fifth year of homeschooling (with depression).

 

Friends, today is our last day of school!

We made it!

We celebrated with a surprise trip to Dunkin’ Donuts and big smiles all around.

As I gather pictures for this blog post and remember our year, this fullness welling up in my heart is gratitude. Sheer gratitude, that we were able to complete this school year. Allow me to reflect a tiny bit.

This is the first time that I nearly spent an entire school year living with depression. It descended like a thick dark cloud last summer and has dogged me ever since.

I’m telling you this, first of all, because I want to tell you about God’s faithfulness.

And second, because if you struggle with depression: I know how you feel. I know how it affects everything: your relationships. Your hobbies. Your work. Your worship of God. Your homeschool. Even when you learn coping techniques, it’s always hovering at the edge, bearing down, pressing into your heart in the moments that should be happy. It’s a hard knot in the pit of your stomach. It is darkness and isolation and heavy limbs and panic and tears at the drop of a hat and the inability to cry and an insatiable desire to just. sleep. more.

Worst of all, depression is a joy-stealer.

 

 

I want to talk about depression along with my homeschooling year for exactly that reason.

My life is very normal and mundane, and the grace God gives me to live with ongoing depression is not a grace to move mountains, but a grace that meets me in the normal and mundane. He knows my frame. He’s mindful that I am dust. He promises help for homeschooling. Maybe as I tell you about my journey this year, you will feel hope in yours.

 

 

I’ve planned to write this post for months, have had bits and pieces of it trailing through my thoughts and my heart.

On our family blog I’ve always wanted to take care to write to you from “in the middle.” From the middle of hard times and unanswered prayers, rather than victoriously on the other side.

But by God’s power, He lifted my depression the last few weeks of school. And so I’ll say honestly from the outset that I now write to you from a place of hope. I’m gathering moments of joy again, treasuring them in my heart. I don’t take them any of them for granted.

Come to think of it, maybe that’s the reason I can finally write again.

 

 

But if, like me, you’re a person who lives with depression or anxiety, then you understand that the chances are high it will never fully leave you this side of eternity.

And so while I give thanks for the light that fills my days this cloudy, humid May, I tuck away the lessons God taught me for the next wave. It will come again. I know myself by now. Maybe tomorrow or next year or next decade.

One day I’ll be in heaven on my face worshipping Christ. One day I’ll have a new body and my soul that lasts forever will never taste the darkness of mental illness. I’ll be free. And, if you know Him, so will you. The cloud will lift. You’ll live in joy for all eternity. One day.

But I’m going say this, right smack in the middle of the blog post: I’ve never been able to live with so much hope as I contemplate future encounters with depression. I’m not cowering in fear anymore.

And the reason is, in the darkness, God has drawn near to me this year in a way He never has before. He took me into the wilderness, and the whole time I wandered there I was exactly in His will. Even the times that I prayed and prayed to get out, and He said, “No.” His righteous right hand guided me.

 

 

You know what I learned this year?

I learned to accept God’s “No.”

It has been the most painful lesson of my entire life.

But I’m changed now.

I’m chastened and small and quiet at the feet of God. I can hear “no” and not throw a fit. He stayed with me in the wilderness and met me there because literally no one else could. He was all I had. And He became enough. His rod and His staff comforted me.

 

 

This blog post about homeschooling through depression, is really a post about God.

It’s my giving of thanks.

 

 

I learned a couple of things this year: perhaps the biggest, is that God asks me to be faithful.

No matter how I feel, He has ordained the commitments in my life and the spiritual disciplines to be a strength and to comfort me in the wilderness — even when none of it feels like strength or comfort.

And so that’s how you homeschool with depression.

You sit wearily at the dining table on Sunday afternoon in the snatch of quiet while the kids jump outside on the trampoline and scribble out a week of lesson plans.

I learned that one of the most distressing things for people living with depression is making decisions. And so I began to make my life as scheduled as possible.

I printed a daily chart. Start school at 8:30. Sit at the table and help Amie and Gabe. Snack and recess at 10:00. Grab a nap. Morning meeting and read-alouds at 10:30. Lunch at 12:00. Room time at 1:00. Grab another nap. And so on. Having a very specific plan is my guide for the dark road.

 

 

And so the plan is set. You wake up at 7:30 on Monday morning. You wanted to wake earlier, to read your Bible and pray, but the medication you take to help with the depression makes you so sleepy. You lay and relish those 40 seconds in your bed of freedom as you gather consciousness. And then. Oh yes, there it is. The darkness. Freedom is over.

And so another day begins.

 

 

Let me stop right now and say this, because learning it changed my year:

The getting out of bed is a victory. Okay?

You did it. Some days you couldn’t do it. But today you did.

You wanted to turn over and burrow deep into the covers and block out your life. But, as John Piper says, “By faith, you swing your legs over the side and you stand up.” By faith, you get out of bed. That’s the first victory of your day. Seize it. Even if there’s no spark of joy in your heart. Give thanks for it. You got out of bed. Take heart: God is with you.

 

 

And so, grabbing hold of that victory with white knuckles,  you continue with your day.

