Radical Motherhood - finding joy at home

How to Budget Without A Budget

If you’re serious about being a stay-at-home mom, you have to figure out how to make it work financially. You have to make sacrifices, and you have to put at least a little bit of thought into what to cut out of your life and what to keep. But it doesn’t have to be painful, and it doesn’t mean spending hours every month balancing spreadsheets and deciding where every last penny will go. The hardest part is when you first start out, and we have two great posts (and a free workbook) to help you with that:

Living on One Income, Part I

Living on One Income, Part II

After you make the initial effort to figure out exactly how much money you have (or will have) coming in, and what you absolutely have to spend on necessities each month, I don’t think that the time and energy that goes into setting a monthly budget and dividing it up into cash envelopes and tracking all of your expenses and creating sinking funds and having 15 different bank accounts is worth it. I respect and admire many things about Dave Ramsey, but I am a Financial Peace University dropout. In fact, I respect and admire anyone who is dedicated enough to put that much energy into managing their money. But it ain’t me, and it’s okay if it ain’t you either.

No budget? No problem.

In fact, I manage our family finances without using a written budget at all. I don’t even balance my checkbook. Really. (Although I did use the nice little leather checkbook and check register holder that came with my Financial Peace University course for quite some time. I just never actually recorded anything in it.) And we still have a great credit score and a decent bank account balance, all on one income. If you’re hesitant to quit your job because you don’t think you can manage on a lower income, or you dread the idea of budgeting and penny pinching, keep reading to find out how I keep us afloat with a very minimal amount of bookkeeping or stress.

So, what’s my secret?

It’s simple: I changed the way I thought about money.

I decided that I was no longer going to make my life a quest for more and more money and more and more stuff. Once you kick money off of the center stage of your life, it’s pretty easy to live within your means. It’s like when you stop eating sweets or carbs or processed foods, and your body actually stops craving them. (To be totally honest, I’ve never actually given up sweets or carbs or processed foods, but friends have told me that this is what happens. We’ll just take their word for it.)

There was a time when I thought that the amount of money and stuff you had was how you measured your success as a human being. When I had that mindset, I was always looking forward to getting more money and buying more stuff, because I thought that meant I was a little bit closer to really “having it all.”

But somewhere along the line, I realized two things:

1. I’m not very good at making money. At the rate I was going, “having it all” was never going to happen.
2. More money and more stuff weren’t making me happier. It was starting to seem like NO amount of money or stuff could do that.

So, rather than accept the conventional wisdom that I was a failure and my life was doomed to be miserable, I decided to rethink my ideas about making money, and spending money, and success, and happiness, and the purpose of life.

I decided that instead of fixating on what I might be able to buy if I had just a little more money, I would focus on enjoying what I DO have and figuring out how to get the most out of the things we already own. And you wouldn’t think that would really work, but it did. I think the challenge of reusing things and fixing things up and finding bargains can refocus that competitive, “keeping up with the Joneses” energy and give it a better outlet. I also started to be more generous with our money and giving to those who have less. It’s harder to feel bad about the new laptop you can’t afford when you get letters each month from people who live in cardboard shacks and eat one meal a day.

I still want things that are silly and extravagant and way out of our means (if we had $20,000, for example, I know exactly which camper we would buy), and sometimes I buy things that I regret or cut it just a little too close at the end of the month. But for the most part, it isn’t hard. And I’m not more virtuous or disciplined than you are, I promise.

What about savings? College? Retirement?

There’s one other component to living budget-free that I feel like I have to address: we aren’t saving huge amounts of money for the future. We don’t have a whole year of income set aside “just in case.” We are not on track to pay for our children’s college education (in our case, this would literally be a million dollar expense) or to retire early and travel the world (another million). But we made those decisions together based on our priorities. For us, having me at home to raise our kids is a much better investment than a 401k or a college savings account. And, according to my math, no amount of budgeting or manipulating or penny-pinching is ever going to be able to send our 8 kids to college or sock away a million dollars in a retirement fund. If they have to find a way to do college on their own, and we have to work well into our golden years, so be it. No degree or vacation or retirement village can stack up against the precious time I get to spend with my kids when they’re young.

Some practical tips

There are also some practical things I do each month that make my no-budget lifestyle run smoothly:

I pay off every bill as soon as I get it. I’ve learned that if I wait, I will lose the bill or forget to pay it.
I pay off my credit card balance once a week. Well, I TRY to pay it off once a week. At minimum, I pay it off before the end of the billing cycle to minimize the interest fees.
I try to keep a cushion in my checking account, because when I used to transfer all of my savings into a separate account right away (“pay myself first”), I would always cut it too close and bounce checks.
I set up as many bills as I can on auto-pay. Just make sure that you don’t set them all to come out during the same week. I try to spread mine out so that some hit the first paycheck of the month and some hit the second (my husband gets paid every other week).
I glance over my bank account and credit card account transactions probably once a month or so to make sure there aren’t any surprises. I’ve never actually found a surprise in my bank account, but I’ve found several on my credit card. Mainly because subscriptions to various things renew before I remember to cancel them. It’s worth the effort.
I avoid window shopping, browsing stores online, and watching ads as much as I possibly can. It’s harder to want something if you don’t know it exists.
Once a year, usually when we do our taxes, I look over all of our income and expenses and figure out a) how much we need to donate/tithe for the coming year, and b) whether we need to cut back on our spending in any particular area.

