FROM THE ARCHIVES
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Family as mission
[Rod Dreher 03/17 09:24 AM]In the book, Julie talks about the stay-at-home moms who were part of her circle of friends in our old Brooklyn neighborhood. All of them were liberals, politically and culturally, but the thing that bound these women together was a shared conviction that nothing — not their careers, and not the material gains that would come from having an extra income — was more important than staying at home to raise their children. "All of us wanted more than anything to be a real part of our baby’s life. A baby, that’s a human being. That’s a soul. That’s life. The baby is not an accessory. He’s not part of life. He’s everything,” Julie said. “The kind of women I look up to and think are real heroes tend to have a gravity, a real earthiness about them. They tend to have a sense of mission and calling without taking themselves too seriously, but they also tend not to rule things out because they’re outside of the norm that you see on TV.”
…"These are women who are willing to sacrifice themselves for something else,” Julie said. “A lot of times that comes with faith, but plenty of times it just comes out of motherly love. You meet women in La Leche League who aren’t necessarily religious, but they want to do what they believe is best for their children, no matter what it costs them, and no matter if it seems odd to someone else.” That word “mission” is key. Kay S. Hymowitz of the Manhattan Institute has written that families who conceive of their lives together as a mission — the mission being forming the hearts and minds of their children — are the ones who succeed. Obviously you don’t have to homeschool to be mission-minded, but homeschooling is, to me, an ultimate expression of Family As Mission. Here’s Julie once again:"Homeschooling forces you to see your home as a place where more than just consumption takes place. It leads you back to the traditional view of the home as a place where something was produced. It keeps you from seeing home as just a place where you sleep and eat before you go out into the rest of the world to do the really important things. It keeps you from feeling dependent on experts to do the serious teaching of your children.
“There’s nothing more important we can do than raising our children,” Julie said, growing more emphatic. “Teaching them, shaping their intellects and their character. Of course it’s hard, but ‘easy’ is not the point. Doing the right thing is the point. Homeschooling is not right for every family, but I believe that for ours, it’s worth the sacrifice.”
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