In The Beginning, I Created Our Homeschool

I've been deep in research, planning, and organizing our homeschool adventure.

It's confusing, daunting, and exhilarating.

I decided (pretty much on a whim) that our start date is Aug. 29, 2011.

Our first year of homeschooling...

Wait...what?

Can I do this? Will I mess up my kids? What happens if I'm off by 15 minutes in my weekly logged hours? Will the government arrest me? Will my kids ever have friends? Can I teach them everything they need to be prepared for college--and the real world?

Will I go crazy? Will my kids resent me? How often will I have to explain that we are good without god? How often will I have to defend our choice to people who think they know my kids better than me?

Will my house be messier? Will we go on all the field trips we plan? Can we afford this? Will I continue to lose sleep because I have so much to do? Should I have a baby amidst this chaos? Does freedom come with anxiety?

CAN I DO THIS?

WILL I MESS UP MY KIDS?

Fear. I was taught to fear things unnecessarily. But shaking it off or un-teaching myself is challenging.

I understand natural fear to be a good thing. It's a survival mechanism.

HowStuffWorks.com says: 

If we couldn't be afraid, we wouldn't survive for long. We'd be walking into oncoming traffic, stepping off of rooftops and carelessly handling poisonous snakes. We'd be hanging out with people who have tuberculosis. In humans and in allanimals, the purpose of fear is to promote survival. In the course of human evolution, the people who feared the right things survived to pass on their genes. In passing on their genes, the trait of fear and the response to it were selected as beneficial to the race.

But some things I shouldn't be afraid of - like homeschooling.

There is also fear conditioning.

From Reframe Reality:

From the moment we are born, our ego develops off of our experiences to help give us an identity, to help us define ourselves. Through these reference experiences, we then learn mechanisms of reaction to certain circumstances and scenarios. One example of this is social conditioning — how society brought us up to act, things we learned were considered taboo or bad, etc etc. From birth, we are told repeatedly ways to act or be, what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is bad. People, although they mean their best, impose their own conditioning on you because it is all you know. If you are born with introverted parents, scared of society and people, there are large chances that on some level, you will carry this fear as well.

So, I've been conditioned to fear many things that aren't really part of the "fight or flight" response. Not that this is new information.

It permeates many aspects of my life and has come from so many sources I am probably oblivious to most of them: parents, teachers, peers, TV, non-secular homeschoolers, media, ads, church, friends, employers, etc.

How can I unlearn the fear about homeschooling?

WebMd says:

Exposure therapy indeed works, as his clinical experience and laboratory experiments have shown. However, he's found that either multiple exposures in a very short period of time -- or exposures spaced quite far apart -- will get someone past anxiety disorder, Michael Davis, PhD, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, tells WebMD.

My job (to add to ALL the other ones) is to expose, expose, expose!

Just start it-get to it-homeschool away!

In time the irrational fear will leave. I don't expect to never question, to not be skeptical or stop feeling the need to step back and critically think about what I'm doing and how I can improve our homeschool.

Growth and evolution in our adventure is necessary... ear is not.

"You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do." - Eleanor Roosevelt

Also view on Silver Outlined Window.