It has been a year since I’ve written a blog post. Last year we had a beautifully restorative winter in Florida, with the help of a lovely woman who worked as a half time housekeeper and half time nanny. She had planned to follow us home to Maine and work the summer after taking April off, but after a couple months of trying, couldn’t get a visa to return to the US.
This was just the beginning of our labor shortage woes of 2021. The Maine coast was extremely busy this past summer, and without any of the J1 international student workers there wasn’t anywhere near the staff to serve them, at our store or anywhere else. I had my trusty high school helper and my next-island-over babysitter, but I still was at least one full time employee short in my homefront and farm work load. The store was very short on help too, which meant Aaron was working even longer hours earlier in the spring than ever, and Briggs and Phoebe worked more and more as the spring ramped up.
We crutched along at homeschooling last spring until I waved the white flag in June. I knew we had knocked the schoolwork out of the park over the winter, so I wasn’t overly concerned academically. Another homeschooling family with six kids had moved to Islesford in April for the warmer months (just like us) and my middle kids were having a wonderful time playing for hours outside every afternoon and evening. I was happy to have their focus more on fun and friends than on schoolwork.
I tried to do too much in the garden. Anticipating my helper’s return, I planted, tilled and prepped for a big yearin the spring. When it became clear she couldn’t make it to Maine for the summer I had the time and money invested already, so I just did my best to harvest. And harvest I did. A local, older woman offered to help three mornings a week with the harvesting, and she ended up being a lifesaver. It was a great growing year with deep soaking rains well spaced with warm sunshine. I certainly had my best bottom line in the garden ever. But it was too much. I spread myself too thin. To top it off, the woman who had done the cleaning for our off island rental turnovers (we own three weekly rental properties) ended up moving away in June, leaving us with nobody to clean a fully booked rental season. So it ended up being me. Every Saturday for nearly three months straight I went off island and cleaned, and often I had to go off for a mid week day as well.
Our own house decended into chaos: dirty, disorganized,cluttered. The garden was weedy and not maintained despite crazy abundant productivity. I couldn’t keep up with a baby, a three year old, four other bigger kids, working full time, and a husband who worked 14 hour days every single day for months on end. My big kids were working a lot at the store, so I didn’t even have them to help me as much at home. It was pretty awful. I spent the fall trying to dig myself out of the housework hole, homeschooling the best I could manage, despite not having taken my usual time over the summer to prep and plan, and by early October descended into a pretty terrible seasonal affective disordered funk.
I’ve noticed over the years that my SAD manifests less in poor mood and more as a loss of cognitive function, and I become extremely forgetful, and can’t pay attention to basic tasks, I loose time, my productivity nosedives, and worst of all, I can’t make a list to save my life. This may sound like a minor detail, but I function on lists. If it is on paper, it doesn’t need to be rattling around in my brain. Life as a homeschooling momma to six is a really big series of small tasks, and without the ability to sort and order those tasks life feels WAY overwhelming. I also don’t feel like I am sharp enough to safely keep track of crazy toddlers. Luckily, 48 hours in the sun in Florida and my brain starts working again.
In the past year I’ve thought a lot about the metaphor of juggling glass balls. Trying to figure out what balls in your life are made of rubber and can get dropped, and which will break if you let them fall. My role as a wife and mother are my glass balls. Although my garden is important to me it is a rubber ball. Housework can slide sometimes, or be hired out, thus a rubber ball. Feeding this crew is a daunting task, but frozen dinners in Maine are an option, and take-out is possibly in Florida, rubber ball. My perfectionist tendencies make it really hard to welcome rubber balls, but this is a season when they need to bounce.
Homeschooling is trickier, our life is set up so in person school would be hard for our family, since we spend the winter in Florida. This down time in the sun away from the store for Aaron is essential, and with my SAD, being home in Maine when it is dark isn’t really a great choice either. I also truly feel God called to me to homeschool our kids. But redefining what we’re doing, and incorporating more outside teachers in the form of online or in person is a way to offload some of the burden. Briggs wants to pursue boarding school for high school and has been accepted at Hebron Academy, and we are going to try to make that work for him. The homeschool ball isn’t made of glass, but for now, with our lifestyle, its one that makes sense to keep in the air.
