Permission to Pause: Sometimes We Need to Scale Back

EP220: Life’s challenges sometimes demand that we slow down or scale back, whether we like it or not. You always have permission to pause!

In this episode of the Art of Homeschooling podcast, Jean shares her own recent experiences of navigating stress, uncertainty, and caregiving while reflecting on past homeschooling seasons filled with ups and downs. She reminds us that scaling back is not a failure ~ it’s part of the rhythm of life.

With warmth and honesty, Jean explores the mindset shift that allows us to embrace life’s curveballs without guilt. And offers three life lessons for parents on the homeschooling journey. 

Tune in for Jean's heartfelt words about resilience, self-compassion, and the power of homeschooling through life’s inevitable ups and downs.

Find the Show Notes here  https://artofhomeschooling.com/episode220/

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Chapters

• 2:31 The homeschool challenges I've faced
• 3:38 Do you need permission to scale back during challenging times, too?
• 6:33 My insights about calming the nervous system
• 8:45 Three things I've learned about life's curveballs as a homeschooling parent
• 10:41 The "hero's journey," facing challenges, and growth

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:09

You're listening to the Art of Homeschooling podcast, where we help parents cultivate creativity and connection at home. I'm your host, jean Miller, and here on this podcast you'll find stories and inspiration to bring you the confidence you need to make homeschooling work for your family. Let's begin Hello and welcome to the Art of Homeschooling podcast, or should I say welcome back, because we're back after taking a break in the month of March for personal reasons, which I'll share a bit more about in a moment, and now April is almost here and I'm happy to be back connecting with you through this podcast. Today, I want to talk all about how sometimes we have to scale back to take care of ourselves or take care of our loved ones. This is what I've needed to do recently, and mostly I want to talk about how we can give ourselves permission to do that. I'm going to give you some examples of when this has been necessary in my own life, including this past month, or few months really, as well as offer you some encouragement for how to be gentle with yourself even when life gets crazy. If you want to hear more about this topic, I have a whole episode called Homeschooling Through Life's Curveballs. It's episode number 219, which shares more about practical strategies for homeschooling during tough times like these, like keeping the learning flexible, implementing the 20-20-20 rule for balance and structure and creating an action list for tough times. I'll put a link to that episode in the show notes for this one, which, of course, you can find at artofhomeschoolingcom slash episode 220. That episode was more about strategies, but today's episode is really more about mindset and encouraging you to take a break when you need one.

Speaker 1: 2:31

So those of you who've been part of my world for a while know that we homeschooled three kiddos for over 25 years. The kiddos are all grown. Now I just became a grandmother, hooray. And in those years of homeschooling we had some ups and downs, just like everybody else does. As a family, we experienced my challenging third pregnancy when I had hyperemesis gravidarum, which, if you don't know what that is, it's extreme sickness from a pregnancy like bedridden, living on IV fluids, and then a preemie. At the end of that pregnancy, we experienced my mother-in-law's breast cancer journey, a house fire which caused us to move out for nine months and live in a rental house, and me developing not one but two chronic illnesses and autoimmune diseases that I developed, I believe, as a result of so much stress my nervous system just couldn't handle any more.

Speaker 1: 3:38

I share this, just to acknowledge that we all have our struggles. Your experience as a homeschooling parent might be very different from mine, but I would venture to guess that you too have had some challenges along your journey. We all do, and so today, what I really want to talk about is how we give ourselves permission to scale back in our homeschooling during these times, and especially, I want to encourage you to let go of the guilt and the shame when we do need to scale back. It's really a part of the process. This need to shift things up from time to time. It's really a part of the process rather than an exception to the rule. I want you to be able to still feel good about yourself as a homeschooling parent and about your choice to homeschool, no matter what.

Speaker 1: 4:34

So my most recent experience with needing to scale back in my life has been just these past six months. As you know, my kiddos are all grown up, so I'm not homeschooling anymore, but over these past few months, I've had an opportunity to reflect on the challenges we did have when we were homeschooling. What if my family had gone through all of what I'm going to describe to you now when we were homeschooling. So here's what my past six months have looked like. Last fall my husband wrenched his back very badly by lifting something too heavy and he was in pain for weeks. Then my almost 90-year-old mother was in the hospital for 10 days with pneumonia, complicated by the fact that she has dementia, and I was her person through that whole saga. Then our new grandbaby was born, our first grandchild. So we traveled to meet her and spend time with our oldest in his wife and new baby, and the baby had some challenges herself in those first few weeks. It was an extreme joy and a lot on top of everything else that was going on. When we returned, my husband had an MRI for his back which discovered a mass on his kidney. These past three months have involved lots of scans, doctor's appointments, waiting and waiting for results, the discovery of kidney cancer and, most recently, my husband's surgery to remove one of his kidneys. As I look back, that is a lot for anyone to handle. Now I'm so grateful because my husband has recovered well from surgery and is doing quite well, living with just one kidney, and the prognosis is very good.

