Apron Strings

Posted by Elizabeth Curry | 0 comments

When we took our oldest daughter to college this fall and helped her move into her dorm room, we received many comments from well meaning friends.  More than one person mentioned it being time to cut the apron strings.  We took it in the spirit in which it was meant, but still it chafed a bit.  There is an undercurrent of over-protectiveness implied in the statement.  Others expressed great concern for my welfare, with the trepidation of someone who may be confronted with a hysterical woman at any given moment.  While I miss my daughter, I am not distraught.  I am excited about the classes and experiences she is going to have.  She is ready to face these new challenges, and frankly, there is still a lot on my plate at home.  I don’t have all that much time to drown my sorrows in a carton of ice cream.

Even though homeschooling is old hat to many of us, for a great number of people, it is still a new and untested idea.  They have had little experience with actual homeschoolers and misunderstand how it works and the relationships it fosters, especially during the high school years.  In fact, I believe that homeschooling a child through high school provides a wonderful basis from which we can send our young adults out into the world.

My well meaning friends concluded that because I had spent so much time with my daughter during her growing up years, I would find it impossible to send her off to college.  But just the opposite is true.  It was precisely because she and I have spent so much time together that I can send her off with only minor trepidation.  I haven’t missed anything.  I was the one who helped her to learn to read; who watched her discover new things; who shared long afternoons playing games together; who listened to intricate descriptions of the latest frog inhabiting the tanks in her room.  I had the best of my daughter’s time and didn’t have to be satisfied with the tired dregs after a day of school.  I know her well enough to be sure that this move to college is good and right for her and I am content.

Of course it helps that she has proven to be a very responsible young woman.  This is another way that homeschooling helps to prepare young people for venturing off on their own.  Instead of raising children who are so sheltered that they cannot go anywhere without a parent, homeschooling tends to foster independence.  As my daughter has grown, she has become more and more responsible for her own life.  Instead of being in a school building with everything laid out for her for the majority of the day, she learned to direct her own education and how to manage her time.  She knew how to get about the city on her own and took responsibility for getting where she needed to go.  By the end of her high school career, she had ceased to be a teen and had turned into a young adult.  The idea that the beginning of college marks the beginning of one’s real life is completely foreign to her.  As far as she is concerned, she has been having a real life all along.

But not only has homeschooling changed my daughter, it has also changed me.  Being at home and teaching my children has given me time to develop and pursue interests that I might not have had, or even known about if my children had been in school.  For instance, often when I ask my children to do something, such as when we first dove into keeping nature journals, I would do it along with them.  I would get my book and watercolors out and just start painting, and it would never fail that within a half an hour all my children would be painting as well.  This was wonderful in and of itself, but I discovered that I loved doing it.  I can’t imagine that I would have discovered watercolors another way.  I have lists and lists of things that I would love to have more time to pursue… someday.  When the last two girls leave for college, I don’t imagine that I will lack for things to do.  The nest may become empty (though that is currently so far in the future, it’s a difficult thing to imagine), but I don’t see myself as idle, waiting for my children to phone.  By teaching my children, I have grown myself and my children have been able to watch the process of an adult continuing to learn.

In all fairness, I will admit to missing my daughter and being a bit sad that she no longer joins us at the dinner table or wanders into my room just to chat.  I think that her brothers and sisters are having the more difficult time, though.  Her father and I knew what was coming and had a sense of what it would be like.  Some of the younger ones didn’t really understand and still ask if she will be home for dinner.  They have spent so much time together that they all really care about each other and are good friends.  It’s hard for me to watch them miss her.  But I take comfort in the fact that even this is a good thing as it shows the depths of relationship that my children have for one another.

So we are not cutting the apron strings to our daughter so much as letting them naturally loosen; a process which has been slowly happening over the course of many years.  And while the apron strings at some point become completely unattached, I don’t plan on taking off the apron.  I will always be her mother, no matter how grown-up and responsible she is.

Elizabeth Curry is on year 14 of homeschooling her 9 children (with #10 arriving via China at some point next year). Devoted bookworms all, it’s not surprising that much of the learning that happens centers around whatever chapter book is being read. When she isn’t taking care of children or reading, she enjoys sewing, cooking, and writing. Her life of following Jesus with many children in the Big, Ugly House is chronicled at www.ordinary-time.blogspot.com .