So here’s my action plan for those of you who are like me when it comes to managing money:

Spend some time with your husband talking about your overall money philosophy. Try to get on the same page with him about your money goals – and life goals. We have a really great workbook to help with this part on our subscriber freebie page. (Subscribe to our newsletter and you can access everything on that page for free!)
Refer to your new personal money philosophy every time you’re about to buy something you know you don’t absolutely need. Ask yourself if it would be consistent with your philosophy to buy this thing.
Embrace what works for you. If, like me, you can’t keep track of your bills unless you pay them right away, do that! If you find that you actually enjoy setting up a filing system for your bills and paying them right on time, do it that way instead! Whatever system you use will work so much better if you tailor it to accommodate your unique strengths and weaknesses.

What’s your favorite budgeting or money tip? Share it with us in the comments!

Image by Steve Buissinne from Pixabay

September 10, 2020 0 comment

Finding Joy Homeschool

Why You Don’t Need a Homeschool Room

written by Allison Schoonover

If you’re a new homeschooler, one of the decisions you’re facing is how and where to set up your “homeschool room.” That can be a huge obstacle, especially for families like mine who don’t really have a spare room or the budget for all new homeschool furniture.

But, guess what?

You don’t need a homeschool room.

Really.

Keep reading to find out why a homeschool room didn’t work for us, and why I don’t think it’s a good idea for your family, either.

I have tried, several times, to set up a designated homeschool room in my house. Don’t you just love the idea of a homeschool room? The color-coordinated displays of craft supplies? The bookshelves organized by subject matter? The bulletin boards? Oh, the cute and clever things you can do with a bulletin board! I even used to have a poster with the Pledge of Allegiance on it and had visions of us reciting it every morning (nope, didn’t happen). The homeschool room is probably what excited me the most as a new homeschool mom. For years, I struggled with the notion that if we didn’t do school in a school room, we were doing it wrong.

But, looking back now, I am here to tell you that you do NOT need a homeschool room. I would even go so far as to say that you do not WANT a homeschool room. In fact, I think I would even say this:

The homeschool room epitomizes, for me, all that is misguided and wrong with the typical understanding of what homeschooling is and how it should be done.

So, before you start agonizing over furnishing, decorating, and stocking your own homeschool room, take a look at the (many and convincing) reasons that I think they’re a bad idea.

You will feel guilty for wanting to stop using it, and even more guilty when you actually do stop using it. Do you need one more thing to feel guilty about?
Kids don’t like homeschool rooms. Even if they’re really, really cute. In fact, the only thing they will enjoy doing in the homeschool room is knocking over and tearing down all the cute stuff.
Moms don’t like homeschool rooms either. We like to design them, and put them together, but even we don’t like to spend time in them.
Why trap yourself in just one room of the house for the majority of the day? If I were going to do that, I would at least choose a room with food and a TV in it.
Isn’t the worst part about school sitting at a desk all day? Who wants to sit at a desk all day, when your house is full of beds, and couches, and comfy spots on the floor and under trees in the backyard?
If you have a homeschool room, that means one less bedroom, or playroom, or den, or TV room, or knitting room.
“Homeschool room” is really just a euphemism for “place to hoard a bunch of curriculum that we will never use.” The more space you give yourself to accumulate homeschool stuff, the more you will buy. And, if you’re like me, 75% of it will get used one time. Or less.
Having a homeschool room establishes the mentality that learning only takes place in that room, when you’re “doing school.” Not so! Learning is happening always and everywhere. Sticking it in a room and calling it school is a sure-fire way to convince your kids that it’s boring and not worth the effort.
It’s really hard to do something that requires concentration when you’re stuck in a small room with a bunch of kids. Even if you’re one of the kids. And believe me, you do not want to make it harder for your kids to concentrate.
If you have a homeschool room, you have to make (and enforce) a lot of extra rules regarding the homeschool room. Can you leave the homeschool room during homeschool time? If so, for what reason(s)? Can you play in the homeschool room? Can you take things out of the homeschool room? Can you eat in the homeschool room? If these things seem too obvious to need rules around them, you probably haven’t actually tried to have a homeschool room before.
Furniture is expensive. And hard to get rid of once you realize that it’s useless. I cannot tell you how many desks, shelves, chairs, tables, and cabinets I’ve gotten that I knew would be just perfect for our homeschool room…and then…they weren’t. Don’t give yourself another reason to buy and dislike more furniture.
The more time, effort, and money you put into a homeschool room, the more you will force yourself, and your kids, to use it even when it’s not working for you. That goes against the whole philosophy of homeschooling.

So, get off of Pinterest, stop watching homeschool room tours on YouTube, and relax. Throw your extra yarn stash and a couch in there instead and call it your knitting lounge.

August 8, 2020 0 comment

Finding Joy Homeschool Raising Kids

Homeschool Mistakes: What Not to Do When You Start Homeschooling

written by Allison Schoonover

Are you new to homeschooling or wondering whether homeschooling is even possible for your family? Read this post. Learn what I did wrong so you can set your family up for success.

