What I've Learned From 20 Years as a Stay At Home Mom

[Music] If you're a mom like me who feels called to invest the majority of your time at home with your children, this short window of time we have to influence their lives. You are choosing the road less traveled and there will be bumps along the way. As a mom who's been doing this for 20 years, I want to share with you the biggest pitfall that I fell into time and time again so that I can help you avoid it. Welcome to our life homeschooling. [Music] In this video, I want to share with you some of my journey, our journey of going from being a full-time career public school teacher to having our first child and wanting more than anything to be able to spend as much time with him as I could to 20 plus years of spending the majority of my time at home with our kids, raising them, teaching them, investing in them. If you're new, my name is Sher. I'm a Christian. My husband and I just celebrated our 25th anniversary. It was amazing. We got to get away for 3 days. If you want to see more about it, you can look on my Instagram page. Um, together we have 10 children, ages 20 down to two. Here on my channel and over on the blog rlifehomeschooling.com, I like to share homeschooling encouragement for everyday moms. I know what it's like to be just in the midst of diapers, dishes, dinner, dirty laundry over and over again. And I know how exhausting it can be, but I also can say I absolutely love what I do and I'm so thankful for the time God's given me with our kids. Someone once told me, "It's the hardest job you'll ever love." And I can't think of a better description. When I first became a mom over 20 years ago, and you know, it is so hard to believe that it went by that fast. I was immediately smitten. You You just don't know until you have a child how much you can love someone else. And the power of mother love is just so strong. I wanted more than anything to be able to spend as much time as I could with him. I didn't want to miss his first time that he sat up or crawled or walked. I wanted to be there for all of it. At the time, I was teaching in a public school. Enjoyed my job, enjoyed teaching, but my priorities totally shifted when our son was born. He became the center of our world and nothing else mattered. Now, from the time that we were even when we were dating, my husband and I had talked about our roles and how it was going to look when we had kids. And I had told him right up front that I wanted to be able to raise our kids. I didn't want to feel the pressure to have to bring in a substantial income just so we could make it and also have the responsibility of our the care of our children. This was actually kind of a litmus test in our dating relationship because this was a huge priority to me and I wasn't really sure how he was going to respond when I told him this from the get- go. He was totally supportive and it's almost it's kind of what won me over to him. He told me that was something I would never have to worry about that he would do whatever it took to take care of me and our kids and provide for me. what a tremendous gift that he gave all of us. So, when our son was born, we were both on the same page about how this would look. Now, I want to say just from the get- go that um this is not to discourage or talk negatively about moms that work. Um throughout our whole marriage, um at different points, I have worked part-time in some seasons. Some seasons were just so busy that my all my time was spent at home. There was no room for something like that. Some people could say, "I'm a working mom now. I spend a decent amount of time each week during nap time working to put together this content to give to you." So, this is not to kind of draw a line, a dividing line between working moms, non-working moms. Um, but for me at this time, I wanted to be able to invest all of myself as much as possible into our kids in our home. And I was so excited about it. However, we didn't have a lot of support at this time in our lives. My husband and I had recently graduated from college a few years back, and so all the friends that we had were very careerdriven. I didn't know anyone, at least any close friends. We were both living away from home. Um, so we didn't have family near us. We didn't have any close friends that had the same priorities that we did regarding kids. I finished out my year of teaching. Um, I did have to go back to work full-time for about 6 weeks. Um, and we were able to just manage the child care for that time. And then I was not coming back. I was staying home to care for our son. This cut our income in half. And on quite honestly, we felt it. It was a huge step of faith for us. At that time, there weren't a lot of part-time options. It's not even like today where you can just do so many things from home. It was either you are committing to a full-time job or you're not. That was basically the option that I had. And when we made this decision, we really received hardly any encouragement. I heard teachers say to me, "Oh, you'll be back next year. You'll realize that you don't want to waste your life like that." I heard phrases like, "You'll lose yourself in motherhood." I don't think anyone was purposely trying to discourage me, but I just felt really deflated at the response I got from our closest friends who just clearly didn't have a lot of the same priorities that we had. Now, before my last day of teaching, I had a sub come and pull me aside. She was someone who had spent the majority of her time at home raising her kids. they were all in school and now she was subbing getting her feet wet again in the workforce. She pulled me aside and she told me and it was quietly because um she knew the kind of pressure there is around this subject. She told me, "Don't look back. This is the best decision that you're going to make for yourself and for your family. You can walk away from this job tomorrow and they can find anyone to replace you. But there is no one who can replace you in the life of your child. She told me, "No one's going to encourage you. No one's going to be cheering you on as you step out of the rat race, but you will never regret the time you spend with your kids." Wow. Her words were so encouraging to me. We recently got some chicks at our house. We raise all of the chicken that we eat for the whole year on our property. And so these are broiler hen chicks. And it's always fun for the kids when we get them. So back to my story. I stepped out in faith, my husband and I together and made this decision that this was going to be a change in our lives. And you know, most of my friends at that time, they were going on and getting master's degrees. And in some ways, I felt like someone who had been at the top of my class and now was a high school dropout. But God was so faithful to us, and I had no idea the great things he had in store for our future. Our summers around here are really busy raising these broiler hens. We also have some pigs that we raise only for 6 months. We have some layer hens. We have a huge garden, which I'm going to show you in a little bit. I just want to show you how our garden is looking. I want to take some time to show you guys our gardens and how they're coming along. It's never really pretty because just as soon as we get one section weeded and looking nice, the next section needs weeded. So, these are our potatoes starting from the corner over here and going all the way across. So, we're hopefully going to get a good potato harvest, but