Quote from Forum Archives on March 12, 2004, 8:51 am

Posted by: homenews <homenews@...>

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THE HOPE CHEST HOME SCHOOL NEWS

with Virginia Knowles

#7-2: A Bit of Mother Culture: Good Friends and Good Books

March 11, 2004

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Dear Hope Chest friends,

These thoughts are about to spill out of my brain and onto the keyboard, so I trust you’ll be understanding if they get a bit jumbled in the tumble. I’d like to tell you about two dear friends, and how we have shared books with one another over the years. As a bonus, I’ve included web sites about Charlotte Mason, Karen Andreola, Lindsey O’Connor, and Susanna Wesley.

First, the friends!

I met Cheryl Bastian the week we moved back to Florida in 1993. We had been invited to a 4^th of July picnic by mutual friends we had kept in touch with during our seven year absence. We were soon attending the same church home group, and when Mike and Cheryl started a new one to include parents and children in the meeting, we joined them. That home group lasted only a few years, but from the start, I knew I had found a lifelong friend. Cheryl has been so faithful to encourage and admonish me this past decade. She is one of the few people who have carte blanche permission to tell me what I need to hear, even if it isn’t pleasant. Her advice has tilled out many weeds in my life, and I find myself repeating her sage words to others in the same situations. Cheryl has served as a home school support group leader for most of the past nine years. I don‘t use the word “served” lightly. It is more like pouring her life into the other moms, me included! She only recently announced that this is her last year of leadership, as her fifth baby, Sophia, was born just before Christmas, and she is getting too stretched out. She would also like time to write the books that have rattled inside of her brain for years. During the wait for her own authoring season of life, she helped edit my books, somehow being gentle and ruthless at the same time. (It was her suggestion to slice almost all of the academic and curriculum information out of The Real Life Home School Mom, which is well enough, since it formed the basis of Common Sense Excellence.)

I can’t pinpoint the exact day or even month that I met Debbie Klinect, but it must have been around 1996, when she was working at a local home school bookstore. (I do love books!) Like Cheryl, she had the bittersweet experience of laying aside home school support group leadership, in her case to preserve her high risk pregnancy in 1997. Debbie and I once met at Lake Lily to get better acquainted as our children played, but our friendship was mainly maintained by e-mail for a few years. During this time, Debbie started a used curriculum business, which she later sold to a friend. Then, nearly two years ago, Thad and I started attending the same church as Debbie and her husband Kurt. Last year, we even joined the same home group. We try to get together once in a while, as do our husbands, who have very similar personalities. The dormant seed of friendship between our families has sprouted and blossomed. I appreciate Debbie because she is so real and well seasoned; motherhood has brought her a rich store of maturity and humility. She’s a busy lady, keeping up with a son in the Air Force, a daughter in missionary training, another young adult son at home, and three younger children.   She even helps home school a few other children.   Like Cheryl and I, Debbie likes to write.  Eventually she would like to publish some unit studies.  Knowing I was sending this issue on Mother Culture, Debbie offered me some articles she has written on Mother Care; I'll send them to you just after this message.   I’m so honored that Debbie has sought me out for friendship.

I could say so much more about Cheryl and Debbie, especially about how creative they are. I will share a little bit more later, but first a few words about Mother Culture!

Karen Andreola, in the chapter “Mother Culture” of her book A Charlotte Mason Companion: Personal Reflections on the Gentle Art of Learning speaks of a mother’s need for rest and renewal. If we give out so much of ourselves in home schooling and home making, we must replenish the well so it won‘t run dry. Karen shares,

“Clearly a mother likes, or shall I say needs, some adult conversation. I felt isolated in suburbia for years. Wherever we moved there seemed to be a lack of community. Just a few generations ago, mothers used to talk over the fence while they hung up clothes or weeded their back gardens. People used to walk to the corner grocery and pass neighbors along the way. Now everyone drives into large parking lots and shops in malls. How does one love his neighbor as himself if he never sees or bumps into him anywhere and everyone seems to have a full-time job outside the home? One of the ways I found to make friends was to invite people into our home. How about starting a monthly literature discussion group? I find conversations made comfortable by a shared love of good books and the relaxing intimacy of a home atmosphere stimulating, and the fellowship which results from such good conversations encouraging.”

