Doubt

This morning I was in one of those, "I am the worst homeschooler in the history of homeschool mamas" kind of moods. I was piling up the evidence. The stack was getting deep. I don't make my kids really do anything, including going to bed right now. My 7 year old does not know the alphabet from A to Z and cannot count very high. You know, the usual. It was not pretty.

When I worry, I am grumpy,when I am grumpy, the girls get reactionary, the spiral starts and we can only hope something stops it before full meltdown and threats of school enrollment ensue.

Suddenly, I realize we are doing math. Yep, spontaneous, organic math. How, you may ask? Well, I have a huge bowl of tomatoes and I needed to know how much they weighed in order to determine if I had enough to make sauce to freeze. It takes 5 pounds. I got out the scale and we began weighing, pretty much anything we could find. And we started estimating and guessing what weighed more and then we figured the difference in weight between myself and Ari and then myself and Mina and then Mina and Ari. All of that is math.

Later, I came downstairs and found Ari on the couch writing addition problems on a piece of paper and solving them. All spontaneous, all for fun.

Here is the thing. I see the learning. I get it. What irritates me is how often I loose my faith. My faith in the process, my faith in their curiosity, it pisses me off quite frankly. I told the whole sordid affair to my husband on the phone. Of course, he has heard the whole thing before, and then suddenly I realized something. I had an epiphany. I need to stop waiting for that magic day when I no longer doubt and just go with it. The doubt should be a guidepost. "Hello there doubt, thank you for stopping by, I see you there." A wave and smile might be nice. Something like that.

I think my expectation that I will have no doubt is completely unrealistic given my personality, my constant changing view of the world, and the fact that I think certainty is a form of delusion in the first place.