Guilt

We have all now returned to normal. The children have all returned to school and I have had the influx of nightly homework hit me like a freight train and I am still in a lot of pain with it all.

I opened the book bag at the end of the day on Monday and found a load of letters from the teacher from BEFORE the Christmas break.  Ooops. 

I will be honest, on the last day of term,  I threw the book bags under the stairs and didn't look in them again.  Apparently I was supposed to.  Apparently I wasn't supposed to have a Christmas break with the children.  Oh no.  Apparently I was supposed to plough through a double sided A4 piece of paper with "ideas" of how to keep my children occupied and make notes throughout, of all that we had done.  Proof if you like that I hadn't just sat idle, picking my nose, eating cake and watching Jezza Kyle.  And god forbid, celebrate Christmas. 

Good god almighty.  I hadn't done a thing.  Not a jot of reading, no times tables and no Ancient Egyptians googling.  Bloody hell.   The shame.  The feeling of failure.  I thought it was a school holiday?  It was for the teachers...but apparently it wasn't for me.  Now, I get that the teachers don't get the entire holiday off,  I am sure they have marking, class plans etc to sort but this vocation was their choice, no?

I then got the rage.   The rage that the expectation of me to perform for my children's education was coming to this. 

I reflected on the Christmas break ...

I took 5 days off from work over this time.  I worked full time all other days.   I had stressful prep to do on the run up to Christmas Day.  (So shoot me for not reading or doing times tables.)  After Christmas I went away for a long weekend.  Which mainly consisted of long walks, pub lunches and good times with my family and friends.  I then returned to work.  Full time.  The children returned to school 4 days after me. 

In this time I was supposed to read, times tables, some science stuff, some Ancient Egyptian stuff and then allow Roman to return to school with some imaginative power point presentation to show to the entire class .   And I did nothing.

According to Roman he has to come up with something this weekend to avoid getting some sort of low level punishment.   That's pretty crap really, isn't it?  All because of me and my complete inability to get motivated by a 7 year olds homework.

Don't get me wrong on a weekly basis I do shed loads of the bloody stuff.  15 minutes of reading A DAY each.   Maths homework, English homework, projects and everything in between.  His diary is full of work that we've done together.  But I expected a break over Christmas.  And I think the children need a break.  To unwind, to refresh and to prepare to start all the hard graft all over again in the new year.

This weekend it really started to grate on me when I spent two hours on Saturday night doing Education City with both boys.  Its too much.  For me and them.

I am not a teacher.  I don't want to be a teacher.  I have no patience and I genuinely believe that half the time I am doing more harm than good with my 0 - 60 in three second fury when they can't answer the question first time round.   And this is probably one of the major reasons I realised teaching is not for me.  But here I am practically home schooling them.

I want my children to learn, I want my children to succeed and be the very best people they can be.  But I don't want ALL of the  responsibility of making sure this happens.

I am crumbling.  Really.  Crumbling under the strain of it all.  I am a full time working mother of five and its all starting to get, well,  a bit too much.  Something has to give.  And I know that this is my lifestyle, my choice.  But seriously, I would have thought twice about having children at all if I knew what teaching I would have to do.

So I have decided.

I am going to try.  I am.  To do as much homework as we can as a family.  Yes, Jurgen also takes his fair share of reading (not so much the times tables).  But I am not going to make myself ill over it.  I am not going to do masses of homework in the holidays.  I am going to do what I can if I have the time.   The time has come for me to take a stand.  The homework is beating me and this is a battle I am losing.  And now, I am more than happy to lose.

I really feel bad but I want my children to enjoy life and appreciate that there is time for fun as well as hard graft and studying. 

And, when the blame is at my door when they are flipping burgers at Mcdonalds...I'll take it on the chin.  I will apologise if that's what's needed.   I will apologise that I never sat with them and did googling of Ancient Egypt on Boxing Day. 

And here's hoping that they will forgive me....