Special needs homeschooling is full of ups…and downs. Guest blogger Lisa Pelissier knows this from experience. In this post she describes her adventures in homeschooling, which began long before she discovered she had joined the special needs homeschooling tribe.

I wanted to homeschool before I even had children. I didn’t even need to make a list and check it twice to weigh one side against the other.

I wanted to raise my kids to love God.
I wanted to spend time with them and have them spend time with each other.
I wanted to do all the fun things you can do with little kids, like growing bean seeds, dressing up like Ancient Romans, and making Native American huts out of hot glue and cardboard for authenticity, of course. (See image below—lol).

I dove in, not without some fear because I didn’t know what I was doing or how it was going to turn out.

When we began homeschooling, I was a mom of two little boys, then almost five years old and eighteen months. It didn’t take me too long to figure out that homeschooling was harder than it looked. Entertaining a baby while trying to teach Latin and Greek to a disinterested four-year-old (I was ambitious in those days) kept me on my toes.

But there was something else going on, too. Every subject was a battle. Once my son got used to addition, then came subtraction. It was something new, and therefore something that must be rejected with howls of misery and a tantrum on the floor.

When I tried to teach him to spell, he told me he didn’t really care how other people spelled things. He was going to do it his way. It took me five years of struggle before I convinced him that it might be nice if other people could read what he wrote.

When he was nine—and I had a baby girl and another on the way, we got his autism diagnosis. My construct of a happy homeschooling family fell apart. Nothing had changed. But, if my son had anything to say about it, nothing ever would. He was going to protest every new thing I taught him. He was going to be difficult. And he was. He’s a lovely human being. But he’s a pain in the butt to teach.

When my second boy was twelve, he got sick with PANS (see my previous post here for more information). My world fell apart for a second time. By the time he graduated from high school, he was on his way to good health, at last. Then my girls got sick. In the midst of their difficulties came the divorce. It’s not been an easy road for any of us.

But through all the illnesses, both neurological and physical—depression, anxiety, dyslexia, dysgraphia, dyscalculia, OCD, autism, PANs, and more—homeschooling has been a blessing. I’ve been able to tailor our studies to accommodate my kids’ disabilities.

One of them needed everything read aloud—and I mean everything—to him all the way through school. So we read aloud.

One needs to travel the schooling path more slowly and more independently, so I’m able to scale back.

It doesn’t matter if they graduate on schedule or much later than their same-age peers. It matters that they’re still making progress. And they are.

Has it been hard on me? Absolutely. Would I change it? Uh… some days I want to move to Italy and never look back. But the rest of the time, I’m grateful for the journey we’ve had, as I get to know my kids better, to understand their struggles, and to understand myself as we continue to navigate the ups and downs of special needs homeschooling.

Do you like what you see at DifferentDream.com? You can receive more great content by subscribing to the monthly Different Dream newsletter and signing up for the daily RSS feed delivered to your email.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash