A mother of ten, Deborah Marambos has been homeschooling for fourteen years. She talks about how, coming from South Africa, she lived in England and struggled through the “dark and cold” English winters. She “couldn’t get my head around the idea of sending my four year old to school where they were going to spend most of their daylight hours in the winter behind a desk” At a similar time, she stumbled across a book on homeschooling by Kimberley Hahn, and “I was very interested to know why Kimberley Hahn had decided to homeschool, because I’d read a lot of her husband’s books, and I kind of saw them as model Catholic parents.” Deborah was “just amazed at the possibilities of homeschooling, what you could do as a homeschooler…the vision sort of gripped my imagination and I started to pray about it.” She also met homeschool families and was “very impressed with their children, specially their teenagers, they were particularly social and very kind, close with their siblings, and they were very good at holding a conversation with an adult they didn’t really know.”
In response to the all-too-familiar socialization question, Deborah replies, “well, there are twelve of us in our house and socialization’s not really a problem.” She mentions her children have opportunities to socialize; they see people at sports, and Church, and also know other homeschoolers. It is important that “the kids spend time amongst adults, older siblings, so they can learn how to talk across the generations and talk to people with different interests to themselves.”
She says balancing social time, family time, and schoolwork can be “quite difficult at times.” Life changes; you’ll have to do things differently when you have a new baby, or you might do more extracurricular things when you have teenagers. She says “we’ve just had to have a routine that was quite fixed in some ways, and then in other ways quite flexible.” She “found the things that works the best for me is…to take it term by term,” planning one term at a time.
A routine also helps to spread her time out between all the children. Sometimes one child might need a bit more help, or another child might be doing a lot of extracurricular activities and need less attention. Deborah notes, “I’ve had a lot of help from my older children looking after younger ones.” Sometimes she has had people coming in to help with cleaning, cooking, and housework.
About learning difficulties and health problems, she says “that’s been really challenging and its not something I foresaw when I decided to homeschool. I’ve learned a lot. I didn’t know much about some of the health problems we’ve had and I didn’t know much about specific learning disabilities.” She found it helpful that there were other moms out there who knew more about these things, and organizations and computer programs to help. She says, “sometimes you have expectations that you have to do so much…or your child has to do a certain amount, and if they’re struggling with a chronic health problem you have to be able to adjust that, you have to pray a lot.”
Deborah used curricula and online classes from Mother of Divine Grace School, an American distance school, “to educate our kids in ways that I couldn’t.” She loves homeschooling because it has “given [the children] time to explore some of their own interests” and “they’re able to just be themselves.” She uses a “lot of books, a lot of Catholic books have helped me to learn along with my kids, ever since they were little…we’d try make it an effort every day to read some kind of Catholic book, Saints book, or the Bible.” She’s also used resources from Catholic websites to help bring the Faith into daily life, as well as Formed (Formed | On-Demand Catholic Movies, Audio Books, Podcasts & More), Augustine Institute (Augustine Institute | Catholic Educational Apostolate & Theology Graduate School ), podcasts, CDs, and “Mother of Divine Grace has got a great religion program which I think has helped to form the kids, and me as well.”
She finishes with these reflections:
“One of my favorite things about homeschooling is watching my children learn, especially those kids who have struggled, to see them actually achieving goals where they’ve had to put in a lot of effort [and] having everyone together…I appreciate that time, because it goes very quickly. One of the hardest thing about homeschooling is that as a mom you always feel like you’re never good enough, and its really hard to sort of overcome that, and just trust that its enough, that you teaching your kids, that’s enough, that God is using you, and that he’s happy with that, and it’s enough for your kids. You know, it might not be the greatest education, or it might not be the most creative or as good as you’d like it to be, but it’s good enough.”
Her advice to every homeschooling mom is: “Pray and persevere. Don’t give up.”