When I started homeschooling, I make a lot of mistakes. So, so many mistakes. As in, it eventually got so bad that I gave up and couldn’t get the kids back in school fast enough. Now, I’ve had a few years to reflect, to learn, and to try something better with my younger kids. I DO NOT have everything figured out. There is no area of motherhood that causes me more self-doubt and worry than homeschooling. But, there are a few things I know…and here they are:

My biggest homeschool mistakes and how you can avoid them:

Mistake #1: Having unrealistic expectations. These are still your children. You know, the ones you have to drag out of bed on school days and who would rather do anything than read that awesome chapter book you just bought. They are not going to wake up on the first day of homeschooling eager to sit at the kitchen table (or your newly furnished homeschool room) for hours, filling out worksheets and memorizing times tables. Well, maybe they’ll be that way on day one, but they will certainly have wised up by day two. Worksheets and times tables and 99% of what we think of as “educational” are – let’s face it – boring. Kids are not going to love school just because you’ve brought it into your home and made yourself the teacher. Which brings me to my next mistake…
Mistake #2: Trying to recreate school at home. I’m going to lose some of you on this one, but hear me out: school is not the best way for kids to learn. You probably agree with that, at least in part, or you wouldn’t be considering homeschooling. But many of us think that the fundamental structure of school is good – we go out and buy math books, and language arts books, and science books, and social studies books, and don’t forget art, music, foreign language, bible/religion…and then we sit our kids down and try to “teach” it all to them for hours and hours every day. Trust me on this one: unless you are a very authoritarian parent with unusually compliant children, this is not going to go well. You will end up hating school and hating the screaming, whining, bribing, manipulating nag you have become. Your kids won’t like her much either.
Mistake #3: Not understanding our end goal. When I started homeschooling, I thought I’d measure our success by how well my kids “kept up” with their peers at school. My goal was to keep them “on track” so they would know everything they were supposed to know by the time they graduated. That may sound like a great goal…but why? Because we want our kids to know exactly what the school system has decided they need to know? Because we’re afraid that if they don’t, they’ll never get into college or get a job? Because if they don’t learn what everyone else learns, they’ll be weird, and we’ll look like bad parents? I’ve been there. I’ve agonized over this for the better part of a decade, and I’ve read a LOT of books about our modern, Western ideas on education. My conclusion? School as we know it gets almost everything wrong, and emulating it should NOT be a homeschooler’s goal. What I want for my kids may be a little different than what you want for yours, but neither of us wants to limit them to “keeping up” with the school system. Read some John Holt and Peter Gray, and then set your homeschool goals.
Mistake #4: Buying a lot of curriculum (that’s fancy homeschool talk for “school books”). Now, I love to buy curriculum. I could spend hours online, reading reviews, looking at books, yearning for all the boxed sets, science kits, manipulatives, and educational toys. I have inflicted a book or toy from nearly every homeschool publisher under the sun on my children. So, believe me when I say this: the more you love it, the more they will despise it. Or, worse yet, simply ignore it. Curriculum is not interesting to kids. Using curriculum ingrains in your children the mentality that learning is something you have to endure until the end of the lesson, the book, the worksheet, the test…and then (thankfully) it’s over. I have found myself prying real coins out of my son’s hand so that he will stop “messing around” and cut out the paper coins that are part of his math lesson. What??? Don’t do that. Let your kids learn real things the way they want to learn them. Real coins are better than paper coins.
Mistake #5: Asking what other people are doing. Remember, your goals are not about keeping up with anyone else. No matter who you ask, you will walk away from that conversation feeling bad about what you’re doing and envious of what they’re doing, or overly confident in your own methods and judgemental about theirs (I do, anyway). And, as someone who is raising 8 kids, I can assure you that each child is different. What your friend is having wonderful success with could very well be a big flop at your house (been there, done that…repeatedly). Don’t put yourself in a situation where you’ll end up comparing your homeschool or your kids to someone else’s. It’s not fair to you, to your kids, or to the other family.
Mistake #6: Trying to separate homeschooling from the rest of our day/life. Things I regret: trying to create a “homeschool room”; feeling guilty about not using the homeschool room; setting specific hours in which to “do school”; using fun activities as a reward for “doing school”; differentiating between “educational” and “non-educational” books, videos, and toys; and the basic mentality that learning is part of school and is separate from the rest of our lives. Kids are wired to learn. They are born curious. They are constantly learning. Why, at age 4 or 5, do we have to separate that learning into specific subjects, or certain times of the day, or designated rooms? Why don’t we trust them, or ourselves, to keep that learning going throughout their childhood, without all the trappings of school?

When you reflect on your experience of “school”, what comes to mind? For many of us, not only is there not much that’s positive, there’s not much of anything at all. School is endured, and largely forgotten. Is that what you want for your kids, or your homeschool? I spent a year of my life in high school learning trigonometry, and I got an A in it, and I have no idea now what it is or how you do it (I doubt I ever did). I spent 4 years taking French and couldn’t read or write it now to save my life. Why did I spend so much time on those things? How did they benefit me? What if I had, instead, spent that time learning something that interested me? Would I remember that? Would this have affected my future? What if I hadn’t gotten into college without those classes, or what if I had chosen not to go? Did I do well in school because I learned the material successfully, or because I was good at figuring out what the teachers wanted me to do/write/say? Is getting an A or a perfect ACT score an accurate measurement of learning or educational success? Maybe the first step toward homeschooling is to spend some time reflecting on your experience of school and how it shaped (or didn’t shape) you. If you find that you’re unhappy with something from your own school experience, I would think long and hard about incorporating that into your homeschool.

July 28, 2020 0 comment

Homeschool Raising Kids

Homeschooling during the Covid-19 pandemic

written by Emily Thams

Are you considering homeschooling during this pandemic but don’t know where to start? Read on!

The 2020-21 school year is already stressing me out.

I don’t know about you, but with all of the current restrictions and (I hate this word right now) uncertainty about what’s to come, I am reevaluating all kinds of things. Are you?

I have seen several hypothetical situations for the coming public school year. Full-time online school from home, splitting the classes in half and teaching each on opposite days or morning vs. evening, later start dates, earlier start dates, shorter or longer breaks, and even no school until 2021. And on top of that, the social distancing guidelines that might further impede effective learning will likely be in place. I often wonder how well any of this will help kids learn, or if this might just be the year that everyone backslides.

