Leaping From The Box

Are you one of those lucky few who have never experienced homeschool burnout? I went through at least two sessions of homeschool burnout during the twelve years we actively homeschooled, probably more (time has a way of blurring those days/weeks you would like to forget). You would think an unschooler would have no reason for burnout, wouldn’t you? But even unschoolers can have expectations both for themselves and their children that are sometimes unrealistic or unattainable. Unschooling moms are not immune to placing tremendous pressure upon themselves in the same ways that all moms do around the world.

Life Burnout

You might wonder how I could experience burnout when I am no longer really homeschooling. Ah, but you forget, I now have a very active toddler living here! And toddlers have been known to cause life burnout, which is exactly the variety of burnout I just went through. Not that it was the toddler’s fault! She really is a wonderful little girl and I love having her here and am grateful we are able to provide her and her mommy a safe place to land … most of the time, anyway.

It’s just that I have taken care of children for over twenty-three years now. With our last child graduating in May I though that time of my life was done and I had been eagerly anticipating doing some new things, something that did not necessarily involve children! I had also become used to quieter days and being able to pick up and go as I wished, when I wished. Suddenly I was thrust back into those toddler years where you plan around naps and diaper changes and such. Talk about a big change!

Add to that all the other changes that have occurred in our lives the last two to three years – children moving in, children moving out, weddings, the birth of our first grandchild, moving to another state, my father’s health issues – and you can see that my life has been more than a little eventful recently. Normally I am pretty even tempered and adapt to the highs and lows that life throws my way quickly and easily. But suddenly it felt like more than I could handle.

Signs of Burnout

About mid-July I began to realize that I was not adapting as easily as I would have anticipated and by August the signs of a full-blown Life Burnout were readily apparent:

• Extreme tiredness
• Snapping at people for no reason
• Mentally running through the list of the negatives in my life over and over
• Physically aching all over
• Feeling overwhelmed and frustrated
• Eating too much junk food
• No interest in activities that I usually enjoy, such as crocheting and writing

Dealing With The Physical

It is one thing to recognize the signs, though, and quite another to begin doing something about them. Thankfully I realized that one thing I could easily do was begin to take my vitamins again. I am very good at reminding others in my family to take their vitamins, but not so good at remembering to take them myself. To be honest, in the past I never really noticed much difference in how I felt whether I took them or not. But as I near the half century mark, I find that I now notice a big difference and I do need to take them, especially my B-Complex and Omega’s. After just two weeks of starting back on a daily supplements regime, including a new packet of vitamins designed especially for women my age, I began to have more energy and the physical exhaustion eased.

The next step was to cut out the junk food, which was easy enough since I am the one who buys the groceries. If you don’t buy it and don’t have it in the house, it is much easier to avoid. Instead, I stocked up on fresh vegetables and fruit and snacked on them whenever I had the munchies. And I renewed my efforts to not drink soda, since I do not believe the corn syrup in soft drinks is good for us. Even though I love the taste of root beer, it does not quench my thirst but instead leaves me wanting more, which is not really the intended result of drinking a liquid, unless, of course, you are the manufacturer of that liquid and wish the consumer to purchase more! So I went back to drinking mostly water, which I like to drink, and my hot tea and morning cup of mocha. I still have the occasional soda, maybe one or two a week, but not on a daily basis.

Tackling The Mental

Once I began to feel better physically, it was easier to deal with the mental stuff. I knew I needed to pare back my expectations of what I could accomplish each day. I spend a lot of time each day working on this blog and my website: writing new posts, updating old articles, checking links, adding new information. Caring for a toddler means a lot of distractions and those distractions make writing new material an almost impossible task for me. So instead of writing, I focused on the areas I could do more easily with distractions, which is checking and updating links. Doing so immediately lowered my levels of stress and frustration and increased my enjoyment in my granddaughter again.

Along the way I made an interesting discovery. By lowering my expectations, I actually accomplish more. Of course, this doesn’t happen every day, but often enough to be encouraging.

Surviving Burnout

Burnout is survivable. The key is recognizing burnout for what it is, an overload in a particular area, whether homeschooling, life, expectations, whatever, and then taking steps to reduce that overload. Many times those steps mean changing our own expectations of ourselves, our children, our lives. We are not SuperParents. Life will sometimes throw us a curveball or two and we have to step back, regroup, and start again.

How do I know that I have survived burnout this time around? By my renewed interest in crocheting and writing, which I do purely for my own enjoyment. I decided not to participate in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) this coming November, but I have been thinking about brushing the dust off an old novel attempt and working a bit more on it. And my current crochet project, a Celtic-design wedding afghan for my son, is exciting the heck out of me! I would like to do nothing more than sit for hours working on it. My passion is back! Burnout is gone! I survived, again!

Homeschool Burnout

If you would like to know more about Homeschooling Burnout – what it is, what causes it, how to conquer it – please read my article, Surviving Homeschool Burnout.

Have you survived burnout, whether Life or Homeschooling? If so, how did you do it? And what did you learn from your burnout?

I recently read a topic on Amy’s Live, Learn, Knit blog titled What Brings You Joy? In her post Amy mentioned a book she had read, Let Your Life Speak by Parker J. Palmer, which I have added to my “must read” list. During this past week’s marathon NaNo writing, I found myself often distracted from my story and thinking about joy. I began to wonder what the difference was between joy and pleasure, since I could easily think of many things that brought pleasure to my world, but not so many things that seemed to bring joy. So today I looked up the words “pleasure” and “joy” online and found an explanation that suited me at Dictonary.com.

