So this is how it begins.
After years and years of our girls struggling every day with their mental health and falling behind in school more and more, we have finally decided to change things up drastically. We are starting our own school at home. This is both terrifying and exciting.
We are not coming into this from an anti school perspective. I know the people in the education system are doing their best, and that for a lot of kids it is a great place to connect and be a part of something, as well as to learn and grow. For our girls though, it seems like this is not the case.
Everyday they wake up exhausted and drag themselves through a stressful mess of a day at school and come home completely drained and feeling like they are not capable and not smart. They have no energy to do the fun activities that will build them up. They are so exhausted that they struggle to get a good night's sleep. Then we repeat it the next day.
Things are getting worse and not better. We need a different plan.
I look at Hayley, who has been struggling the most with her mental health issues (depression/anorexia/psychosis/bi-polar/ptsd). She can't even function in school anymore. Her life has gotten so small. When I listen to her I hear that she wants to build a safe place for herself where she can work on her own thoughts because she knows that her thoughts are her biggest barrier. She believes that this should come before the hard work of going out and having to deal with other people's thoughts.
She reminds me of my man, who has mastered himself, but not without many years of struggle. I have noticed how, when he is not doing well, his life shrinks to just the house, or maybe just our room, to his safe space. This used to scare me, and I would scramble thing to find a way to "help" him feel better. Now, after many years, I know that this is what it looks like when he is taking very good care of himself, and his life will expand again when he is feeling better.
Felicity is having struggles with a severe anxiety disorder. She has worked harder than anyone this year on herself in hopes of feeling better. She has been doing vision therapy every day to improve her reading, in hopes of being able to keep up in school. Her vision and reading have improved dramatically, but she is still not able to do much in school. Flis has been working with our wonderful psychiatrist for months doing cognative behavioural therapy trying to reduce her crippling anxiety. Early on our doctor suggested that her anxiety was just too high for her to receive much benefit from the therapy, so now she is also on some meds. They have reduced her anxiety a lot, but the trade off is that her already compromised sleep is now even worse. A lot of days she is just too tired to go to school.
Our youngest, Kyya, thankfully has no diagnosis, but she still has also always struggled in school. She feels like she is stupid because of all the help that she needs. It breaks my heart to force her to go to school when we are starting this little project for her sisters, so she is going to have to come along too. If we could afford Montessori school I would love to send her there. I bet she would do really well.
What I hope for this year is that we can bring our life back to our safest space. We are going to spend the summer (or as long as it takes) learning some really important things like how to find beautiful sleep, what kind of activities build us up (and fill our days with lots and lots of that), what kind of things are we already capable of, and what kinds of skills would we like to grow, and who are we, what are we interested in, and how do we learn best??? Then, I hope, we can begin to learn.
The terrifying part is that I don't really feel like I know what I'm doing. I am telling myself the story that this is maybe a good thing because I don't bring a lot of expectations of how things "should" be, so I'm going to have to do a lot more listening and paying attention and so much more learning. I am very fortunate to be surrounded by a lot of people who do know what they're doing, so I know where to go with my questions. We also have the beautiful and wonderful Doctor Santa (our psychiatrist, name changed because psychiatrists are all about privacy), keeping watch over us.
The man and the girls all agree that it's a good idea to blog this adventure, so hopefully you can learn from our successes and our mistakes.
Here's to new beginnings!
@schoolthatheals
