In The M•I•D•D•L•E Of It All (entry #4) - Lessons Learned, Lessons Yet to Come

My journey through this period of life that I call the “Middle of it all” years as been full of lessons I didn’t know I needed to learn as well as lessons yet to come. I have shared in a previous blog about my dads recent health decline. He was 79 when we got the out-of-the-blue terminal cancer diagnosis.

The lessons I learned during that time and through the subsequent 18 days of hospice care have forever changed me as a person. Being able to care for your parents later in life is something we should do without hesitation, in my opinion.

Lesson learned: Our parents took care of us when we needed it the most, and when it’s our turn to return the favor it’s a no-brainer. Thinking about the ‘what-if’s’ and the ‘might-have-beens’ during the end of someone’s life is not the way to process things.

Being in the present and meeting our parents needs as they arise is all they really need.

Lesson learned: Walking this new path with my newly Widowed mom who needs her adult kids in a new and different way now means standing in the gaping hole my dad left. We are all willing to do anything Dad would have normally done.

As the one who lives closest to Mom, that means taking care of household tasks, handling whatever emergencies arise (hello, unexpected ER visit), attending doctor appointments, and my favorite of all, just spending time with her and having meals together as often as possible.

Doing life with those you love the most, even the mundane and simple ones, can provide sweet moments that will be remembered for a long time.

Lesson yet to come: What will we learn as a “new to homeschooling” parents alongside our 3rd child - our youngest - in her 7th grade year is yet to be seen.  It’s kind of crazy to me that we never seriously considered homeschooling before and we’ve had our three kids in both public and private schools over the past 17 years.

Parenting is hard, but making decisions about your kids education ranks up there as one of the most crucial ones. These decisions determine who they will spend a lot of their waking hours around and what kind of influences they will be exposed to during crucial developmental years.

Something shifted in me this past year and suddenly homeschooling has become what feels right for us as a family. I look forward to sharing how the homeschool experience differs - good and bad - from the years of public and private schooling so far.   

Lesson learned: No matter what the decision is, the path is yours to walk and doubting your decisions as a parent gets you nowhere. Our oldest child just graduated college after attending a total of 7 schools. Not only did she survive through all the changes, she took away so many valuable lessons herself.

We could have doubted ourselves all the way through, but we went with the flow and prayed a lot along the way.

To illustrate our wide ranging school decisions, this is how her path toward higher education went:

After 2 years in pre-school [school #1] we enrolled her in a school choice Lottery in hopes to have her attend a magnet school in downtown Chattanooga, TN. We won a spot and off she went to her first day at Normal Park Elementary school as a five-year-old [School #2]. We loved that school but it wasn’t meant to be her place long term.

An unexpected out of state move landed us in New Albany, OH the summer before she started 1st grade. She attended New Albany Elementary for five years, the longest she would spend in a single school, yet studied in three different buildings due to the sheer size of the school system there [School #3]. Seriously, the campus looks like a College.

We decided to move back to Tennessee between her 5th and 6th grade years in hopes to find a balance to life that we were missing while living in Ohio. She spent her Middle School years in Knoxville, TN at a private school called Concord Christian [School #4].

There must have been something about that shift from a huge public school to a small private school that was a bit too drastic for her liking. She begged to transfer to a larger school so we caved and allowed her to go to High School in the nearby Farragut school district [School #5].

All these school changes and yet she managed to graduate during Covid with decent grades and went on to study for two years at the local community college [School #6] before heading off to her final school - Maryville College - where she graduated with a degree in Business [School #7].   

Besides a brief period of uncertainty between her 5th and 6th grade years when we had moved states and we were unsure of the school we should put her in, we always felt confident in our schooling decisions. And none of those decisions were to homeschool.   

Actually, during that one summer of uncertainty when our oldest was starting to challenge us I used the threat of homeschooling as leverage and called it Sutton Academy (our last name). Nothing ever came of the homeschool idea, of course.

Lesson learned: On the other hand, our son was three years younger and attended only two different schools. Fewer decisions for him but the same parents making the decisions. It’s beyond me why we - as parents - can decide things so differently for our kids, but it’s that kind of instinct that makes their lives go in a certain direction. No wonder parenting can feel so overwhelming at times. 

Our son’s educational path was a lot simpler and his way of living has also been much more simple than his older sister. I don’t know who two kids can be raised in the same household and end up so different in nearly every aspect, but we’re proof of that and we love them both the same.

Our place as parents is to guide our kids to adulthood, and who they become is something to be proud of.

Lesson yet to come: I guess you can technically say our son attended three schools, but that’s only due to the fact after he graduated high school he gave college a try and decided it’s not for him. I share the Mike Rowe way of thinking and do not feel that college is right for everyone.

We need people to work in trades and without their hard work we would have a very different world. Where our son goes in his next phase of life is yet to be seen. He’s chosen at this time to live out of state, which is a story for another blog, so stay tuned.

Whether it’s in lessons learned or ones yet to come, these moments are what we live for. I recognize and remember them best by writing about them. I’ve journaled through all 22 years of parenting and would say it’s one of the things that helps me recognize how blessed I am and gives me a beautiful summary of gratitude that I can reflect on.

With love and a whole lot of grace,

Julie

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