And so we're trying to look at other (Catholic) homeschooling families in the same way - we are trying to raise our children to live lives of faith out in the middle of a secular world, a world that they should love and understand and succeed in.  That's always been our goal, but this year marks a change in how we're approaching the task: rather than starting with the most common educational systems and making the best use of them that we can, we're starting by looking at how we'd like our children to end up and the childhood we'd like them to have, and we've chosen the path that we think will get us there.  Our path doesn't look like anyone else's, but it may be equally fruitful and faith-filled, just like the Carmelite nun and Jesuit missionary's lives look nothing like each other, but ultimately they serve the same end.

Our friends have chosen one route to get there, and it looks very different from ours.  They're not wrong, and neither are we.  Homeschooling allows you to own your family's education like nothing else.  It's liberating, to have the freedom to create the lessons and experiences that you want your children to grow up with - not necessarily always pleasant or easy ones, but always yours.