The importance of being at home

Our pace of life has been speeding up considerably since the weather has warmed up. Our calendar has been filling up with activities, appointments, visits, meetings etc. It's great to have so much going on to choose from but I get lured by the abundance of opportunities after the fairly quiet Winter that I tend to bite off more than we can chew. Sometimes, I get dazzled by the possibilities and forget the importance of being at home.

From an aspie point of view, time at home is especially important to retreat from the outside world with it's unpredictability and be at home, in familiar surroundings, and have time to concentrate on our interests. It is only with this time to recharge ourselves that we manage as much and as well as we do.

From an unschooling point of view, we find that time at home is vital to the process of developing interests and following them up. I have observed that the greatest educational triumphs, so far, on our journey in home education have been beyond the boredom point. I have learnt to listen a little bit less to the instinct inside me that wants to "fix" the boredom, suggest something or distract from it. Self direction is difficult to learn if you are used to being entertained.

One of the most important lessons I have learnt over the last few years is that time spent gazing into space, day dreaming, fiddling with things etc. is not wasted - it's absolutely essential to development.

I shared this quote from this book a couple of weeks ago but I think it's relevant to what I'm talking about today:

"... in our efforts to make each moment "count", we seem to have lost the knack of appreciating the ordinary... we do too much and savour too little. We mistake activity for happiness, and so we stuff our children's days with activities, and their heads with information when we ought to be feeding their souls instead..."

Mistaking activity for happiness is exactly what I do when I see, read or hear about other families who are doing amazing things, going to fabulous events and generally making me feel inadequate - not that that makes their children automatically unhappy - I just have to remind myself regularly to follow the path that is right for me and my family, not what looks most impressive.

Over the years of being a parent, I've noticed something else about the importance of being at home, too. I have an interesting perspective on this issue, having been on both sides of the fence, and my transition from one to the other was a real struggle.

It comes in the form of girl talk - mother-to-mother chats. One minute you're talking about how cute a baby is and the next you're stung from out of nowhere by the parent who is returning to work and tells you that they can't possibly stay at home any longer, "I need something to stimulate my mind" they'll say.

At first, I was the parent saying this, and I was saying it to justify my decision to put my career before my child, because I felt insecure about it. I felt insecure because I'd been conditioned to believe that a girl like me could "have it all" - a high flying career, a loving family, a picture perfect home. I felt inadequate about my decision to be a working mother, because I had to ignore my maternal instincts to strive for unattainable goals and the trade-offs were not worth the benefits.

Later when my career was stalled by long term illness, I found that I didn't know how to relax. I couldn't self-direct my own time and it took me a long time to accept being out of the workforce. I felt defensive because I wasn't "contributing" as society expected me to do, I felt worthless. It took me a long time to be comfortable being alone with myself and fully appreciate a stay-at-home lifestyle (and by that I mean embracing domestic arts and my own personal interests, not watching Jeremy Kyle with a packet of Jammy Dodgers and playing online bingo) and I don't think I would ever have fully got there without being forced to take a break and "do nothing".

Sometimes, the word "home" is used in disdain, it's considered a dirty word - not by me. I think home is the most important place to be, for us. Not because we're scared of the outside world, but because we would never fully cope with it, or properly make sense of it without our time at home.

Sometimes I wonder if those people who deliver stingers about how being at home is not "mentally stimulating" are on a similar journey to the one I've been on. Is it that they feel insecure about their decisions, inadequate because of societal expectations, or aren't comfortable spending unstructured time with themselves?

I've just started reading this book, which is on topic for my post today and extremely interesting.