Part One - God Reveals My Fear
Don't Be Afraid to Obey Series
This post is the first in my series, "Don’t Be Afraid to Obey." In this series, I am exploring what God has taught me about obedience and trust. Subscribe to follow along as new parts are released.
“For in this way in former times the holy women also, who hoped in God, used to adorn themselves, being submissive to their own husbands; just as Sarah obeyed Abraham, calling him lord, and you have become her children if you do what is right without being frightened by any fear.”
- 1 Peter 3:5-6
The fall my firstborn entered kindergarten, my home was disordered and my marriage was struggling. My husband came to me with something unexpected: we should send her to public school. We had both been homeschooled all the way through. I like to joke that my husband had even homeschooled college. He tested out of a lot of classes and then did college online.
We knew we wanted to do things differently, and I had been telling people for years that we were going to take it kid by kid, and year by year. Sure, I figured, we’d probably send the kids to school at some point - but apparently, I never really thought it would happen in elementary. I hadn’t realized I never expected it to happen until the kids were older. My husband said we needed to do it.
I hated the idea of sending my kids to school. I hated the idea of public school mom being my identity. When we were wrestling through the idea, I cried for weeks.
Literally. Daily. (My poor husband.)
I thought this conflict was about school. It wasn’t.
I didn’t know it yet, but God was going to use this to expose what was in my heart - and to change the trajectory of our marriage.
God was gracious to me in two ways. One, I knew Parker was right. I wasn’t afraid to send my kids to school. I knew that schooling methods aren’t the most important thing in parenting, and that other Christians I trusted were happy their kids could go to this school. Parker told me to make a list of pros and cons, and every reason that I wanted to keep her home was mainly selfish or fearful. Most of the reasons we would send her to school were specifically for her good. I could see that.
Second, she wanted to go. I don’t know how I could have done it if I had to make her. It might have sent me into depression. It certainly would have taken longer for me to be happy again and to see the good in what we were doing. Thankfully, she loved it.
But these did not make it easy. I hated it, every day. My husband encouraged me to make it fun. He suggested I take her school shopping, just the two of us. He made me list the good things about school. I wrote down every single thing I could think of that I could be happy about and thankful for. I was surprised how many there were. I quickly filled three pages. Later, I started a fourth. I wasn’t very happy about most of them, but I wanted to be, and I had to be intellectually honest.
Parker would not tolerate complaints about school or the teachers. When I was working through signing up or schedules or communication, he often stopped me to tell me I was not allowed to complain - even when he agreed with my objection.
I still don’t like thinking about filling in those forms the first time. It took me days, and not because there were so many pages. Filling those forms felt like death.
At Parker’s prompting, I had a phone call with our pastor’s wife. She encouraged me in the same things he had. She reminded me that it would be much easier for Parker to let me do what I wanted, but he loved me and the kids enough to do what was best for us. Make it fun, she said. Take Marie out, and don’t cry.
A sweet friend of ours who had gone through a similar situation and was seasoned in public school, and was by God’s kindness involved in the same one, graciously encouraged me and answered lots of questions.
I wrote a document full of questions that tried not to belie the bitter thoughts I had - are there days they don’t learn anything? How often do they watch movies? Could we do a parent-teacher conference since we missed it? Can we know what they do in art? Is there any way of knowing what goes on in the bus?
I remember pausing writing this google doc because I was too upset to continue, and skipping some of them when I talked on the phone with her. I realized some of them I needed to let go. I knew the anger was wrong.
I did take Marie school shopping. The day is distinct in my memory. Sitting in a booth at Big Boy’s, I asked her careful questions about school and tried to soak in her anticipation.
I could not let my sadness quench her excitement.
School shopping before starting kindergarten is a favorite tradition of our kids now. I look forward to them too, with only a touch of bittersweet.
If you had asked me if I was afraid to send my kids to school, I would have told you no. I wasn’t afraid, just sad. I was giving up on a dream indefinitely. That was true, and certainly part of the hardship. But I was willing to do that for the good of my children. So why was it so hard?
Looking back, I can see my emotional distress was seated in fear. I was afraid that I would always be unhappy and discontent.
At the time, this seemed reasonable. How could I ever learn to be happy about school? In my mind, sadness was the problem. Only later did I realize that beneath my grief was something deeper: fear.
I had an unnamed fear that my kids would live in a world I would never understand. School was a mystery to me. I didn’t know things like the difference between a principal, whom I thought was the head honcho, and the superintendent. I didn’t know what the routines were or how friendships worked or if I should talk to people at ceremonies.
On the other hand, they would not understand me. I grew up in the homeschooling world. What if that felt as foreign to them as school did to me? Would we even be able to connect when they were grown?
I feared never getting to homeschool. If it was too hard for me to homeschool one kid in kindergarten, when would we ever? I would be sad about it for the rest of my life! I had visualized reading aloud as my children played quietly on the floor, or looking around a table full of children happily writing as I oversaw with a baby in my arms since I was a child myself. My vision of motherhood was very tied to teaching. What does mothering without being a teacher look like? I couldn’t visualize it. I think I was afraid that somehow I wouldn’t even be a mom to my kids after they turned 5.
I feared my kids losing out on childhood. What would time with them look like if most of their lives they were gone from home? Another Christian friend who had done public school sent me her time calculations of how much time she had with them. To me, the glaring number of hours they would be gone was the only number I could see. Would they know me? Would they know their siblings? I was always with my siblings as a kid. I loved them. What if my kids didn’t?
I don’t think I identified any of these as fears at the time. I thought I was just sad. I was sad to give up my vision of my future life. But it was sad because I feared that by submitting my desires for my life to my husband’s - and ultimately God’s - leading, the future would not be as good.
It wasn’t because of a lost dream. I was afraid of the future God was asking me to walk into.
I knew God was calling me to do something I didn’t like it - but the thing that made it hard was that I didn’t know if it would be good for me or for my children. If you had asked me, I would have known that didn’t make sense. How could I trust God and think that He was calling me to do something that wouldn’t be good for me?
By God’s grace, I was willing to obey when I didn’t understand. Eventually, God would teach me that obedience is always good for me - and that would teach me not to fear anything that is frightening.
I wasn’t merely struggling with school.