Pleasure, enjoyment, delight, joy refer to the feeling of being pleased and happy. Pleasure is the general term: to take pleasure in beautiful scenery. Enjoyment is a quiet sense of well-being and pleasurable satisfaction: enjoyment at sitting in the shade on a warm day. Delight is a high degree of pleasure, usually leading to active expression of it: delight at receiving a hoped-for letter. Joy is a feeling of delight so deep and so lasting that one radiates happiness and expresses it spontaneously: joy at unexpected good news.

So what does bring me joy?

My first thought was writing, but writing is not always joyful or even pleasurable. It can be difficult, painful and emotionally revealing, none of which brings me joy. Writing is something that I have to do, like breathing and eating. It is a rare day that I do not write something, whether a blog post, an email or a letter to a friend (sometimes those are even handwritten!). It does not matter to me whether anyone reads what I write or not. The possibility of an audience is not why I choose write.

Reading also comes to mind, but again, it is more of a need I have, like an addiction to caffeine or nicotine. A day is not complete if I have not had my daily fix of word input and output, reading and writing.

Crocheting gives me pleasure and satisfaction. I find it relaxing, soothing. But crocheting does not give me joy. The act of giving a crocheted item away, knowing that it will be used and appreciated by the recipient, that gives me joy. I never really understood why we needed to save an item that someone had made, pass it down from generation to generation, never to be used. To me, the value of the item is in knowing the person who created that item. If I did not personally know great-grandma Tilly, I am not going to value something made by her nearly as much as I am going to value something made by my Grammy. And so it brings me joy to know that items I have made and given to others are actually being used. That was the reason I made them in the first place!

Here is a picture of the baby afghan I made for my niece’s new baby boy:

Knowing that Aiden’s older brother loved his afghan and carried it around with him for several years gave me great joy. I hope Aiden enjoys his half as much.

Here is another thing that gives me joy:

Copper has taken to sleeping on laptops and computers. When it was ninety degrees and better outside, she preferred sleeping out on our balcony all day long. But when cooler temperatures came in September, she ceased wanting to go out on the balcony and now sleeps away the day on top of laptops or any other computer she can find that is running and warm. Anyway, just seeing a cat gives me pleasure, but having one (or more) of my own that I can interact with gives me joy.

Photography brings me joy. Amy mentioned photography and art in her post, too. Unlike Amy, I have never been interested in the darkroom and developing of pictures. What I love is the hunt for a good subject, the art of framing the subject and the sense of accomplishment I feel when I capture a moment in time. That gives me joy, knowing that I have saved some essence of “now” that can easily be recaptured in the future simply be looking at the picture.

My children, of course, bring me moments of joy. Their individual births were three such moments. Add to that my granddaughter, Miss Munchkin; I was lucky enough to be present at her birth and one of the very first to hold her. Miss Munchkin brings me joy almost every time I see her. There is just something about a toddler who is happy and curious and loving that is joyful, especially when she is related to you.

I feel joy when we hit the road for a road trip, whether it is just a day’s jaunt somewhere or a vacation. There is something truly joyous about leaving behind the every day world for a bit and looking forward towards possible great adventures. And I feel joy every time I step onto a beach. Hearing the waves crashing onto shore and the cry of the gulls, feeling the heat of the sun through the sand on your bare feet, the smell of the salt spray, it all fills me with joy. Oh, and the skirl of bagpipes bring me joy. If ever I were to come across bagpipes being played on the beach while I was walking barefoot with my granddaughter, my heart would likely burst from experiencing too much joy all at once.

Amy’s post talks a lot about finding joy in your work or rather work that you find joyful. I know this is the goal of many unschoolers, to find a way to turn their passion into a career. That is a great goal, although I know few that have been able to truly realize it. The only possible work-related thing that brings me joy is being able to find answers and resources for others. I love to research; I love to hunt for the perfect gift, for the perfect book, for that needed quote or just the right word that will complete a project. I think that is why I continue with my website, since HTML and web design certainly does not bring me joy. On the contrary, many days it fills me with stress and frustration. But I love to know that a resource I have reviewed or something I have written has provided an answer to someone’s quest. That brings me joy.

So, what brings you joy?

I just checked when I last wrote here and can’t believe it was so long ago. Where did December go? It’s been a month of ups and downs and not one I’d like to repeat for a long time to come.

Mr. Algae-Eater seems to have recovered nicely. I bought some sort of aloe juice medicine that was supposed to be for sores on fish and added it each day for a week. It seemed to do the trick. He’s back to his old self.

We did take a trip to Tallahassee last week and Bill interviewed for a position with a company there. He liked the company, so now we are just waiting to see if they liked him enough to hire him. Or if they thought they needed his experience enough to hire him, as they have a huge mess to clean up. Hopefully we’ll hear soon. Bill and I really liked it there. The sunshine, the warmth, the beach, the seafood. It was very nice.

Christmas was a quiet day. Several of us have colds, others have been stressed and working too many hours. So we just watched movies and played with Miss Munchkin and tried to keep the wrapping paper out of her mouth. The best gift seemed to be the Flexible Flyer horse we got her. It didn’t take long for her to figure out how she could move to get the horse moving. It is going to be a while, though, before she’ll be able to ride it herself.

And I bought her a stocking that had the head of a cat at the top of it. I was going to make her a stocking. I got all of 4 rows done on it. I’ll have to finish it next year. But the cat stocking was a big hit. Miss Munchkin loves “fluffies” and all day long she’d carry that stocking around and put her face right down into the cat’s face and make her “kitty cat” noise, which is sort of a cross between a meow and a purr and a dinosaur growl. Very cute. That’s what she’s doing in these pictures, in addition to trying to eat the nose of the cat!