Do I Get Any Time For Myself?

The past few weeks have been some of the busiest of my life! The busy-ness wasn’t just homeschooling, but a combination of back-to-school, harvest and food preservation time, and beginning chicken raising. Also, maybe I’m just not as good at multi-tasking as I used to be when I was younger. Anyway, I have had the topic of “time” on my mind of late.

The actual “school” doesn’t take much of my time: about one hour per day in the lower grades to about three hours a day in middle school. My high school students spend more time than this, but only some of it requires my attention. (Actually, the children usually get more and more independent once they learn to read.) I find that the best way to keep from being frustrated about time for school work is to never schedule anything else during the morning. I often have to remind other people that I have a full-time job teaching school and am not available until the afternoon.

Another time consideration involves housework. When the kids are home all day, the house gets messier than if the kids were at school! I spend a lot of time with cooking and laundry, and have my kids do most of the cleaning. We work mostly on one section of the house each day (Monday is kitchen day, etc.) so we can more or less work together. I spend time with younger children who are learning skills, but mostly the kids do the housecleaning. It’s an important part of their education.

Next, is time for planning. I usually spend 20-30 minutes on Sunday laying out the specific assignments for each child that week. In addition, I've found that planning unit/block studies can take a lot of time when I do it the way I described here. I think my greatest desire is for uninterrupted quiet time. Not only do I need time to plan my curriculum, but I need to be able to ponder—about spiritual things and about the needs of each family member. Unfortunately, I seem to only get this time late at night or early in the morning—when everyone else is in bed. I do recognize that early mornings may be almost impossible for young mothers who never get enough sleep. (I remember!) A daily quiet time might not be achievable, but I feel that a regular time away—with husband or friend watching the kids--is incredibly helpful.

And this leads to the big question: do I have time for my own needs and hobbies, or are they just swallowed up in the needs of my children? The answer is….yes and no.

There are things I want to do that I rarely get around to. I’m sure that is true of every mother—not just homeschooling mothers. And yet I find that my needs and hobbies have evolved somewhat over the years to be more about my children. Homeschooling is such a passion for me that much of my reading (of which I do a lot) is about topics I want to cover with my kids. I probably read three times as much as they ever hear about in their lessons! And this isn’t out of a sense of obligation, but because it interests me. When I’m chauffeuring to lessons or sports activities, I always bring along needlework (something I didn’t used to do before chauffeuring) or reading. Waiting in a car can be a great “quiet time!”

Also—though you’ve heard it many times before and it doesn’t seem true when you’re in the middle of it—remember this is just a short time of your life. With nine children, I had 23 years of nursing (some of the most time-intensive care—right?), yet it doesn’t seem very long in retrospect. With my youngest now in 2nd grade, I’m realizing that these homeschooling years will be over before I know it. Then there will be time to make quilts and learn to play the harp. I may even have too much “quiet time.”