One day last fall I had a moment where I walked up our front steps and noticed home terribly messy the front lawn was with toys, gardening stuff, random clothes and shoes. But I needed to spend the next hour with my middle kids on reading and math. I know what some people might think….the kids should be helping clean up the yard! And although this is true, I’ve found I have a nagging budget. When I alone do the managing of all the tasks associated with the house, yard, and homeschool, that means a TON of bossing around. I have to choose my battles. Do I spend my nagging budget on getting in some good phonics learning or on having a clean yard? These are choices we all make, but somehow this year I’ve been forced to clarify my priorities in a different way.
The reality of this season of our family’s life is that there are a lot of diverse needs. Never have I felt spread so thin. One year olds are always my most challenging age (well, up to age 14, as that is all I know so far). Azalea is good natured, but she isn’t a solid sleeper, she is curious and climbs and and she requires very close supervision. And then there is River, who is his own special category of demanding. My middle kids are easy, but they are both late readers so in terms of my homeschooling time budget, they need a lot out of me this year. And then my teen/nearly teen is a whole other set of demands and needs. Briggs is trying to shore up some academic skills to prepare for boarding school, and needs my help. Many smaller sized families do these stages at three separate times:toddler/preschool, kids, and preteen/teen. Being up all night with a teething baby, then having to be coherent to diagram a sentence with my big kids and patient enough to listen to and help beginning readers. This is a reality of large family life, and I underestimated it until now.
There are absolutely wonderful parts of having the mix in ages, like Phoebe taking over the job of hiding the stupid Elf on the Shelf each night in December. She does the decorating for holidays and birthdays, making special daysso much more magical for the little ones than I could ever manage alone. Briggs is old enough that I can text him a grocery list, drop him off at Walmart with my credit card, while I go run other errands. Quinn is the endless entertainer of River and Azalea. There are so many examples of such blessings of large family life. And I know their love for each other counts for so much in the richness of their homeschool life. Their relationships with each other teach so many lessons. But currently, with three distinct age groups, the hard parts of mothering this crowd are glaring, it feels like I’m always neglecting somebody.
We hired a woman to help here is Florida this winter, she is doing some childcare in the morning while we do lessonsthree days a week, and some housekeeping in the afternoons. She isn’t able to work full time though, which is really what we need if Aaron and I are going to get any down time at all. She has had a number of medical issues this winter and has only worked her full schedule a handful of weeks. We did find another local mom with kids similar in age to our littles that takes them in her home a few hours a week, and that has been a huge blessing. It is hard for me to admit I need this much help, but Aaron is practically catatonic after the months of 100 hours weeks he worked, and I’m not much better. I need to exhale. Finding the minutes to think and process the year has to happen if I’m going to recover. Luckily both Aaron and I have been able to physically take better care of ourselves this winter with more exercise.
Sarah MacKenzie says in her book Teaching From Rest, that when homeschooling and mothering is overwhelming, to just be diligent in showing up with your loaves and fishes. When I’m spread so thin, and when I never feel like there is enough of me to go around, and am in frazzle and burn out mode, I know I need to let go of my emphasis on the importance of my own work, and put more faith in God’s work. As Jamie Erickson says in her book Homeschool Bravely “God didn’t call you to homeschool because you could handle it. He called you because HE could handle it.” (p.39). This is certainly one of my most challenging lessons to learn as a Christian momma.
Hopefully the summer to come can be different. I hope we have the employees we need to keep our business workload manageable, and I hope I do have more time to pour into the kids. I hope to finally get some consistent sleep. Depending on how the workforce pans out, I might scale the garden back this year. But my takeaway from the past year is a lesson that I need to repeat over and over…. that I don’t feel like enough because I’m not, but luckily God is.
Raising Veggies and Humans 