and encouraged to read this essay by John Mark Reynolds.
Highlights include:
“Whenever I feel very bad, I make sure to speak to home school mothers. These women represent something new. They are not feminists, a phrase they most often reject with scorn. Most live in very traditional households where the husband is the head of the family. However, they are certainly not Donna Reed door mats waiting at home in pearls and high heels for their lord and master to arrive home. They are very strong and fiercely opinionated.”
“In one sense, their lives are a bloodless martyrdom. The media mostly forgets them except for the occasional condescending piece in the Times. They fit no stereotypes, being too numerous and too interesting, so they are ignored. They sacrifice for the well fare of their children.”
“Talents that could vitalize a corporate board room are turned to teaching children to read. Their children, of course, take such sacrifice for granted. Their mothers make it safe for them to be blissfully unaware of their blessings. So these strong women sacrifice everything our culture deems important. They have no résumé inflating career. Yet they give new life and meaning to all the Victorian platitudes lodged, because they are true, in the back of all our minds. ‘The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.’”
And here I’d been feeling that homeschooling was just something that I did….and did poorly. (This sentiment, by the way, arose after the day I had on Wednesday. It is a common temptation for homeschooling mothers, I fear. More on that later.)
Well, thank you for the encouragement, Mr. Reynolds! Indeed, I really needed it.
ht: one of the loveliest homeschooling moms of all
The above painting is Le berceau (The Cradle) by Berthe Morisot: 1872.
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