This year, my family is on the struggle bus. Since I'm the mom, I am fully aware that I am driving the bus and that knowledge is just killing me.
The first hairpin curve includes things that I had no power over. Like, all my middle son's friends are graduating from college in the next few weekends. Today is the graduation from a Nashville university, where my dear middle son was accepted to the Honors College on scholarship -- until hidradenitis suppurativa stepped in to ruin his life. He had to drop out mid-way through second semester of his freshman year, take a whole year off to heal, and then is just trying to do it piecemeal using community college credits, while working. As a homeschool mom, my self-imposed measure of success was to get my kids to a four-year college and have them do well. Well, that was a dumb measure of success, wasn't it? He's a good, kind person, and I should feel really good about that. But I am grieving. From the depths of my spirit, I am grieving what was lost to him. He was so deserving of everything good in life, but he was physically broken, and I cannot fix it.
Secondly, that massive speedbump we are currently jolting over represents the things you warn your kids about and which they ignore you and do anyway. All The Bad Things. And I do mean all of them. People who think two-year olds are bad get what they deserve when their kids are in the early twenties, in my experience. Their ability to inflict harm transcends even their generation - both up and down the family tree. The Bible wasn't kidding when it said, "Be sure your sins will find you out" in Numbers 32:23. However, I feel like it is the consequences of my sin that has found us out. Why didn't I let him suffer the consequences of his mistakes more early on? Why did I shield him from the pain of loss and grief of smaller, less important things like Lego sets and Nintendo games? Why didn't I follow through when I made rules and he disregarded them -- when he was 5 instead of 15? When he was 21, I shouldn't have paid his college parking tickets so he could register for his last semester and get his college degree. My husband told me not to. But I thought the consequences were just too great for him to bear and that he might drop out of college and never finish. So I did. This was the second time, after I had announced I would never do it again. THAT was what allowed him to leave home and get into even worse trouble. Sure, I thought I was helping. But everything I did turned out to be at a juncture that, had I selected a less interventionist pathway, could have saved him from future catastrophic derailment of life goals, plans, and potential for a future he could feel proud of.
Next is the massive hill that we've been climbing for at least 15 years. I feel terrible about all the time I took from my own kids' homeschool education to, in my justification, foster a healthy community around them. Their experience suffered from my inattention. As with most anything that takes you away from your true priorities, my dedication to "the community" turned out to be a hollow effort to feel like I made a difference, to please, to be heroic. Unfortunately, 15+ years of service doesn't matter to anyone who has made a religion of not wearing masks. My "work" - and that of my friends - is being dismantled, brick by brick. The anti-maskers are leaving (after actively and overtly poaching others) because we were saying in March 2021 that masks would be required in August 2021 if they were still recommended by the CDC. Sure, they should've read into that that there's a chance that won't even be necessary by then, but it is the principle of The Thing that counts, right? The maskers are leaving because they don't want to be in community with a bunch of "covidiots" and "maskholes". Yes, future American and World History classes will most certainly give homage to America's response to the Pandemic of 2020-21. The mental image the rest of the developed world has of Americans right now probably includes a dinosaur skin loin cloth and a bone through the nose. That's a pretty accurate depiction of my homeschool group at this moment, with a team of less-vocal, but no-less appalled twenty-first century moms on the opposite end of the football field.
Then there's the crest of the hill that we've all been anticipating. Isn't the view always fabulous at the top of a hill? But no. We finally make it, bus engine sputtering, to the top and the engine just sort of dies. We are staring at nothing but a non-descript block wall. Not so much as a daisy growing in the crevices. My anniversary was two weeks ago and I have yet to hear my husband acknowledge it. I've even neglected to foster my marriage in my fruitless effort to please others.
Now, I am old and tired. Do I even have the energy to turn this bus around?