Good friends and good books! What a rich life, and even more so when the friends and the books weave together a tapestry of grace in a mother’s heart. I love to share books with friends. I can’t always sit and talk about them, but when I find a really good title, I try to buy several copies.

One such book is my current favorite: Lindsey O’Connor’s Moms Who Changed the World: What You Can Learn from Their Stories. I wanted to get a book for Debbie for her birthday. I knew she liked Emilie Barnes, but figured she already had everything written by her. So, I went to the Long’s Christian Outlet looking for something along the same lines, namely Beautiful in God’s Eyes by Elizabeth George. On my way to that shelf, Lindsey O’Connor’s name caught my eye. I had read her book Working at Home back in the early 1990s, and had recently found an on-line article about her coma after her fifth baby’s birth. Curious, I picked up this attractive book and was instantly enchanted. The aroma of Mother Culture wafts through the pages. Written from the perspective of a home school mom, it introduces us to several mothers whose children made significant contributions to society. I love the format. In each chapter, Lindsey gives us a profile of the famous child, shares candid thoughts from her own modern family life, takes us back in time to meet the featured mother in her own setting, expounds on the specific character qualities she sees there that we can develop in our own lives, and finally writes a letter to mother telling why she appreciates them and asking some more questions. Here is an excerpt from the chapter on Susanna Wesley, mother of John, Charles, and 17 others.

~*~*~

What I’d Love to Tell Susanna Over Tea

Dear Susanna,You were so disciplined…consistently. You were so faithful…constantly. When I look at my own routine, my own child training, my own home schooling, I sometimes feel like I’m swimming near the bottom of the food chain. But I have to avoid thinking that way. That attitude comes from comparing myself to you. While we are very different, we share a common ground of disciplined faithfulness in loving God.

I understand you better when I remember the harsh times in which you lived. People could be jailed for debt, not given an extended credit line. School children’s backsides were acquainted with birch rods, not field trips. Water was hauled in, not piped. Too many babies were buried instead of rocked. You had a hard life, didn’t you? You were sick and bedridden so often, your marriage was a struggle, poverty was a constant, your family was harassed, and oh…those nine little graves. You were not superwoman; you were a hurting woman who drew strength from God and then lovingly, sacrificially poured your life into your children.

At first I wanted to tell you, “Hey, Susanna, lighten up on the legalism and bask in some freedom with me, won’t you?” It can be as relaxing as a long soak in a hot tub (and you would have enjoyed that too!) However, God used your methodical ways and your desire for spiritual depth to produce fruit in your children, who then made a lasting impression on the world. And the fruit continues. What a legacy! God made you who you were for a purpose. God points me to things in your character that inspire me to be a better mother, while reminding me that like you, He made me who I am for a purpose.

Thank you for reminding me that a lot of Christian kids fall away, and I must do all I can to impart deep, lasting, spiritual growth. Thanks for reminding me that helping with school work isn’t a substitute for individual time for talking privately with my children. Susanna, it is not your discipline that inspires me, although that is admirable. I am touched, rather, by your heart and your depth. Your zeal for your children’s salvation fueled your own disciplined faithfulness, and that enabled you to train your children in the way they should go, to sacrifice personal time in order to really know them and to spend time sitting at Jesus’ feet to really know Him. That is why you are in my heroine hall of fame.

Sincerely, Lindsey

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When I presented this book to Debbie, I suggested that we get together to discuss it.  Yesterday afternoon we met our friend Brandi at the park with some of our children, who really enjoyed the playground.  We three moms had a lovely time just talking about the book and whatever else was on our hearts.   One thing I know is while each of us have different backgrounds and viewpoints, we each have the same goal of raising children in the nuture of God.

I also lend books, though I can be pretty careful with my favorites if I know they are out of print. Unfortunately, I’m not very good about returning books promptly. Debbie and Cheryl have both lent me countless books, only to wait months or (shall I confess?) even years for me to give them back. They are still so patient with me, though.

