One of the highest honors of my life is to be a daily witness of how each of my children navigates the world. The interplay between how they see the world and how they are received by it so often seems divinely orchestrated. It's like their very beings were made to nestle into the world just so.
And yet this carries with it not only ease but friction. Because each of us, inevitably, will often encounter spaces in which we do not fit. I am grateful in these moments that I am not merely observer of my children, but mother. That God in His infinite mercy not only gave my children to me, but me to them. To fall back on when they smack into one of life's glass windows like a bird, unawares.
I give my children the gift of homeschooling both to enable and to protect. To free and to limit. To play to their strengths and provide for their weaknesses. To allow us both to be surprised by what those are.
Because as mother, my hand is on their pulse. My chest rises and falls with theirs. I know when to push and when to pull back, when to immerse and when to dry off. When to work, when to play, when to eat, when to rest. It's both well thought out and completely intuitive.
While my children are young, I will sit behind the wheel and make the micro adjustments needed to stay safely on the road. Someday they'll take their turns in the driver's seat.
Squabbles, yes. Wrong turns, absolutely.
But we are headed somewhere worth going.
And worth going together.