Due to my tiredness, I moved our school start time from 8 to 8:30. I can’t tell you what a difference it made.

Instead of feeling like a failure every single morning because I just moved slower and I couldn’t start on time, I felt relieved.

I taught my big kids how to fix breakfast for their brothers. And lunch too. Now they do it every day because it’s a habit.

My 10-year-old is an early riser and needs a plan, and so I learned to write his daily to-do list (school work and chores) in his spiral notebook, so that if he wanted to get up at 7:00 and start school, he could.

 

 

And how do you face the day, you ask, with four kids clamoring at you with their needs and school to do and dinner to make and the darkness and the need to just be alone?

The answer is: you just do the next thing. You think, I’ll do what I can this morning, and Lord, will You stretch these loaves and fishes and for my children?”

If the plan is posted, and I get the idea in my mind that I’ll just do the next thing, I’m usually pleasantly surprised with how much we do. If I need to stop and turn on an episode (or three) of Wild Kratts and go lay down, I give thanks that we did something. And when I get up, I start the next thing.

This year, we rarely completed every item on my lesson plan. There were gaps. And it is good for me to see this and say it. I couldn’t be enough. But I learned that God is enough.

 

 

He is teaching my kids and growing and shaping them. He’s faithful to our family.

We had so many bright-white moments in the dark. They were treasures. Maybe they were they all the better because of the darkness?

We studied Latin and did Friday morning spelling bees with laughter.

We read many, many books aloud. We learned about early American history. We studied the Bible and catechism together and talked about real things. We gave thanks. We plodded through Saxon math. We went to swim practice three times a week. We helped Gabe learn to read. We gathered with our homeschool group and went on field trips and talked about books.

We also had sibling bickering. We had many, many teaching moments of discipline. Less than last year. But still many. Mommy had many moments of apologizing for my anger and irritation. I need lots more.

I learned to praise God for imperfect days.

 

 

And while we did learn — so much more than I thought possible — this year was also valuable in ways I just never would have guessed.

Every one of our characters were stretched (some of them, it felt, to the breaking point), and we grew. We grew as individuals. We grew as a family.

Ever since I had kids, I’ve tried so hard to hold it all together and check all the boxes and be a good mom. And I just keep failing.

This year, through the wilderness of depression, God took my capabilities out of my tight grasp and showed me that He is Lord of our family. I’m not enough and I never have been — not even in the years I thought I was doing so well. He is the one building our house.

He never, ever intended for me to be the one to meet all my kids’ needs. He alone does that. There will be irritations on their lips and holes in their hearts and aches in their soul from their parents’ lack, and that’s exactly what God intended. Because He’s wooing them to Himself, the beautiful, strong King who meets every need and wipes every tear from their eyes.

With that realization, He set me free to finally just be myself with my husband and my kids. And to let Him fix us.

 

 

I’m rambling in this post, but that’s been the nature of my wilderness wandering.

I’ve learned to make a schedule. I’ve learned to just do the next thing, to ask God to help me go through the motions.

I’ve also learned to act the opposite of how I feel. This may be the hardest lesson, but I’m growing. It’s actually okay if I don’t feel joy in homeschooling or inspiration or a desire to be around people or love for my family or excitement over going to church. Being faithful is acting like I do. And trusting that one day the feelings will come back.

I’m here to tell you: they do.

God brings them back. And I bow and give thanks for the months that He enabled me to get up another day and go through the motions of my life. Because we were building something in those days, He and I. You can’t have the joy without the trying, without taking the leap and trusting Him to be faithful. You can’t give up.

 

 

During my year of depression, I learned how be known by others.

You may remember that soon after we adopted our boys, I lived with a long season of anxiety in social situations and small spaces. Well, God showed His grace to me this year in that He lifted that panic disorder. He did not give me more than I can bear.

Depression is very isolating. You don’t have the energy or will for relationships. They feel unfruitful and exhausting and unbearable. Sometimes you long for company, but you’re scared, deep down, that if you really let people see the darkness, they won’t want to be around you any more.

And so, because David and I were both struggling with depression this fall, and wanted nothing more than to hole up with history documentaries and novels every evening, we decided to do something completely counter-intuitive. We decided to let more people into our lives, into our home.

It was another way of acting what we didn’t feel. It was John Piper’s “by faith.”

By faith, we had many Taco Soup nights with friends from church. We got together with friends. We spent time with our family. I told the ladies prayer group at church about my depression. I let them come over and cry with me and pray with me. I accepted help from people with homeschooling and babysitting.

 

 

Of all the things you can do in your depression, this is one of the best.

Find people around you that you respect, that you want to be like, and make them part of your life. Don’t hole up alone. Let others in. Let the kind of people in who will listen to you and then speak God’s truth to you, even if the truth is hard.

I am humbled and amazed time and again by the stories of people I know. People who have suffered so much more than I have. They are quietly, faithfully following God and serving people and loving their church and boldly telling non-Christians about the Christ who is with them in good times and hard.

That’s the kind of person I want to be.

I see their example and I pray, “Lord, change me. Make me like that.”

