Author: K Verderaime

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The Loneliness of Motherhood

I’ve read that the mental load a mom carries is quite heavy.  Perhaps this was just a way to accuse moms of being overly worried.  I’m not the chill mom, though I’m sure life would be much easier for everyone if I were.  I try to not be overbearing and controlling or a worry wart, but unfortunately these tendencies have been written into my being since childhood and removing them has been unsuccessful and exhausting.

Whatever the reasons of carrying a large mental load, I think it’s an unspoken and often lonely truth of motherhood; more accurately the spiritual or interior load of motherhood is what contributes to loneliness.  You see, even as much as we try to form friendships and community surrounding motherhood, our individual motherhood is unique and to a certain extent, purposely lonely.  We are our own worst enemy, it seems. 

It’s inevitable for me to compare, to feel defensive in my choices, to judge, or to distance myself from other mothers.  Is it a cultural issue?  I’m not sure, but if you experience similar sentiments and can relate, maybe it’s an unspoken issue we should confront and address.  I think the hidden problem costs many women sanity or sound mental health.   Woman are hormonal, some more than others, much of what I attribute to biology and epigenetics.  I am a hormonal, sensitive woman, it’s sort of a given having been through 14 pregnancies and postpartum periods, many of which were short.  Hormones can make a tremendous difference in motherhood especially when there is a lack of support. 

In addition, women in an age of feminism, I believe, try to temper or ignore a need of approval or praise from others, and when it’s lacking, or worse, confirmed that approval or praise is undeserved; it stings, it penetrates, it smolders.  And much like that smoldering quiet fire, one comment or disagreement can raise up a flame of panic and insecurity.  For mothers, I think that’s felt much deeper, as it informs our identity and worth. 

Who do women go to, to share that?  I suppose if they have healthy relationships with their mothers, aunts, grandmothers, sisters, or forever friends they may feel safe to be vulnerable.  Ask yourself, how safe do I feel being vulnerable?  For much of my life, I have not.  I’ve shared with my husband or close friend from time to time, but my innermost fears, traumas, and insecurities of motherhood I hold close to the chest.  How much could my husband understand?  He has his own experience in parenthood, hormones and biology influencing his experience.  Other woman may be more adept to empathizing, but only to the extent of their own experience of motherhood, which could differ drastically.  In addition, sharing those innermost thoughts makes them real, painful, and shameful.  And that is what’s wrong with modern motherhood.  We are shamed for being worried, shamed for our choices, shamed if we are too strict and shamed if we aren’t strict enough.   The frequency of shaming each other and even ourselves has grown exponentially, I think, leaving each of us to feel desperate and alone.  That loneliness can be so heavy sometimes, especially when consolations are few and far between. 

History often paints a rosier picture of mothers supporting mothers.  Mothers mothering their daughters into motherhood in a healthy, picturesque way.  Did that truly exist? Or is it inevitable to be pressured into choosing similar mothering patterns, at the expense of a new generation of children?  Were mothers humble and understanding if their daughter raised her children a bit differently?  It’s foolish to think we could all mother the same.  Some women face single motherhood, some have multiples, some have an only child, others like me have large families.  Some families face medical challenges or disabilities, others don’t. I think the unfortunate truth is that when our mothering experience, family circumstance, or values don’t match exactly to other mothers we encounter often, we compare and judge each other; thus, resulting in loneliness because we can’t relate or feel inferior to another. 

Does anyone else ponder these things?  Or am I alone in trying to wrap my mind around my motherhood?  Is there even the right way to mother?  I want to say no, but maybe someone out there has figured out the secret to perfect motherhood.  I find it hard to believe or accept that there is a one-way approach.  My identity as mother has evolved since its conception and it continues to evolve with each added cross, event, or trauma encountered in life.  I’ve in my 21 years of motherhood had to mother amidst a decline in health of myself and recently some children.  Illness definitely changes motherhood.  Loss changes motherhood.  Vulnerability changes motherhood.  I don’t know if the hard truth is that if we want to feel less lonely, we have to embrace vulnerability.  I really think that’s the game changer.  We can validate each other until we are blue in the face, but ultimately, we are only validating and being validated based on the facade of our motherhood, not the gritty or raw pieces that encompass who we are because we’ve learned to hide those.  As long as we stay in hiding, we’ll most likely remain lonely in our motherhood.

