Changing Our Homeschool Path

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Our homeschooling journey took a weird turn when my mom moved in with us in May of 2019. In the beginning, I requested her assistance in homeschooling our younger children as she loved spending time with her grandchildren. Unfortunately, these plans – of having her help one of our children while I worked with the other – never came to fruition. Shortly after she moved in with us, we began noticing there were changes in her memory and personality.

My mom did a really good job of hiding all the problems that she was having with her memory and physical health. It wasn’t until I began writing things down – her getting lost on the way back to our house, arguing with us about items that she thought were hers but were in fact our property, etc. – that we were able to convince her to visit the general care practitioner. In October 2020, the doctor saw her and recommended she have additional tests and see a neurologist. With the events of the world, it was difficult to get the necessary appointments. So, the next step wouldn’t take place until January 2021. When we returned to the neurologist after additional tests, the doctor confirmed our fears – my mom was suffering from Alzheimer’s.

My mom 

During the entire time she was living with us, our daily lives changed progressively. During late 2019, things remained mostly the same with the exception of a few details. I had extra housework as we had added an additional person to our home. We worried about another person as my mom would often be out past the time we expected her home, and she would not call us or message us. And we lost space as we tried to accommodate her and the items she was slowly moving from her home – my childhood home – to our house.

Little by little, things changed even more for us after the diagnosis. My mom got angry and suspicious. She would often accuse us of taking things, which did not happen. I hardly went into her bedroom, even though it provided access to our attic space and housed our children’s clothing dressers. I wanted to give her privacy.

I found, sadly, that giving her privacy meant that we didn’t see all the problems she was having until it was too late in a lot of ways. She destroyed many family photographs, pictures she colored (as well as those she colored with our daughter), and books. She took to cutting them up, writing all over them, and doing other things that caused them to be damaged or destroyed. I didn’t discover this until the last year of her life.

How did this impact our homeschooling? 

My husband and I needed to step in to directly take care of my mom in more and more ways. She stopped remembering to eat, so we needed to feed her. I had to help her with her daily hygiene needs and eventually, I needed my husband to help me do these tasks, too. With these additional tasks, our time was consumed with taking care of my mom. So in between these tasks, I set out what our children could do on their own or with the help of their older brother. And we homeschooled after dinner on many evenings. We had to be flexible in how and when we homeschooled.

My mom died on April 14, 2022. While we are struggling with our grief, we are slowly moving back into a normal homeschool routine. During the past difficult year of taking care of my mom, we continued to study math, language arts, science, and history. Some weeks, we were able to fit in foreign languages (such as our son’s studying of Latin and spelling. Now, I can see us moving back into an even more regular routine. I look forward to finishing some of our curriculum – we are almost done studying Mammals with Memoria Press – and adding back into some of the materials our son and daughter have been missing.

What Did I Learn from Our Journey?

It is very important to offer yourself grace. There were many days when I thought we weren’t getting any homeschooling done, but my children were still learning. They were learning how to cooperate and help each other. They were learning how to take care of those we love, even when it is difficult. They were getting more time to read and re-read books that they loved. They invented many games together – working out rules, scoring, and more. They learned the importance of love.