Have you been considering homeschooling during this pandemic?

I know many parents who have entertained the idea of homeschooling, but then decided that they couldn’t do it. I’m here to tell you that you absolutely can, even with no experience and even if you aren’t a stay at home mom. To learn why we started to homeschool, read our post about homeschooling high school.

We have 2 teenagers at home and have been homeschooling for 2 years. It is hard, but it’s also not as hard as you think. Let me tell you why.

You get to be with your kids a lot. This is an amazing gift, and a tremendous challenge. (Teenagers…. That’s all I need to say.) But being the main influence in your child’s life gives you the opportunity to shape their character more than anyone else, and to enjoy them as people. You get to see what they are interested in, spend time talking about all kinds of important things and unimportant things, and watch them have learning moments.
You are in charge of what they are learning. The options for curriculum are endless. They can enroll fully in an online school or you can teach every subject. You can give them choices or they can decide for themselves what they want to learn. Or you can count things they are already doing as classes. For example, my youngest daughter’s dance class is also her PE class for the year. It is really liberating for the whole family when the kids are able to enjoy what they are doing.
You can enroll your high schooler in college classes if they are ready for that. These count as their high school class as well! The downside is that you may have to pay for them, BUT it will be cheaper in most cases for them to take a class at your local community college now rather than at a university in a couple of years.
It takes way less time than public school. Way less. So much less. Which leaves time for sports, hobbies, and sleeping in.
They learn at their pace.TMaybe they are finished with Algebra by February. Maybe it takes all year for them to master a few concepts. Both are acceptable. Homeschooling is also a great choice for a child with a learning disability or attention deficit.
They can follow their interests. Have a child who loves to cook? Make it a class and put it on their transcript.
Your schedule becomes more flexible. If it’s a beautiful day and you want to go to the zoo instead of sit inside and work on school, you can. You can take a family vacation in the middle of the year and not miss school.

There are so many benefits to homeschooling and so many ways to make homeschooling work for you, with or without a pandemic.

And there is no one right way to do it. You are the expert in your kids, and you know how and what they need. Here are some helpful links to get you started. You can do this! Leave us your questions in the comments.

https://homeschooliowa.org/start-homeschooling/know-the-law-rules/

https://www.thehomeschoolmom.com/high-school-beyond/homeschooling-high-school/

https://www.weirdunsocializedhomeschoolers.com/the-ultimate-guide-to-homeschooling-high-school/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMbnCzutmnA

July 22, 2020 0 comment

Living your Faith Why be a stay-at-home mom?

Vocations and the Number One Reason Staying Home is Good for Moms

written by Allison Schoonover

What is the number one reason staying home is good for moms?

The short answer is that staying home is good for moms because it allows us to focus on our vocation (married life) and get really good at what God has called us to do (be the best wife and mother we can be), so we can grow in virtue and holiness and spend eternity with him (in heaven). That was kind of a long short answer, wasn’t it? If you want the even longer answer, keep reading.

First – did you cringe when I said that married life is our vocation?

Are you wondering…what about my career? My degree(s)? My life’s mission?

Isn’t married life a vocation only if you don’t have a job that pays actual money?

Well…no.

Let me explain.

What is a vocation?

Until long after I was married and started having children, I thought that “vocation” was just a fancy word for “job.” But not just a job; it was like the job you were always meant to have; the one that defined you as a person. I avoided thinking about my vocation, because I didn’t have a job that I was especially in love with or that I felt could give me an identity (or a cool identity that I wanted, anyway). I had heard of people “missing their vocation,” and I assumed that I was one of those. My real job/vocation was out there somewhere, and I had screwed it up by getting a degree that didn’t actually lead to a real job (English Literature) and by getting married and having kids too soon to be able to establish myself as anything important in the world.

I felt guilty about my lack of vocation. I thought that God had given me a mission, and that it was something in the workforce, and that I was disappointing him by not doing it. Since then, I’ve learned that my ideas about “vocation” were all wrong. I was right about not living up to my vocation, but in a very different way than what I had thought.

Ok, so really…what is a vocation?

I know I’m not the only one who has been misinformed about vocations, because I just looked up “vocation” in an online dictionary, and the three definitions listed there are all about jobs. Vocation is described as a career, trade, profession, or a strong feeling for a particular occupation. Only the section at the end of the online entry that gives the root of the word hints at the real definition. The word “vocation” comes from the Latin word “vocare,” which means “to call.” Aha.

A vocation is a calling, and it is much bigger and much more important than the job you have. Even if you’re a brain surgeon or a non-profit lawyer or the President of the United States. According to the Catholic Church, there are three vocations: single life, married life, and religious life. Three of them. Simple as that. God calls each of us to one of these vocations, and when we choose the right one, we are best able to become the person we were meant to be – the best possible version of ourselves. If you’re a working mom, you have a vocation AND a job, not a vocation that IS your job. If you’re a stay-at-home mom, you have a vocation too, with the added bonus of being able to focus on it full-time (more on that later). If you’re a single person, you have a vocation too, and it’s STILL not your job. All three vocations are about loving people: they are the special way in which God designed you and me to love our fellow man. Some of us are called to love others through marriage (with or without children), some as single people, and some as religious (priests or nuns). Our highest calling is not about what we do to earn money, although earning money is good and necessary. Our highest calling is given to us by Jesus in Matthew 22: 37-40:

And He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment. The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets.”

How do I know which vocation I’m supposed to choose?