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Homeschooling: Consider the Whole Person

Continuing on the homeschool series, I want to address something I discovered later than I would have liked. How do you support and tailor learning to your child’s interests and strengths? Should we point out strengths and weaknesses?  

I would say I discovered this a bit late, but I have tried to remedy this with older children and begin this earlier with younger children. Right now, I have two graduates and eight children homeschooling. My older kids, I see, can be a little unsure or insecure about those niches that interest them. I attribute this to my lack of support and my closed-minded tendency to want to pump out well rounded upstanding students as was my goal in the public-school classroom. 

In all of that, the most striking piece you may be taking away is counting the children. My family size does color my perspective and experience as it relates to homeschooling, but I hope that the content I provide can be applied to a general audience. It will, however, perhaps benefit the large family mom who finds herself going a little bit crazy. Maybe it won’t? As large family moms may tell you, the dynamics of the family changes with each new child, as well as age gaps between siblings, gender of the children, and personalities. But, just to get it out of the way in case you are wondering just how large the family is… I’m expecting baby 14 in the summer. 

Now back on track, encouraging curiosity, independence, and self-awareness in building on child strengths is so important and underutilized as an approach in brick-and-mortar school. I’ve had children who absolutely love reading and creative writing and hate math. Most school years it was gritting teeth to just get through the harder, disliked subjects. Survival of requirements is something that’s been recurring in our homeschool. I’m bound by my state requirements, as many homeshoolers are. Some states have a larger freedom in homeschooling. I’ve had to find a balance to ensure my kids meet requirements, but can be creative and explorative in their own interests, which usually are extracurricular. I have some children who have a talent for music, some for handcrafted art, others for building, some farming. All of these interests are pathways for learning and building confidence in a skill or talent.  

When I began to ease up on academic expectations, I enabled my children to enjoy learning and it became meaningful; almost like play, not school. That’s not to say I want my children to be mediocre in core subjects, but I’m not gung-ho about having an academically rigorous exceptional child. I’m raising a whole person. The reality of adulthood is that there are successes, there is failure, there’s sacrifice and there is enjoyment. Focusing on academic excellence prepares them for a world that, by observation, may not be all that fulfilling. So if you have that academically robust mindset and goal for your homeschooled child, this likely is not the blog for you. This is raw, real, and unscripted. It’s self-reflective in nature, balancing and adapting to people not being solely dictated by a curriculum.  

Homeschooling has taken a different path from year one and that’s my message to you. Don’t be rigid in how you approach homeschooling. What works for one child, won’t for another. What worked one year, may not the next. One thing, though, that will be ever present and enduring is your child’s strengths and interests. Teaching them how to try again after a mistake or failure is equally important and that’s something I’m still learning how to do. I’ve been ingrained with the idea that failure is not an option and that bled into my expectation as a mom. Big mistake. I don’t want to get upset if they don’t get something right. Rather, I want to teach them healthy disappointment and build resiliency so they aren’t afraid to try because their attempt may end in failure. 

One of the largest benefits to homeschooling, in my observation, is to have the time and environment to encounter self-awareness and emotional intelligence. In a school environment there are too many eyes and stressed adults to hone in on the importance of a sound spirit. School is a hell-hole of bullies and judgement, pressure and scrutiny. That’s not a safe environment for forming a sound spirit and a healthy soul. Kindness, empathy, and many other virtues are seen and attributed to weakness. Survival of the fittest prevails. This can be true of a home environment too, but you can make the conscious choice to provide a safe space (yup, I used the woke word) to build up the person. I no longer believe in tough love. I don’t think breaking a person builds them up. That may work for muscles, but although my child’s heart is a muscle, it doesn’t work that way. Brokenness leads to problems in self-esteem and self-worth. The little voices in their head when they are young, become the loud negative screams that sabotage their future successes and relationships.  

If you take anything from this post, it’s that you’re forming a whole person…a mind, a heart, a soul. Math isn’t going to make my child a healthy and successful adult. It may be the means of their livelihood, but as most adults can attest; once you have long lasting relationships, your career has little to do with your core person, ability to resolve conflict in a marriage, or raise a child. In fact, careers often become stressors to family life, some companies touting that you should have work-life balance while demanding most of your time and loyalty. So, consider for yourself what kind of person you hope your child to be. That will be the largest influence in the approach you take as you homeshool. 