A few days ago, Debbie lent me a book I have long wanted to read: Karen Andreola’s Pocket Full of Pinecones. Mother Culture indeed! This gem, written in the form of a diary of a mother in the 1930s, highlights Charlotte Mason’s methods, especially as relating to Nature Study. It is a fictional outpouring of Karen’s earlier book A Charlotte Mason Companion. Carol, the mother in the story, shares Mother Culture moments and a love of books with her elderly friend Emma and her sister-in-law Dora. This excerpt is part of a conversation with her brother Bob, while she visits the family’s country homestead to help Dora after childbirth:

~*~*~

“I don’t know how to fully explain my desire to teach my children at home myself. The classes in the school are so large, and Emily was labeled “slow” in reading and arithmetic, but it’s more than that. Don was losing his sense of wonder. He was bored. It seemed that his lights were going out for want of a better expression. Emily and Don were losing a spark of curiosity and a love of knowledge that they had when they first started school. I wanted to get it back. And I think I am getting it back by home schooling, and by following the principles of education laid down by Miss Charlotte Mason, the lady who wrote the book Michael’s sister gave me. I’ll let you look at it if you are interested.”

That’s all I said. I could have easily said more. But I stopped before I got too carried away. The words had flowed out of my mouth so fast and with such feeling that it surprised me. Bob must have realized how strongly I felt because he said, “Sounds like God has put this on your heart, Carol. I wish you all of His blessings. Oh, by the way, when I saw Emily and Don’s Nature Notebooks, something flashed in my mind.”

“What’s that?”

“Come upstairs. There is something I want to show you in the back hall closet.”

We stepped lightly on the stairs and walked quietly down the hall. Opening the closet door, Bob tried to move the dusty boxes around without waking the children in the next room. I held the lantern. “Ah, here it is. Isn’t this yours, Carol?” He handed me a scrapbook. Its pages were bound with twine, sandwiched by cardboard end pages, and when I opened it a flood of memories came to me. Page by yellowed page I examined the birds I had drawn as a young girl. I had collected them all into one chapter. Next was a group of pages dedicated to herbs and flowers. At the back were farm animals.

“How could I have forgotten about making this book?” I whispered to him in amazement.

~*~*~

This excerpt reminds me that my husband Thad recently cleaned out his late mother’s attic just before her house sold. He found several of his old Geography composition notebooks -- handwritten in beautiful script with accompanying sketches -- which he created during his 8th grade year in a British boarding school. (For you UK readers, it was King’s College in Taunton. He was homesick and begged so hard to come back to the USA that he only spent a year there.) Anyway, these notebooks were so Charlotte Mason style! Oh boy, do I have a lot of work to do around her to see my kids attain to that kind of academic work!

~*~*~

And now, a few helpful web sites for those who wish to explore more!

 

Home School Highlights with Karen Andreola (A Charlotte Mason approach web site)

http://www.homeschoolhighlights.com/

 

Mother Culture:

http://www.homeschoolhighlights.com/01_reparative/

http://www.charlottemason.com/motherculture.html

 

Lindsey O’Connor

http://www.LindseyO.com

 

Moms Who Who Changed the World

http://www.lindseyo.com/MomsWhoChanged.html

 

Susanna Wesley

http://www.intouch.org/myintouch/mighty/portraits/susanna_wesley_213595.html

http://www.gospelcom.net/chi/GLIMPSEF/Glimpses/glmps077.shtml

 

~*~*~

I could go on, but don’t wish to overstay my welcome in your inbox. I do hope that this issue of the Hope Chest has been a wee bit of Mother Culture for you, but please don’t let it stop there. I encourage you to forward it to a friend! Better yet, grab a good friend and a good book for a grand conversation!

Blessings,

Virginia Knowles

www.thehopechest.net

The Hope Chest is a free email newsletter with encouragement and practical teaching tips. The writer is Virginia Knowles, wife of Thad, mother of nine children, and author of Common Sense Excellence: Faith-Filled Home Education for Preschool to 5th Grade, and The Real Life Home School Mom.

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