this is an area that needs to be weeded and they need to be held as well. These are our beans. We have two sets of three rows each. This is where I'm going to be working today, pulling these weeds and getting ready to plant our second succession of bean rows. As we come through the gate, we have in the back we have all of our tomato plants. Again, this is another area that needs work. We need to stake these. And then in front here, you can see some pepper plants all the way across. These are our cucumbers, which my husband's planning on making a new trellis for those. We have a couple herbs here. cilantro and basil. You may not be able to see this, but we have three rows of beets coming up. And this is another section that I'm going to be working in today, trying to hoe up some of those weeds, and hopefully we can get some good work done in our garden today. This is another section of our garden, a little closer to the house. Over there, we have rows of corn for this year. Along the front here, I have some random raspberry plants. And then beyond we have rows of corn going the opposite way. And we've kind of staked them with sticks so that we know where everything is until it comes up. This here is the beginnings of my herb garden and kind of excited about it. Have some mint. Here's a different kind of mint growing here. Oregano. Balm. The buds on the balm are just opening up and they're just so pretty. Here I have some horseradish and some thyme. And I'd really love to add some more to this herb garden. Just make a whole another row over here. Clean it out and add some more things. But this is always a work in progress. Back to my story about when we first had our son. The first summer I was home with him. I can hardly describe it to you, but I was someone who had been in school a lot. And staying home with him every day was like a revival, an awakening in my life. I would take him out to there was a lake nearby and I would take him out. We would go for walks by the lake. He would fall asleep in his stroller. I wanted to learn about everything in the world. Even before I became a homeschool mom, I wanted to just learn about all the different varieties of birds and insects and trees, I was just experiencing a whole new love of life and especially of being a mom. I loved this very special time in our lives. Uh things changed for my husband and me. He got a different job. We moved closer to our family, which was a tremendous blessing because it's just so nice to be near family when you have a lot of kids. At that time, we only had one, but we wanted to have more. And so, our second son was born and we had moved up here to Pennsylvania. God was so good and we met just so many other families that had the same priorities that we have with children. And um that was just a huge blessing. I didn't feel quite so alone when I saw that there are other people that actually have this value as well. I'm just so thankful for God bringing those friendships into my life, into our lives, because they really were encouraging to me. Even with this added blessing of great friends, other moms who had the same priorities, I often fell into a major pitfall that I think a lot of moms fall into. It's one I struggled with over the years many times. It wasn't just a singular event or a one-time feeling. And that pitfall is just thinking that what I'm doing is not really all that important. Getting lost in the dishes, the diapers, the dirty laundry, making another meal. Is this work really making any difference with this row? You remember how far apart they have to be? Yeah. Basically about this. Okay. So, yes, I do. No, that's actually a tomato. You can just let that go. We're going to let that volunteer. So, put them about this far apart. And you can just see how far apart these are. You see there? Okay. Now, that's a little too close. A little bit farther. More like more like that. Yep. For all that our culture talks about valuing children, protecting children, when the rubber meets the road and you actually have to make some sacrifices to give kids the best, not many people are willing to do it. And the ones that are doing it, they're not very valued. And I'm not just talking about stay-at-home moms. If you look at social workers, early childare workers, teachers, and nobody's lining up for these positions, I think of times that I went with my husband to work parties or even family gatherings where everyone's kind of giving an update on their life. And if you spend a lot of time with kids, your brain is sometimes fried from all their needs and you don't always have the most interesting things to contribute to the conversation. You can sometimes feel lost in all the professional talk when your world is just completely different. I can't tell you how many times over the years, especially as we started homeschooling, as passionate as I was about it, I fell into this kind of thinking that what I was doing was not really significant. I was just washing another dish, making another meal, changing another diaper, wiping another boooo, putting a band-aid on. I'm so thankful for my husband who really encouraged me during these times and brought me out of the pit I was in because now as a mom of a 20-year-old all the way down to 2-year-old, wow, my perspective is so different. Our time with our kids is very short. When your kids get older, the thinking on this completely changes because what you've been investing in all this time, that is now what's giving back to you. These are the people who are coming home for Thanksgiving. These are the people who will be calling you when you're in old age. By God's grace, we have some great relationships with our kids. And that's because we've spent a lot of time with them. If you look at it from the corporate perspective, there is no product you can make. There is no amount of time you can spend that will be as well spent in shaping the future of the people that are coming behind us. I see now as especially a Christian mom, what an incredible opportunity this is to invest in our kids, not only for this life, but for eternity. These are the people who will be taking care of us when we're old. And Lord willing, they will be the people we take with us when we meet the Lord. Two of my favorite quotes are by the late Jerry Fwell. He says the fruit of a Christian is another Christian. The fruit of a church is another church. Our greatest value is to prod reproduce ourselves in the lives of others. When you leave behind a vibrant Christian who knows his calling and his commission, you can be buried, but you will live on through all those in whom you have been reproduced. I hope you can avoid this pitfall. This has been a total change of thinking for me. As your kids get older, God gives you perspective, and I see what an incredible opportunity that I have in influencing the kids that God's placed under my care. I don't want to miss a moment of it. I don't want to get lost in the daily grind of doing all the normal things I do, forgetting that these are human souls that God's given us for a very short period of time. If this video encouraged you, you may enjoy watching a video I did a couple months ago called Play the Long Game: Why Moms Give Up Too Easily and How to Avoid Being One of them. I'll leave the link for you below. Thanks for watching. I do one video a week on homeschooling encouragement for everyday moms. You can also find me on the blog rlifehomeschooling.com where I share a wealth of homeschool resources. Have a great week. [Music]