Before I continue too much further I thought I would share how I have wrongly related with household chores over the years. I grew up in a home that was very cluttered and with little to no teaching or requirements that I can recall in relation to keeping a home. My dear sweet mother was still doing my laundry for me up through the age of 22 when I went off to be married. In the early years of our marriage our home was pretty easy to keep mostly clean with the two of us. Once Dan and I started our family, our home was rarely perfectly clean, but I clung to this standard I created for myself of needing to have a perfectly clean home. I wrongly equated a clean home with a happy family life, of which I experienced neither growing up. As more children came into the picture the mess grew and I felt more burdened with housework, rarely being able to meet my own false standard. My way of dealing with it was unloving to say the least. I would be distracted with various things, some of them legitimate and other things not so legitimate. In my mind I blamed the children for the mess and often dreamed of days gone by when my home was easier to clean. At times, I would realize that I needed to train them by sitting down to clean alongside with them. I would call them into a messy room with the intent to work with them with a loving attitude, but wrong expectations and self centered thoughts would take over and my attitude gave way to relating in anger. I could see that I needed to develop the discipline to work with them throughout the days in teaching them to clean up after themselves. I wasn’t disciplined myself in that area and yet hung on to the wrong expectation that they ought have this discipline.
My wrong standard turned the blessing of having guests come over into a stressful time for my children, as I would focus on deep cleaning my entire house in a day. When the kids were younger my mom would take the kids so I could be home to clean my home alone and not have them messing things up. The house would return to it’s normal state within the following day or two. As they got older and I would have them help clean up, as the guest arrival time drew near I felt pressure building up in me as I began to realize my false standard wasn’t going to be met, and I would release that pressure on my family. One day Dan let me know that this just had to stop. I knew he was right. The Lord got a hold of my heart and showed me that the way I was relating with my family was wrong. I didn’t know how to press in deeper to become free of it and I continued to struggle, with some improvement, sometimes being more loving than others. I came to a point of recognizing that my house didn’t have to be what I considered perfect, but I still hadn’t fully let go of wrong expectations and placing wrong burdens on myself which spilled over onto my children.
I developed chore charts for them and for me. This worked on the days that I was motivated to keep after the kids to do them. On the days I had things going on, housework did not get done. The kids would forget to do them and some of them learned to lie about their chores being done. Charts would be lost and I would lecture them about responsibility, which would lead to self conviction as I knew I wasn’t being the example I needed to be. I would then soften my lecture to a kinder discussion, but without understanding the need to repent of my own wrong attitudes and behaviors, I was not able to be free of them. I did not understand what my deep heart attitudes, intentions and motivations were. I was teaching my kids through my example to cover their own sin with softer words and false grace.
I would change the charts from time to time, thinking this change or that change would make a difference. My last change was to make the common areas a “group cleaning event,” calling the chore chart “group chores.” That seemed to make a difference since everyone was to pick out items on the list and just get them done, none were specifically assigned to an individual. I was getting on track, but not quite there. The kids would pick the easier chores and work slowly so the harder workers would do most of the work. The good thing about this new chart was that cleaning the house became less stressful on the children than my previous charts, we began to work together better than ever before, but only when we were doing the group chores. The house could easily be looking spiffy in about 20 minutes under this program, but it still only got done when I was driving it. It wasn’t developing discipline or an ability to self govern in my children. Sereina would have certain areas she would be willing to tidy up from time to time, but the overall attitude was that “we can’t do the job until everyone is ready to work together” on the “group chore” list. It was the failure of this system and the self centered attitudes of “that’s not on my chore chart” or “I can’t do that now - we do that as a group” that brought Dan to want to do away with the charts. I was not willing to “go there” as I couldn’t see how any other way could work any better and I was just plain being prideful and resistant to Dan’s suggestions.
This past summer, I began to meet with Barbie who began telling me various truths. The Holy Spirit led me through the process of letting go of a deep seeded spirit of anger that I had learned to deny the existence of and struggled against for years. I hope to share that story soon. I have also been going through the process of letting go of many wrong expectations, of which one of them was the idea that our home should stay clean or that I need to strive for a perfectly clean home. This process was apparently necessary for me to stop resisting Dan’s ideas and let go of the burden of chore charts.
If you are wondering what this has to do with school and the Lifestyle of Learning approach to homeschooling it really has a lot to do with it. If I was wrongly relating with housework, I was obviously wrongly relating with many more things in our home, including how we approach school. More to come…
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A BURDEN is to require something that is carried with labor or difficulty; that is grievous, wearisome or oppressive; unjustly severe; to weigh down, overload
To read more about how Jesus wants to free us and our children from the yoke of unfitting burden join Home Educated Mom on Facebook if you haven’t already and read the following discussion which is based on a book Marilyn is writing:
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