This last August, Richele wrote a great article about being a homeschooling mom and running a home business at the same time. Those of us who like to operate from home seem to do it in a multi-facted way, don’t we? I thought I’d take a few minutes to add my thoughts to Richele’s.
I am a homeschooling mom, and I have been since my children were born. I was taught at home, so it seemed perfectly natural to me. What would be weird is sending my kids to public school.
I am also a work-at-home mom. I’ve done this off and on with various different projects, but two years ago, I took a job as an editor for a publishing company, and then I started my own author services company.
It’s not easy, I’ll give you that. I often play the guilt game. When I’m schooling, I feel guilty because Client A is waiting for an answer and Client B wants a price quote. When I’m working, I feel guilty because I could have extended math just a little bit longer, or we could have played that geography game on the top shelf and had a lot of fun with it. Guilt, I’m learning, is just something that comes with the territory, and you learn that as long as you’re doing the best you can, the guilt is misplaced.
The first question I’m asked is this: “How do you balance it all?”
My honest answer is this: “I don’t.” And it’s true. I am not in balance—or at least, in the traditional sense. I don’t have a perfect house and a perfect yard and have my hair done all the time. My house is always cluttered, my yard is always weedy, and my hair is usually up in a clip on the back of my head. There are things you learn to let go, and there are things that have to wait their turn.
In addition, school doesn’t get done every day. Today was one of those days. I had fire after fire to put out all day, and I had to take a twenty-minute nap—it was either that, or die of some strange sleep-deprivation disease. But because I homeschool, I can make today up on Saturday, or do a little extra for the next few days, and not lose any ground. You’ve got to be flexible.
I would like to have a little more order in my life, and I am getting to where I can balance certain aspects of it better. But I’ve learned to let go of the things that aren’t important. It drives my mom all kinds of batty when she comes over and sees a basket of laundry on the couch, but hey, it’s really not that important, and at least it’s clean. If I come to the end of the day and know that my children felt loved, supported, and cared for, that’s what it’s really all about.
Join me tomorrow as I discuss further aspects of working from home and homeschooling.
Related Blogs:
Moving Toward Your Home-based Business