By the time I knew what a vocation really was, I had already chosen one without thinking for a single moment about what God might be calling me to do. It never occurred to me that God did that kind of thing. I really and truly thought that choosing a job (what I thought of as a vocation) was more important than choosing my actual vocation. So, if you’re reading this, and you haven’t made the decision to get married or be single or enter a religious order, STOP! Listen. Pray. Talk to smart people that you trust. Open yourself to the possibility that the life you always imagined you’d have is not the one God wants for you. This is not about you figuring out what you want. This is about you figuring out what God wants. Do not assume that you can do both at the same time. If you ask God to make your calling clear to you (and you’re patient), he will.

The vocation of married life

We spend a lot of time and words on this blog talking about why being a stay-at-home mom is good for kids, and even for husbands. But what is the number one reason why staying home is good for moms?

Simple: Because it’s your best, easiest, most direct path to heaven.

When you step back and look at the big picture, isn’t that the only thing that really matters? I don’t think any of us wants to be on the path to hell, or even on the difficult, winding, thorn-ridden path to heaven. I want to be on the smooth, straight, hard-to-get-sidetracked-or-lost-on, express path to God. The fewer distractions and temptations, the better.

When you have a job, you have to split your time and energy between your work life and home life; when you’re a stay-at-home mom, you can focus your time and energy on your vocation. Our vocation as wife and mother is the number one tool that God uses to help us get to know and love him, and to grow in virtue. It’s our path to holiness, which is the whole point of our life on earth. The more time we can devote to our vocation, the closer we can get to fulfilling our life’s true purpose. I think we make the mistake today of thinking that being a”good” mom or wife is easy, requiring little in the way of thought or effort. It’s something that we can be successful at in our downtime, once our real work is finished. After all, it doesn’t take any special education or skills to get married, or have kids. We save our emotional and intellectual energy for other relationships – our bosses, our co-workers, our friends – because we assume that running a household and cultivating a family will just happen naturally. If you agree with the idea that the more difficult and important a job is, the more it pays – which I think most of us do – you can’t help but look at staying home to raise a family as a poor excuse for a “calling.” Why spend all day doing something that most modern women can get done on evenings and weekends? Get a cleaning lady, throw in a frozen pizza, hire a babysitter, and as long as you get some “quality time” in on Saturday afternoon, you’ve got the wife/mom thing in the bag.

I believed all of that. For years. (And then, I got divorced.)

Since then, I have come to realize that you can’t make your marriage your lowest priority and expect it to succeed. You can’t use up all of your energy and brainpower and the best parts of yourself at work and expect to have an easy time of it at home. Managing a home, raising children who are decent human beings, and being the kind of person your husband wants to be around is not actually easy. It’s difficult, and it’s worthy of your full-time attention. It stretches and tests you in ways that you need to be stretched and tested. When I had a full-time job, many of what I would now consider my less-desirable habits and traits were tolerated and even applauded. It wasn’t until I started spending all day, every day, with my family that I learned how to truly be patient, gentle, meek, generous, and all of those other “feminine” qualities that are devalued or even disdained in the workplace. I have also, believe it or not, grown intellectually and spiritually in ways that I never could have while I was busy with my job. I have time to read. I have time to pray. I have time to have conversations about what’s important to me.

I want to encourage everyone reading this post to think about the idea of being called to a vocation by God. Is God calling you to something bigger than your career? What would happen if you gave your home life all of the time, energy, and thought that you would give to a full-time job?

April 30, 2020 0 comment

Book Reviews How to be a stay-at-home mom Why be a stay-at-home mom?

What is freedom? And will being a stay-at-home mom rob you of it?

written by Allison Schoonover

One of the big arguments our culture makes against motherhood, especially stay-at-home motherhood, is that it robs women of their freedom.

I’ve never thought that was true, but I couldn’t figure out how to argue against it. I mean, it does sound reasonable that if you’re staying at home raising kids, there are a lot of other things that you can’t do. Like working all day, or taking off for weeks at a time to climb mountains in Peru. And if you can’t do those things, you don’t have as much freedom as, say, a single woman does. Kids, and the responsibilities that come with them, hold you back from doing what you want and, therefore, from becoming your true, “free” self. Right?

Turns out, that’s not actually how it works.

I just finished the book Following Jesus Every Day, by Cristoph Cardinal Schoenborn, and his second chapter is titled, “True Freedom in Christ.” It’s a great chapter, and I’m not going to be able to do it justice here. He explains everything I never could about the difference between actual freedom and what we, here in 21st century America, think it is. While he isn’t writing specifically about stay-at-home moms, his book helped me understand how stay-at-home motherhood actually fits perfectly into the true definition of freedom.

Here are some of Schoenborn’s main points, along with how I think what he says applies to motherhood.

