On Plans and Plodding
It has become tradition to take end-of-year photos like this. This year there will only be two of them, but we’re not quite done with lessons yet. I am always amazed that those stacks are as tall as they are. It does not feel like we did all of that week-to-week. These last couple of years have been wild: we moved, I had emergency surgery and a couple of hospital stays, my husband lost his job, we moved my mom with secondary progressive MS to an assisted living around the corner during a global shutdown, I became her caretaker and power of attorney, we graduated our oldest, and we are walking through understanding the special needs of our son. It’s been a lot. In the movie Cars 2 the secret agent car, Holley Shiftwell, flies past the Italian race car, Francesco Bernoulli, and Francesco yells out, “What is happening?!” This has been me in the middle. My plans have not been The Plan.
In our early years of homeschooling my husband came home from work to find a color-coded schedule laminated and hung on our fridge. I even put a special column on the schedule just for him in blue. *insert side eye* I wouldn’t say he appreciated that, but I felt like I was nailing it. Give me color-coded scheduling cards and a laminator and nothing will be safe. I used to take any opportunity I could get to play around with ideals, but for some years now planning hasn’t looked like this for me. We, instead, have been mostly operating in the rhythms of our home and the habits we’ve cultivated.
When I get a phone call that my mom is in the hospital, I don’t get to tell them, “No thanks! That’s not on my timetable today!” Or when my youngest is struggling with regulating, I don’t get to tell him to please stop because I don’t have this on today’s agenda. I tell my children often that it is best to learn how to serve when you aren’t in control of the schedule. I also tell them people come before books. *ahem* I get to practice this myself daily.
Last summer I thought a lot about our Morning Time. We’ve been doing morning time since the oldest was in pigtails. Now it was just going to be me and the boys. I pulled some books off our shelves and jotted some things down on a post-it note. This felt exciting. I thought that maybe, now that my oldest had graduated, we could go back to doing some things how we used to do them. But after our lessons started, we ran into some struggles, and I had to let Morning Time go. I grieved this, I tried several times to tweak it and bring it back, but letting go was what was best for us. I imagine this comes to every family eventually. But do you know what? The poetry still got read. The hymns still got sung. The artist’s prints were still studied. The composers were still listened to. Fortitude is flexible.
Charlotte Mason said we shouldn’t let the endless succession of small things crowd great ideals out of sight and out of mind, but sometimes those small things feel like very big things—don’t they? I have learned that when my plan isn’t The Plan those great ideals have happened anyway because of our habits. The how, when, and where may be a bit all over the place, but we got the why down. As I have begun considering next year, I recognize more that I am going to have to let go of, but we’re going to be ok. Paul says what we sow does not come to life unless it dies.
These pictures show me all this got done *not* because I had everything planned out perfectly and our days were lived in a bubble, but because we plodded hard to live a lifestyle of learning and worked in cooperation with the Holy Spirit who got us through another year.
No lamination needed.
Mariah Kochis 2023