Diary of a selfish mother

I didn't plan on homeschooling, although I had been homeschooled a few years myself it just never entered my mind. I was a single mother to three young children with an ex-husband who was completely out of the picture and school just seemed like an obvious move. In 1999 I got remarried, moved my family up to the Florida panhandle to be with my new Air Force husband and enrolled my daughter Chelsea in first grade. Right away she started having problems in school. She was only six but more interested in talking, clothes and boys than in education and her teacher a rather horrible woman who had lost all interest in children started claiming she was ADHD and possibly learning disabled. Well I knew my daughter and fought the system and won. When she was tested she was not only NOT ADHD but she was around three years ahead of her grade in intelligence. I was so disgusted and angry that without any thought or preparation I pulled her out of school, bought some workbooks and started homeschooling.

Through the years we have evolved in our homeschooling and tried many different methods and curriculums. We had two more children and lost a third. We lost my mother to a long battle with cancer. We tried a private school once for two of my children, British school once for three of them, a base school one year, and then this past year I put all five of them into local British schools. The thing is I had become a homeschooler at heart. Chelsea had become a strong independent young lady who doesn't follow crowds, has strong morals, and thinks boys are for friends not for dating. This I don't think would have happened in school. But yet I had become burned out, broken inside over the loss of my baby boy Liam and my mother. And school had become a babysitting service that allowed me to be selfish and alone.

Now Chelsea is nearly 16 and will graduate her GCSE's and move onto her A-Levels, Christopher is starting GCSE's and Tristan is thriving in his local school. It seems I had made the right decision but yet the guilt wouldn't lift. You see my little ones were not becoming the young men I wanted them to be. With one year of school under their belt Phoenix was whiny, rude and angry. Gryphen who was a little boy in private was becoming a monster in public. They were trying to "fit in" with their peers. Educational Socialization was ruining my boys. You see I believe that socialization is a major reason TO home educate your child. In a school setting much like with Chelsea and my boys a child tends to become what his peers are. The reason being that they haven't yet had time to figure out who they are as people and therefore it is easier to just follow the crowd. So we have these kids who are following their older siblings, or parents whose ideals are very different from what you want your children to follow but these children and their parents ideals have created the children that yours idolize and want to be like. So anyways after much MUCH MUCH prayer, discussion and thought we decided Gryphen and Phoenix needed to be at home with us.

So this is our Journey. We are not new homeschoolers, but we are starting new.