Freedom is a gift from God. Since freedom is a gift, and we are the recipients of that gift, we are all dependent on God for our freedom. Our culture, on the other hand, tells us that to be truly free is to be totally independent. Women can’t depend on men for financial support, for example, or to help them raise children, or they aren’t truly free. What we fail to realize is that we are all dependent by our very nature. As Schoenborn says, “We are all creatures, and God has given us everything: our existence, our life, and our freedom.” So, being free and being independent are not actually the same thing.
Even if you don’t acknowledge God as creator, there is one person that you are inescapably bound to – yourself. You are bound to your nature, your personality, your physical body. You are not free to turn into someone or something else. We have control over some aspects of our nature, like how well we can play the piano, or how truthful we are, but some things can’t be changed (at least, not without some very damaging consequences). Our culture has tried to deny this as well, telling us that women can become men, if they want to. Or we can be free from our femininity in another way, by controlling our fertility. Contraception and assisted reproductive technology give us the “freedom” to have children on our own terms. We can have sex without men, sex without marriage, marriage without children, children without marriage, and children without sex. We want the freedom to be women and mothers when it suits us, regardless of what God, our husband, or our body tell us. But what are the consequences? Among Christians that I know, issues of sexuality – homosexuality, transgenderism, contraception, abortion, and reproductive technology – are probably the most hotly debated. Many disdain the Catholic Church’s stance on these issues as outdated, repressive, and oppressive. I think that we have trouble believing that God and the Church truly want the best of us – for us to be as free and as happy as we possibly can be. As Schoenborn says, “This brings us to the difficulty that lies deepest in our hearts when we think about freedom, namely, the suspicion that I will renounce my freedom if I obey God, the suspicion that God does not really want me to be free. This suspicion is one of the fruits of the fall. But the experience of the saints says something different: we become free when we trust God and his will and allow ourselves to be led completely by him.” I think that as women, we have to have to be aware that our culture wants to strip us of our feminity and our motherhood under the guise of “freeing us,” but that this is a lie. These are not burdens or obstacles – they are the very means he is using to make us truly free.
According to Shoenborn, “The more we bind ourselves, the freer we are.” He gives the example of St. Theresa of Calcutta, who made herself “totally available to serve God and the poor.” Her whole existence was in service to others. It would seem to most of us that she had no freedom at all, right? But “innumerable people who met Mother Theresa saw her as a wonderfully free person.” How can someone be so bound by obligations, yet seem so free? Shoenborn says it’s because the more we give ourselves to God and to his will, the greater our freedom will be. Mother Theresa was free because she gave herself totally to God, who asked her to serve the poor. Our modern society views children as a burden that mothers should rightfully seek to get rid of – before they’re born, through contraception and abortion, and after they’re born, by finding others to care for them (daycare, school, grandparents), or by simply ignoring them. The idea that a woman would want to be bound to such creatures is ridiculed and dismissed as pathetically old-fashioned. But just as God called Mother Theresa to serve the poor, he calls all wives and mothers to serve their families. And not just to serve them with their leftover time and energy, but to serve them in the same total and selfless way that Mother Theresa served the poor. And, in doing so, we will become free.
“There is no true freedom except in service of what is good and just.” In other words, we are free to choose good or evil, but we are only really free when we choose good. To choose evil is to enter into what Schoenborn, the Bible, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church refer to as “the slavery of sin.” Schoenborn gives an example that I think is relevant to mothers: that of an adulterer. I can freely choose to abandon my family and run off with another man (and many feminists would applaud me for doing so). But how free would I be I after I made that choice? I wouldn’t be free to spend all day with my kids or live in the same house with them. I wouldn’t be free from the guilt of knowing that I hurt them, and my husband, and our extended families. By choosing evil, we limit our freedom. Always. As Schoenborn says, “freedom of choice is not yet definitive freedom. As long as it is still possible for me to fall away by choosing what is evil, I am not yet safely established in what is good. As long as I have not yet definitively ‘lowered my anchor’ in God, my freedom is not yet perfect.” Now, I’m not trying to compare being an adulterer to being a working mom, and I don’t think that choosing to be a working mom is evil. Sometimes, it’s just plain necessary. But I do think that if you can choose to be a stay-at-home mom, then that choice is going to lead you closer to true freedom (and to God) than choosing to work.

The last point that Schoenborn makes in this chapter is that unless we go where Christ is leading us, we aren’t really free. He sums it all up by saying, “This is why we believe that we can truly set out on the path of freedom only when Christ takes us by the hand. Christ has called us to freedom, and he has set us free.” My desire for everyone reading this post is that, when our kids are grown, we can look back at their childhood and confidently say that we were going where Christ led us.

April 17, 2020 0 comment

Finding Joy How to be a stay-at-home mom

Enjoy Your Kids: A Vlog

written by Allison Schoonover

Check out our latest video, which is on the same topic as this post: How to enjoy spending time with your kids.

Watch a little bit of Allison’s daily life and get some ideas on how to enjoy spending time with your kids.

April 7, 2020 0 comment

Finding Joy How to be a stay-at-home mom Transitioning to being a SAHM

How to enjoy spending time with your kids

written by Allison Schoonover

I feel the need to preface this advice by admitting that I do not always enjoy spending time with my kids. Building relationships with your children and creating a home environment that helps those relationships flourish takes a constant effort, and I fail at it. Frequently. Sometimes, there is nothing I want more than to get away from them.

But it IS possible to have mostly good days, and to make your home a refuge that your family wants to spend time in. One of the biggest lies we tell ourselves about being a stay-at-home mom is that we could never spend that much time with our kids; we would drive each other crazy. Not true. The whole point of having kids is to spend time with them. If you don’t spend time with them, you won’t know them. If you don’t know them, you can’t have meaningful relationships with them. If you don’t have meaningful relationships with them, you can’t guide or influence or “parent” them, because they won’t care what you want think.

You can enjoy your kids. It might take some work, especially at first. But being at home with them can be every bit as fulfilling and stimulating and amazing as even the best job in the world. (And you’re the boss! Even better!)

If you’re feeling doubtful right now, I can relate. For the first ten years of my life as a mom, I worked a full time job, and I just knew that I could never stay home with my kids. But the bottom line is this: your time with your kids is what YOU make it. You are in control. If you want it, and you exercise a little bit of self-discipline, you can stay home with your kids all day and love it. So here’s all you need to know to get started: my top five tips – born of trial and error (lots of error) – for truly enjoying time with your kids.