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A Broader View of Unlearning

 Unlearning Part 1

In the homeschool sphere there has been more and more attention given to unschooling. What is unschooling and why is it important, you make ask? I think the foundational reason many parents choose this approach is to help their kids unlearn bad habits of rote memorization and unmeaningful school habits. Instead, the unschooling approach becomes an attractive alternative in order to produce a holistic approach to learning, leaving children with the freedom to explore and find opportunities for learning that are organic. 

I’ve wrestled with this approach for my own children and while I love a Montessori approach to learning for primary grades, which tends to be more hands on, it’s not fully unschooling. I’ve not fully adopted the absolute unschooling approach in homeschooling, but it has permeated other aspects of life. Baby steps, people. I’m trying to get myself together, first.  

You see, unschooling would require much unlearning on my part. Redirecting my core beliefs, values, and approaches to life in all its complexities. I’ve been on quite a journey of unlearning and reforming pathways that I believe will serve me and my family well. Even with buy in, and support, it can be incredibly overwhelming and exhausting. As mentioned in previous posts, I’ve been homeschooling for about 12 years, having taught public school 7.5 years before that, in addition to college training to be an educator following a public school education K-12. That’s a lot of habit forming and much society pleasing routes to achieve “success” that I have to break down, unlearn and rebuild. 

There are questions I’ve had to consider in how to reroute my parenting approach, my own emotional healing, and holistic living which involves lots of toxic purging.  

Toxicity comes in many forms in life. The wakeup call usually comes in the form of illness, or a mental breakdown. For me, it became obvious postpartum right after we begin homeschooling. I don’t think I want to share the details of those moments, they are quite private and painful, even now. However, my diagnosis came as an autoimmune disease, which altered my ability to think and function. Everything was exhausting and humbling. In these moments I have to consider lifelong habits of eating, household purchases, and lifestyle. I had to grieve for a while. I grieved my health and the fact that my once comfortable daily normal was no more. Grief is a journey and in that journey my toxic purging began. 

I begin with what I thought would be the most obvious and quick, which was detoxing my physical environment. It took several years and many baby steps, but eventually I did a huge overhaul of purging toxic cookware, dishware, glassware, utensils, food storage containers, bedding, mattresses, cosmetics, cleaning products, laundry detergent, footwear, toiletries like shampoo, conditioner, lotions, deodorant, toothpaste, bar soaps, even to a certain extent linens for clothing and bathing. I hyper fixated on endocrine disruptors and arming myself with as much information as I could. The Wellness Mama podcast became a daily staple. My hyper fixation on detoxing the home became so prevalent that one of the toddler’s most common question was “Mama, is this toxic?” The word toxic was frequently and familiarly used.  

I then transitioned to trying to mitigate our toxic load in food. Through the years we’ve cut out and added back certain foods. Convenience and expense of food has played a significant part of our family menu and with a growing family, growing in age and size, along with economic fluctuations has made affording a healthier lifestyle challenging. Not impossible, but oh, so challenging. Enter homesteading. That’s become more of my husband’s realm. He loves homesteading. He’s craved the lifestyle for much of his adult life, but like me, was programmed to believe certain truths. One of those falsities was that homesteading wasn’t a viable or lucrative lifestyle to call yourself accomplished by society’s standards. Nowadays, it’s not easy to make it solely on homesteading or farming and many engage with the land and raising food as an additional job to a conventional career. Homesteading, no sugar coating it, comes with its stresses and hard work, but it’s healthier and gives peace of mind to know your food source. We’re still only a couple of years in, having overwhelmed ourselves with a little bit too much sometimes, but it’s become engraved into our family identity. 

These are some of the practical changes that we’ve made, most of which we all assume have an effect on our physical health. They have, but not fully. I still don’t feel amazing or healthy. Living with an autoimmune disease that cripples fertility, while being pregnant with baby 14, makes me think some of those changes have had an effect, but I still feel unwell. It’s become obvious however, that we are a whole person. Health comes from a sound and balanced mind, body, and soul. We’ve been on a spiritual roller-coaster, the most significant part of that so far has been in probably the last four years. Additionally, the journey of addressing mental health and unlearning unhealthy emotional approaches to interaction and relationships is part of our current journey, the next level of unlearning, detoxing, and healing. I’s like to continue this series touching on emotional intelligence, emotional trauma, and spiritual growing pains. For now, let’s recap.

