“H-O-G … H-O-G … H-O-G …” he repeated, over and over again.

“Now put the sounds together,” I told him.

“HO-G … HO-G … HUG!” he shouted with delight. And then he turned to give me a great big one.

I’m not worried. We’ll get there. Right now, I’m just enjoying the process.

At the start of each new school year, I worry, in varying degrees, about curricula, schedules, chores, time management, reading skills, math facts, socialization, sports, faith formation, state requirements, and educational philosophies.

But my biggest challenge this year is none of those.

Today, I dropped off my oldest daughter at the local public high school. Where she will be taking American Literature this semester. A first for us.

“Are you sure you know the way to the classroom?” I asked one last anxious time as we pulled up to the school.

“Up the stairs and to the right,” she rolled her eyes. But it was a gentle eye rolling. One that seemed to recognize an air of tender feelings and mercifully danced around them.

“So … you can call me if you need anything …” I stopped myself.

She was standing beside the car now, looking back at me with one eyebrow raised in amusement.

She wouldn’t be needing anything.

I watched her walk away — backpack slung over her shoulder and hair blowing in the wind — and she entered the school without turning back.

Of course she didn’t turn back.

I blinked back tears as I drove away. Stupid kindergarten tears. The ones most moms get out of the way the first time they wave goodbye to a 5-year-old at a bus stop in September.

But some of us save up those tears instead. We hold onto them for years and then spill them when our kids are 16. We cry then, not so much because of the letting go — though of course because of the letting go — but because we are hopeful for our kids’ futures and proud of what we’ve learned so far together. Only a little bit of it from books.

From the first moments of parenthood, we hold on. Our eyes meet and we lock on. Instinctively. It’s a painful struggle to establish a firm grip on ourselves, our children, and our family lives. Once we think we have it, we hold on with all our might.

Almost as immediately, though, life pulls back on our white-knuckled fingers. One small bit at a time, it loosens our hold on what we think is control. What we don’t pause often enough to appreciate, however, is that it’s an illusion we hold on to. So tightly sometimes it hurts.

The tears are stupid. But I will spill them anyway.

When I pulled into the driveway at home, my seven other children greeted me at the door with an assortment of wants and needs ranging from transportation to youth group to computer privileges to missing laundry items to scheduling parent meetings for the golf team.

I was all done crying now. And back again.

It’s a love note. From my 4-year-old boyfriend. The child whom I have not gotten around to teaching to read or write yet.

Some things get easier. When you’re the eighth child in a brood of homeschoolers, you pick up some things by osmosis.

If you are a homeschooling parent of a middle school student, can you spare two minutes to take a brief survey and share your opinion?

Thank you!

So, here we go.

I have written before about my ambivalence about homeschooling (Darn that new Inside Catholic site — it’s very cool and all, but I can’t seem to make the links to my old columns work anymore). My husband and I have prayerfully determined that homeschooling is the best choice for us in our current circumstances, but I don’t at all pretend that homeschooling is the ideal or that it’s for everyone.

It simply isn’t. No system of education is.

My precious charts! Nobody touch my precious charts!

The truth is, I think I find homeschooling especially stressful because I have never been a “planner.” I am a “do-er.” I see homeschooling moms who oooh and ahhh over curricula, who have nifty little planners all filled out with liturgically-themed popsicle stick craft projects, state capitals poetry exercises, and recipes for Cooking Your Way Through Roman History, and I wonder at the vast variety of God’s creation.

Because I am not sure at all that we are of the same species.

It would appear that some of us are genetically pre-disposed to be homeschoolers. I am not.

There is something about the broad responsibility of homeschooling that makes me feel like, no matter what, I must be doing it wrong. Or not enough. Or I am using the wrong books, or I shouldn’t be using books, or my kids aren’t getting out enough, or they are getting out too much, or I have too rigid a schedule, or I have too loose a schedule, or I am doing too much housework at the expense of the kids’ educations, or I am educating the children at the expense of basic sanitation, or I am paying too much attention to the little kids and not enough to the big kids, or I am paying too much attention to the big kids and not enough to the little kids, or …

Well, maybe you get the idea.

The white board in our classroom.

Whether I am comfortable in my role as a homeschooler or not, I have to admit that God put me here, and that it is His will for our family to learn at home for yet another year.

Would I rather be dancing through the aisles like those parents in the Staples commercial? The Most Wonderful Time of the Year?

Maybe.

But when I consider the idea of sending my kids to school, an entirely different kind of choking panic rises in my throat.

Which leaves me to think that it’s not homeschooling that is especially hard. It’s just plain parenting that is especially hard.

All parents, whether their kids learn at home or in a classroom, should lean hard on God’s grace. Because though our details might differ, God calls every one of us to sacrificial love through our family lives. And that’s not likely to come easy to any of us.

Perhaps it’s time to mom up. Perhaps the time for analyzing our schooling decisions for this year is done and what’s left to do is only work hard and pray harder — whatever it takes to live up to God’s particular call for me here in this particular family.

Hang on tight, kids. Here we go.

(cross-posted at The Anchoress)

I will also be signing and selling copies of Small Steps for Catholic Moms and its companion journal and meeting many of the very cool people I have gotten to know online through the years … and that means YOU.

Will you be there? I would love the opportunity to meet you!

What Happy Homeschoolers Know: 8 Ways to Thrive in Home Education

Hope I’ll see you there!

UPDATE: I have been reprimanded for not sharing the artist’s name. And here I thought Ambrose wouldn’t want the world to know what he’s doing instead of his school work.

I Love Homeschooling … I Hate Homeschooling