Speaker 1: 6:30

So things have begun to settle a little bit, but here's my honest experience with all of this. First, I will say that I've been through a similar emotional journey to some of the other challenges that I mentioned that were during our homeschool years. I find that my response to stress is a whole body response and I tend to have increased anxiety, poor sleep, lack of focus and sometimes even pain and extreme fatigue. I often absolutely think I'm doing fine up until a certain point and then things begin to crumble. I know that. The truth is that challenges like these are very hard on my nervous system. When I'm going through something like this, I need to take extra care of myself and scale back on outside activities. So that I can do that. I need to add in a lot more mind-body practices so that I can calm my nervous system down. It's not easy to do, but I find that at times of great stress, our bodies force us to rest. They send us clear messages that that's what we need.

Speaker 1: 7:50

Just like my experience in the past with getting chronically ill and developing autoimmune disease while we were homeschooling, I've wanted to take better care of myself in recent months so that I don't have a flare-up as homeschoolers. That often means scaling back on the lessons, scaling back on enrichment activities, scaling back on field trips and lots of other things that we normally do for our children and our family. And I don't know about you, but for me, I often feel very guilty and bad about the fact that my experience of life, in those moments, my challenges, are affecting everyone else. They're affecting my children in ways that don't seem ideal. But here is what I've learned through all of these ups and downs that I want to share with you today.

Speaker 1: 8:45

Number one we often don't have a choice about when we get sick, when our ability to handle stress reaches its maximum, when we're really stressed out or when our nervous system is telling us that we must pay attention. We often can't anticipate this and we often don't have a choice about it. That's the first thing I want you to keep in mind. Number two challenges on our parenting and homeschooling journey are to be expected. This is part of life, so, rather than thinking of this as the exception, it can actually really help for us to anticipate life's ups and downs or curveballs. They really do happen to everyone.

Speaker 1: 9:31

And number three our children learn by observing how we handle these kinds of situations, and the truth is, we want them to learn these life skills how to care for others when they don't feel well. How a family pulls together at times of struggle. That sometimes in life we need to let go of things, even things that we normally enjoy. That our energy levels and ability to do some activities will change based on what's going on in our lives at that time, at that season. We want our children to learn all of that, because we're all going to have some of these experiences on our life journey. This is what it means to be human, and when our children see us taking good care of ourselves, they learn to take good care of themselves. When they go through tough times, they learn how to scale back to make more space for taking good care. So there you have it. I hope that this episode has helped you recognize that we all go through challenges on life's journey.

Speaker 1: 10:41

This reminds me in a lot of ways of something called the hero's journey, or even the storyline in a fairy tale or any good story. The main character in these stories sets off on an adventure and they come up against a challenge, a major conflict. That's what makes a story interesting, right, and how the character handles that conflict is often what makes the story take shape, along with the outcome and how the character handles it all. In the end, fairy tales and any good story will come to a close with the character being a changed person for having gone through that, a person who has learned valuable lessons and has grown stronger. Grown to be more open, more loving, more caring, more mature, more present, more interesting and creative than when they set out. So that's my message for you today. Life will spring challenges on us, and our children learn so much from watching how we handle them. I hope you've found some encouragement here and have been able to shift your mindset just a little bit on the idea that scaling back can be a good thing.

Speaker 1: 12:06

If you have felt inspired or moved by listening today, I invite you to share this podcast episode with a friend. That's something that I would love to see you do to share with a homeschooling friend who might need to hear this today, or with a homeschooling group you're a part of. You can send them directly to the show notes for this episode where they can listen and read an overview of the episode at artofhomeschoolingcom slash episode 220. Thanks so much for being here. I really enjoyed taking the time off I needed, and now I'm so happy to be back, so I hope you'll join me again next week. A new episode of the Art of Homeschooling podcast comes out every Monday, and in the coming weeks we'll be talking about acceptance, poetry and curriculum. I hope you'll join me. Take good care of yourself and I'll catch you next time. Bye for now. That's all for today, my friend, but here's what I want you to remember Rather than perfection, let's focus on connection. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll see you on the next episode of the Art of Homeschooling podcast. You.