Be aware of, and in control of, your mood. I have learned over the years that the atmosphere at home is almost totally dependent on me and my attitude. There’s definitely something to the old adage that “if Momma ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.” For better or worse, it’s almost totally up to me whether we all have a good day and enjoy each other, or we have a miserable day that just seems to get worse and worse. My main problem is that I can recognize a bad mood, but I struggle to change it. Or to even want to change it (don’t you just love to wallow in a bad mood once in a while?). Here’s how I get over it: first, I take a 15 minute break somewhere away from the kids. If you can’t actually leave the property, go sit in your car, or in the yard, or in a closet, or anywhere that the kids are not. Next, say a prayer. Ask God to help you change your outlook. Say the Morning Offering (even if it’s not morning). Remind yourself that there are people who would do anything to have the kids, the home, even the chores that you have. When I’m in a bad mood, it’s usually because I’m feeling sorry for myself, so it helps to think about how much God has given me and how little I deserve it.
Avoid being in a hurry. Start getting ready for appointments and other outings way, way earlier than you think you need to. I give myself 30 minutes to get everyone’s shoes on and get into the car, and that’s almost never too much time. Plan out your meals a day or more in advance, so you’re not rushing around at night trying to pull something together. If you’re homeschooling, have at least a vague idea of what you want to get done the next day, and avoid the temptation to squeeze in too much. Don’t try to get anything time-sensitive done while you’re alone with your kids. If you have an email that has to get sent or a bill that has to get paid or anything important that has to get done, do it early, and do it while your husband or someone else can be in charge of the kids. Hurry is the enemy of peace.
Avoid unrealistic expectations. Toddlers are going to act like toddlers. You cannot put them in a room with some toys and expect them to entertain themselves all morning while you get stuff done. Teens are teens. They are not going to leap out of bed at 6 am ready to help you unload the dishwasher. It’s good to have expectations, but they need to take into consideration your child’s age and temperament, as well as your own. If you find yourself constantly battling with one of your children over a particular issue or behavior, ask yourself, “What’s the worst that could happen if I just let this go?” You have to strike a balance between maintaining order and discipline and allowing everyone to relax and be themselves in their own home. Home should be a haven where you feel accepted for who you are, and overly ambitious expectations can make kids feel like they can’t ever please you or do enough to earn your love.
Establish a routine. You don’t need to schedule every minute of the day (although if you’re a very structured person, you should read Holly Pierlot’s A Mother’s Rule of Life for some great ideas). However, the more you try to do the same things in the same order at approximately the same time every day, the more peaceful your household will be. Everyone should know what time (or between which times) they need to get up, eat meals and snacks, do schoolwork and chores, and go to bed. The great thing about eating and sleeping routines is that they actually train your body to be hungry or tired at the same time each day, so the more consistent you are, the easier it is to get kids to eat and sleep according to your schedule. If you can keep your kids well-rested and well-fed, a lot of behavior problems and power struggles will just resolve themselves.
Don’t compare your family to others. For one thing, you’re never going to see how things really are when you’re not around. We’re all on our best behavior when we’re with someone else, even our closest friends. If you’re like me, and you like to compare yourself to the people you watch on YouTube, the difference is even more dramatic. No one films their kids having a meltdown, or the nights when they pick up 30 chicken nuggets at the drive through for dinner. For another thing, when we compare, we tend to pick out another mom’s or child’s best quality and dwell on how much better they are at that particular thing than we are. How can we possibly expect to have all of the best qualities of everyone we know? Remember that everyone has strengths AND weaknesses, and we are all a work in progress. In fact, we should actually be grateful for our weaknesses. They keep us humble and dependent on God rather than ourselves.

And if everything goes wrong (it will, sometimes), and you have a terrible day, try to keep it in perspective. Tomorrow is always a fresh start. Forgive yourself. Forgive your children. Take a few minutes at the end of the day to honestly assess what you did well and what you did wrong, and resolve to do better next time. Remember that God is with always with you, cheering you on, drawing you and your children closer to himself, even during those terrible moments where nothing seems to be going the way you planned. A wonderful tool you can use to reflect back on the day and find God in it is the Ignatian Examen. He IS there, and he wants to help you!

What advice do you have for enjoying time at home with your kids? Share with us in the comments!

April 5, 2020 1 comment

How to be a stay-at-home mom Living your Faith

What does it mean to trust God?

written by Allison Schoonover

I have come to terms with the fact that I do not have time to write long, well-thought-out blog posts with beautiful photos.

It’s probably a stretch to say that I’ve ever written really well-thought-out blog posts with beautiful photos anyway.

I still feel sad and a little (just a little) bit resentful about it, but I feel almost like I’m being CALLED to write something here, even if it isn’t perfect.

So, rather than continue to stew about it and post nothing, I’m going to try sharing the stuff I’m thinking about, even if it isn’t quite the way I want it to be. I know that the message and mission of Radical Motherhood is important, and I’m praying for guidance on how exactly I’m supposed to share it.

So. I’ve been thinking a lot about trusting God lately. It’s an idea that’s pretty relevant to our current times, and it’s especially relevant to moms who are considering leaving a fulfilling career and income to stay home with their kids.

If you know that God’s got your back, it’s a lot easier to make tough decisions. You know, like the decision to cut your family’s income in half, spend all day every day with your children, and form a whole new identity apart from your work.

For most of my life, I’ve thought of trusting God as kind of a hope against all odds that he will stop bad things from happening, if I can manage to anticipate them and pray about them first. God, please keep my kids from getting sick. Please protect my husband’s job. Or, on the other side of it, as a way of getting what I want from God, if I’m good enough and pray hard enough, and my motivations are pure enough. God, I said a Rosary today. Please heal my friend.