I act the opposite of how I feel by learning to thank people more. I’ve never written as many thank-you notes in my life as I have this year. On the days I wake up and feel my worst, I sit and pen another thank you note.

And you know what? The more I stop and notice gifts and thank people, and the more my hand cramps as I scribble notes on flowery Target notecards and dig around for stamps, the more my thanksgiving is real.  In the same way that writing all of this down makes it real.

The best doorway out of the prison of darkness that I’ve encountered, is to see others and serve others.

 

 

The last lesson I’ve learned in this year of darkness, is to draw near to Christ.

So maybe I can’t wake up early and read my Bible before breakfast. Instead, I put the kids in room time at 1:00 and read it then, with a mug of Earl Gray. I read Proverbs along with Tim and Kathy Keller. I read Paul’s epistles and get to know this larger-than-life man who really was just very normal. He had a fire in his belly to share Christ with the least reached. He loved and prayed and rejoiced in and scolded and lost sleep over his dear, messy churches. He accepted God’s “No.” He never quit.

I read books about knowing God, and I write lengthy quotes in my journal and I talk to my husband about what I read.

I Scotch-tape index cards filled with verses over my sink and on the Vitamix base and on my bathroom mirror. I listen to the music of Andrew Peterson and Rich Mullins and Sandra McCracken and Rend Collective in the van and on my neighborhood runs. I cry more times than I can count behind my sunglasses, running hills in our neighborhood, surrendering my aching heart to God once again. I let the musicians pray my prayers for me, in the dark.

I get to know the God of the wilderness.

I ask Him to teach me what it means that “Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.”

I learn, with the apostle Paul and with Jesus himself, what it’s like to worship God when He tells me “No.”

I recognize He’s doing something deep in my heart. I’ll be honest: I never stop asking for Him to lift my depression. But in the meantime, I learn to abide with it. It’s a presence in my life, but in Christ, it has no real power over me. I speak to myself, “Okay, I’m depressed. What kind of life do I want to live as a depressed person?” And, by faith, I go right ahead and live it.

I wake up and ask God to help me be steadfast, immoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord. Knowing that in the Lord, my fumbling, half-hearted labor in the dark is not in vain.

That’s a good thing, because when the depression finally lifts, the habits are in place.

And I go right on living. But now there’s so much joy in the living.

 

 

This is a long post, and I’m sorry for that.

You come to the end of another day and that’s a victory.

The last thing I’ll say is that what God has done in my kids this year is nothing short of incredible. In my weakness, I needed their help more. And so not only did they take on the chores I’ve given them, but they’ve transformed into genuinely helpful people. More than ever, they jump up and unload groceries or clear the dinner table without being asked. That’s God work in their hearts.

They’re growing up, in Him.

There are days that Judah said, “Mom if you don’t feel well, go lay down and rest. I’ll help Gabe with school.”

God is using my suffering — which we all know is my whole family’s suffering — to grow things in us.

I don’t tell the kids many details about my depression from in the midst of it, mostly because I know the tendency of children to feel responsible for their parents’ happiness. I try to to protect them from that, because I’m the only one who can be responsible for my health. I need to rely on Christ, not them. But we’ve had good conversations this year about what depression means through characters in novels and another friend speaking about it.

I’ll close with this one story:

Like I said, my anxiety has been better this year, but one night a couple from church was over visiting, and it hit me again, the panic, the suffocation, and I escaped from our living room into Judah’s room. I’ve learned to cover up my anxiety by pretending to help with my kids. The little boys were tucked in bed, and so I showed up in Judah’s room, breathing hard, tears on my face, and plopped onto the bed.

I said, “You know how I used to struggle with being anxious around people? Well I feel that way right now so I’m just going to sit here for awhile.”

Judah (my 10-year-old): “Mom, I’m sorry. Please sit on my bed. Do you feel like you want to talk or just sit and be quiet?”

me, taking deep breaths: “This is good, thanks.”

Judah: “Mom, I know how you feel. I mean, not being around people, but I know how it feels to be anxious like that. I wish I could make it go away but since I can’t, isn’t it good to know we’re in this together?”

 

 

Yes, Judah, it is.

This is what suffering does for every one of us, if we let it.

No matter what the suffering is.

It softens us. It helps us see real life and see people and love them. It teaches us to humble ourselves before God and surrender to His will for our lives. And for our school year. After this year, I let go of my obsessive mom-worry about my kids just a little bit more. I don’t want them to suffer, I want to give my life to protect them from it.

But they will suffer, and by God’s immense, powerful grace, it will be the making of them.

I struggled with depression, and we also had a wonderful school year.

We watched God take care of our family every normal, mundane day. We fought for joy.

I’ve now homeschooled for five years. We’ve have good times and hard times. One was a year of adopting two preschoolers, and now another is a year of depression. We survived. And we’re okay. Better than okay. Whatever next year holds, God will be faithful to us. My labor will not be in vain. I bank my life on it.

I choose to look forward to the future.

I give thanks.

 

 

In the harvest feast or the fallow ground/My certain hope is in Jesus found/My lot, my cup, my portion sure/Whatever comes, we shall endure

– Sandra McCracken