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?

My note from The Universe this morning:

The greatest gift a parent can give a child, Karen, is the ability to become independently happy.

And the greatest gift a child can give a parent is exercising that ability.

This is a good note for me today. I think I have mentioned previously that our 2 year old granddaughter (2.5 in just a few more weeks) is living with us now, along with her mommy. Her mommy (our daughter) is going back to college for a degree, along with working part-time. So while Mommy is away from home and/or studying, Grandma (or rather Mum-Mum) gets the care of little Miss Munchkin. And it just so happens that Mum-Mum is in great demand even when Mommy is available. Most days, I don’t mind. Some days I do. I find it quite a different matter to have care of a toddler again at (close to) age 50 than I did at age 25. My patience level is not what it was and it seems that my hormones usually coincide with her bad days / teething days. Not a good combination, believe you me!

Miss Munchkin is normally pretty good at playing on her own, but she is only two and I have to continually remind myself of that as she pulls on my arm, wanting Mum-Mum to do this or that with her. Usually it’s just as I am attempting to click on something or do a cut-and-paste on the computer and the tug on my arm throws the mouse into some direction that I had no intention of taking it. Plus she is just beginning to string words together into full sentences and many words are still not decipherable without actually seeing what she wants or needs or having her give the ASL sign. But she’s gaining on the language ability and I will keep working on my patience level. I thought I had this patience thing down to an art with my own children, but I guess I need more practice in its application!

In the coming months I will be chronicling Miss Munchkin’s unschooling adventures here, since she is the next generation unschooler in our household. My focus for many years has been on unschooling high school (transcripts, resources, preparation for college), but our youngest finished his homeschooling this spring, at just about the same time that Miss Munchkin moved in. So now my focus has turned to toddlerhood and the preschooling years. So stay tuned — see how well Mum-Mum makes the mental and physical leap from high school to preschool – and what new insights on unschooling Miss Munchkin will give Mum-Mum!

I was recently updating some articles on my LeapingFromTheBox.com site and had to smile when I worked on my Chocolate Cake! article. In that article I share an afternoon that our youngest child Charles and I experienced in the kitchen, trying to bake a chocolate cake together. It was one that was not soon repeated. Cooking with my children just never seemed to pan out, no pun intended. I am not sure if it was the too small kitchen, our different learning styles (and subsequent communication issues), or just that I did not have enough patience, but cooking lessons were few and far between in our house. There were occasions when I would try to remedy this, but they were usually short-lived and everyone involved experienced a welcome sigh of relief when any lessons ended.

My step-mother must have been a good teacher, because when I left home I was able to cook meals for large numbers of people. In fact, my husband and I ate a lot of leftovers until I learned to cook for two (after cooking for eight for so long). She would have been sorely disappointed in me that I did not pass along to my children the cooking skills I learned from her, but the truth is, I did not. A homeschooling failure, right? Probably so, but maybe, just maybe, an unschooling success, at least for one of my children.

The Right Incentive?

After our daughter and granddaughter moved back in with us a couple of months ago, I asked our son David to help out a little bit more around the house, maybe cooking some meals or helping with Miss Munchkin’s care during the daytime. I had half thought that might prove to be the incentive needed for him to go get that part-time job, but instead, it seems to have been the incentive to get him cooking. Not quite what I had in mind, but I am not complaining. Well, not much. He still needs to get that job. But I am certainly enjoying the welcome break from meal planning and preparation. In the last two months, I have cooked maybe five suppertime meals! It is wonderful!

I am not completely off the hook, since David had had so little previous cooking experience. I have to be on hand while recipes are consulted, grocery lists are planned, and most especially during the actual cooking process. But I try to stay out of the process as much as possible, just nearby enough so that he can quickly ask a question or I can throw out a suggestion if I see an impending disaster. And amazingly enough, we have had some very good meals. David has been quite adventurous, choosing for one of his very first meals a Japanese fried rice recipe off the Internet, a dish that I have never attempted. After several meals of that, his sister decided he needed to branch out and she has been finding him recipes from other continents. Tuesday night we had Yabbie or Crayfish Fettuccine, an Australian dish. Only it was more shrimp fettuccine and while the shrimp and the fettuccine was great, the sweet potato based sauce was not a hit. Tonight we are doing Africa with some sort of baked meat pie and green bean salad.

What is truly remarkable, though, is how much easier, calmer, less stress-inducing the cooking experiences are now, versus what they were years ago. At that time my children really did not want to learn to cook, but I felt that it was something they ought to know how to do. The end result was a dread on my part and an avoidance of all things cooking on their parts. This time around, I rarely have to ask David what he’s making or if he is going to get started. He has truly taken it upon himself to have a meal served up at around the same time every evening (except for an evening here or there where we eat leftovers or order out pizza). Every now and again it is nice to have an unschooling success smack me upside the head and remind me just why I love unschooling so much!