That kind of trust never really felt like trust. Instead of worrying less, because I was trusting God to take care of me, I worried more. Was I praying correctly? Was I praying enough? Why would God answer my prayers, if even the saints had prayers go seemingly unanswered? How do I know whether God wants the same thing that I want, and if he doesn’t want what I want, am I ticking him off by continuing to ask for it? Am I actually changing his mind when I pray for something to happen? Is that even possible?

It doesn’t take much to prove that God allows hard things to happen to the people who love him. Look at the lives of the disciples. Look at the lives of the saints. Heck, look at the lives of the Christians in our own times. Misery and tragedy touch all of us, even the best of us. God asks a lot of his followers, and he tells us repeatedly that he does all of it for our own good. Sometimes, we suffer, and that’s part of his plan for us.

What I’ve learned is that, while God does want to know the desires of our heart, prayer isn’t about convincing God to do things for us, or to spare us from suffering. Trusting God doesn’t mean that you trust him to protect you from every bad thing, or to make everything easy for you, or to give you what you ask for. It means acknowledging that he’s smarter than we are, and he loves us even more than we love ourselves.

So what does it mean to trust God? Simple. It means that you surrender. You allow him to be God. You spend more time asking what he wants than explaining what you want. When a prayer goes unanswered, you trust that he has something better in store for you. When you suffer, you trust that he will give you the strength to keep going. You have confidence that whatever is going on in your life, he is using it for your good – your eternal good.

You can’t change God’s mind. You don’t need to. He’s never wrong. His plans are never bad. If he wants something for us, and we want something different, the odds are 100% that we are the ones who need to change our minds. To me, that revelation was such a huge relief. I can still tell God what I want to happen, and because he loves me, he will listen. But I don’t have to worry about trying to control everything by praying for it. All I have to pray is that God’s will be done, and that he gives me the grace to align my will with his.

If you’ve been asking God to protect you from something, or to deliver something good, or to make something easier, I challenge you to stop, right now, and ask for something else instead: Ask him to help you to trust him. Ask him to give you the grace you need to do what he wants you to do.

If you’ve been thinking about becoming a stay-at-home mom, but it seems like there are too many obstacles and too many sacrifices involved, ask God to strengthen your will – so you can break your attachment to your current lifestyle, to sharpen your mind – so you can come up with a transition plan that works, and soften your heart toward your vocation as a wife and mother – so you can put first things first without resentment or bitterness.

March 30, 2020 0 comment

Homeschool

Homeschooling is not the same as being quarantined

written by Allison Schoonover

I follow several homeschooling moms online, and I’ve seen a LOT of “here’s how to homeschool” posts from them lately. I think they’re attempting to help other parents who have unexpectedly been faced with school closures, and I think that’s admirable.

But misguided.

I would love to think that one silver lining on the coronavirus cloud is that more parents will attempt homeschooling and fall in love with it. However, my advice to anyone who is suddenly at home all day with their children (or maybe still working full time and wondering how to keep up their kids’ education while school is closed) is to ignore all of those posts.

I’m already a homeschooling mom, and I don’t even want to homeschool right now.

I don’t think it’s fair to you, to your kids, or to homeschooling, to try to figure it all out in one month. Let alone a month like this one.

I don’t know about you, but despite my best efforts, I find myself obsessing over the coronavirus – be it watching the news or Googling it or talking about it or dreaming up worst-case-scenarios. Even when I’m not consciously thinking about it, it’s there, gnawing at the back of my mind. It makes me feel restless. Irritable. Make that very irritable. Exhausted. There seem to be a million things to do (make homemade hand sanitizer? research toilet paper alternatives? can a bunch of vegetables?) but I don’t want to do any of them. A million voices are out there promoting a million different ways to feel, opinions to have, facts to analyze, and supplies I should buy. I feel paralyzed.

Even though my family spends 90% of our time at home all year round, I suddenly feel trapped. Would I be able to do something like start homeschooling from scratch RIGHT NOW? Um, no.

Now, homeschooling does not have to be overly complicated. I don’t want to make it seem like you need any prescribed amount of preparation or education to teach your kids. Under normal circumstances, I think that anyone who wants to do it can homeschool their kids. But if you want it to work, you have to figure out how your kids like to learn. You have to figure out how you like to teach. You have to pick some kind of material to teach from out of the oodles of homeschool materials out there. You have to do it from a place of confidence and peace. You have to be able to observe, reflect, make adjustments, observe some more. Sometimes, you have to scrap everything and start over. I don’t think you can do any of that in such a short period of time, and I don’t honestly think it’s worth trying.

I say, give yourself and your kids a break. You all deserve a break. If you have extra time together, spend it doing something enjoyable. Watch a movie. Play a game. Talk about something.

I DO want other families to try living on one income, and homeschooling, and all of the other wonderful things we talk about on this blog. But I don’t want anyone who has lost their job indefinitely and/or had their school announce a month-long closure to think that this one month of insanity could be anything like the true experience of being a homeschool family.
This is not a season that is, for many of us, going to be productive in the traditional sense. There are a lot of things we would normally get done, like schoolwork, that are just not going to happen.

That’s okay.

Slow down.

Be unproductive.

I think we need to let go of the idea that time is only well spent if we have a worksheet or a report or a completed checklist to show for it. If the only thing our kids learn during our time in quarantine is to enjoy us, and to enjoy each other, would that be so bad?

March 26, 2020 0 comment

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