If you are on your own health journey and want to start a natural living approach to life. One that values and promotes a whole food diet, farm fresh food, regenerative farming and ecological healing, low-waste living, functional medicine health approaches, and biohacking my recommendation is to delve into a couple overarching topics listed below. 

• Light Hygiene and Red Light Therapy

• Grounding/Earthing

• EMF exposure and how to mitigate it 

• Anti-Inflammatory diet

• Non-Toxic Household swaps (I will have a post on some ideas)

• Non-toxic cleaning products

• Natural Remedies 

Eventually, the goal of this blog is to provide consultation services. I’m not a medical professional, nor am I offering medical advice. This is my own journey and experience and what I have personally learned and implemented. Any consultation would be practical advice from my lens of experience. 

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Homeschooling’s Rude Awakening for a Public School Teacher

“Life is messy, your homeschool most likely will reflect that. “

A Homeschooling Introduction

There has been a new surge in the trad-wife movement, but that looks different for every marriage and every family. I wouldn’t claim the title, unless the definition is a woman who has chosen to stay at home to dedicate their time to their home and their family. I came home from a public school teaching career to home-school my children and manage a household. I am a homeschooling mom.

I became a stay-at-home mom in 2013 after 7.5 years of public-school teaching. I was much influenced by society, my parents and teachers to go to college, get a degree, be a working mom once family life came. That’s how I lived for those 7.5 years. My toddlers raised and influenced by many others, instead of their mother. By the time I came home, I had 6 children and my 7th on the way.  

I was not quick to jump onto the homemaking, homeschooling band wagon. It was neither very popular in my area or even at large at that time. Homeschooling has gained interest and traction in the years following the pandemic, which is a huge motivator in sharing my experience and adapting in the 12-ish years we’ve been homeschooling.

There are so many tangents I can go on. In fact, this will be one among a larger homeschooling series that addresses other homeschooling content, hot-topic debates, and plethora of approaches. This, however is a short encouragement for parents on the fence about homeschooling and questioning the commitment and the know-how needed to get started and maintain a home-school. The know-how may be a bit unexpected. 

As a school teacher, I was primarily assigned to the primary grades in public school, my favorite having been first grade. I taught several cohorts of 6 and 7 years olds how to read and write, add and subtract. I was fairly sufficient as a public-school teacher, had good administrative observations and evaluations; I was usually confident in my teaching abilities. I knew how to manage a classroom. 

My first year homeschooling was a rude awakening. What was the issue, you might ask? My training and education focused on educating and managing a classroom and group of close in age children. I will admit that when I was moved to higher elementary grades, I had to adapt to their maturity, personalities, hormones, but still they were all in the same age range. At home, however, I had children age 9 to newborn. Newborns being extremely needy, 9-year-old’s being pre-pubescent and hormonal along with terrible twos and unmotivated learners in between. Add to that, a home to manage. School cooks and janitors are non-existent. A once empty home for a large portion of the day was now being lived in, a continuous mess of dishes, toys, potty training accidents and well-worn school books. My college education was pretty much useless. I soon had to learn how to adapt. So, to all those nervous about their qualifications to home-school, my qualifications didn’t help me much at first. 

One of the obvious changes between the two environments was how quick lessons could be completed on productive days; the days when the toddlers were safely occupied and the newborn was napping. A lesson that would take 30 to 45 minutes in a public-school classroom could now take 10-15 minutes. Therefore, learning time for the core subjects might be quick-er, but learning became much more involved; it was a full day’s worth of learning. Because we began homeschooling with a large family, we had much more opportunities to learn how to manage interruptions and meltdowns and noisy home life. Chores were an added challenge throughout the day. Eventually, I learned that homeschooling was more than language arts, math, science, and history. Homeschooling almost immediately included life skills. Children learned to cook, wash a load of clothes, burp a baby, read to a sibling, handle personalities and maturity levels that are more or less than their own.  

Homeschooling, my dear reader is life schooling. Much of it, is what you make of it. What do you want or need your children to learn and practice? Worried about your successes and failures? Well, the metrics are different. Your child, in being homeschooled, will be exposed to much more than school books. They are exposed to life, to relationships, discord and empathy. Life is messy, your homeschool most likely will reflect that. What better teacher to help a child encounter life in all its complexities? No better teacher than you, their parent. Your investment and love for your child can never be matched by anyone else. You CAN home-school, get started.

Stay tuned for more on homeschooling: the challenges, approaches, hacks, and benefits and all the messiness in between.

By K. Verderaime