What About Patience?

Thank you for joining me for Day 5 of Putting Handles on Home Schooling!

“But Tanya, I don’t know if I have enough patience to home school.”

Oh Mama. You don’t.

I sure don’t.

I don’t say that because I am proud of it. It’s just the reality of it. That whole “you-are-human” thing gets in the way of perfection.

A home schooling friend of mine shared last week:

That’s it, Mama. We get to learn, too. As we teach academics to our children, we sometimes get to learn (or re-learn) some of the academics. As we work on character training for our children, we sometimes get to work on our own character training. As we teach our children patience skills, we too, get to learn patience skills.

But you know what, some days we blow it. Some days we are impatient. Some days we lose our temper. Some days we yell. – Or maybe that’s just me.

I think that is part of the learning, too. Because when we mess up, we get to be an example to our children of what happens next. We get to show them when we are weak, He is strong. We get to show them that when we mess up, we apologize. We say, “I’m sorry.” We ask, “Will you forgive me?” We hug. We try to find a different way of handling the situation.

I can offer a glimmer of hope here. With God’s help, the further I’ve gone in this journey, the more patient I’ve become.

Proverbs 27:17 says, “As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.”

As I work to improve my children and make them better people, through this home schooling thing, they have improved me and, I think, made me a better mom, a better teacher, a better person.