Write Away

It’s hard to believe that I’ve been homeschooling in some way, shape or form for six years already, especially since I still don’t feel like I really know what I’m doing or have ever gotten a handle on it.

I talk to other moms who homeschool.  Sometimes I see their setup.  Occasionally I might read a homeschool mom’s blog where she might wax eloquent about her elaborate daily routine where everything gets done by noon and the children happily accomplish and check off the chores from their chore chart, then cook an entire seven course dinner in time for dad coming home from work.  I might read a post from another homeschooling mom who goes off on how each child is so different she has to take three different approaches for every subject (one for each child).

And I always think, wow, have those other moms got it together!

I’m not one of those got-it-together moms.  What?  Fall’s here already?  Guess I better do something with that stack of materials I bought sometime during the summer.

Right about the time I figure out how to squeeze my older children’s education in between the rather intense needs of the toddlers and preschoolers so that everyone gets more or less what they need to do their work… I have another baby and have to figure it all out again, not to mention add diaper changes and nursing to the list of balls I juggle.

Oh, and did I mention the school room must always be tidy?  Oh wait, I dropped that ball a long time ago.  Who knew my children could be so, er, creative?

We’re the family that never quite finishes the school books, that never quite figures out the routine (or maybe we get it down in time for summer when it all changes), and where the children will easily get distracted from their work in order to get back to their playing.

But here we are, continuing to homeschool, and despite all the unmet expectations and dropped balls, it’s actually working.

Before we started any schoolwork this year I sat down with my fourth grader for a little pow-wow.  She had to take some responsibility for her own education I reasoned.  We went over a simple schedule together, mainly consisting of the subjects she’d need to work on each day or week.  Then we watched the instructional DVDs which came with her math course and her spelling course.

And that’s when we both got excited about the year.

And I finally discovered that there is such a thing as curriculum that is designed specifically for homeschoolers.

The most frustrating thing about homeschooling, I finally figured out, has been that for the most part the curriculum is still designed for a large classroom.  Even if it claims to be designed for homeschoolers, what that really means is that they expect the parents to basically have their home set up like a classroom, and the parent (usually the mom) takes it on herself to provide for all those interactive and often distracting games and experiences which are designed to make classroom learning less boring.

We homeschooling moms burn ourselves out trying to run our home like a miniature school.  I figured out in the first year that this really doesn’t work, but not having much sense of the alternatives, I tended to just think I wasn’t too good at homeschooling when what I’m really not so good at is pretending I’m a school teacher.

Sometime in the third or fourth year I figured out that both my children and I want the bottom line when it comes to what they need to learn.  They really don’t want all those learning gimmicks which are supposed to make learning fun and dynamic.  They really don’t want busy work, and they really don’t want to tackle a subject from every possible angle.  What they really want to do is get on with it.  Give them the bottom line, make sure they understand it, and then let them play.  They want to learn efficiently.  Since teaching my children their school subjects isn’t the only thing I have to accomplish during the day, I’m all for efficiency as well.

When it comes to picking out curriculum, efficiency and simplicity are top priorities for me.  My favorite kind is the one where you open the book, work your way from page one to the end and everything you need is between the two covers.  And the child has to spend no more than fifteen minutes on each subject, unless of course he or she wants to.

When my second child was in Kindergarten, I didn’t start teaching her to read right away.  She actually learned the basics of word building from a Jump Start computer game.  About midway through the school year she asked me if I could please teach her how to read.  ”What if I grow up to be fourteen and I still don’t know how to read?” she asked.

I figured if she was that concerned about not knowing how to read, then she was definitely ready to start learning.  So I told her we’d begin working on it together, but I really didn’t have a plan.  I’d gone through the whole experience of starting my oldest child to read way too soon while using a very good, but very complicated phonics curriculum.  I didn’t want to use that curriculum again.

About a week or two after that conversation I discovered there was such a thing as a reading curriculum that fit my criteria (still undefined at that time) for simplicity and efficiency.  My children and I were at the library.  Lying open on one of the armchairs was the book Phonics Pathways by Dolores G. Hiskes.  It was designed as a remedial reading program suitable for students of all ages.  It appeared to be very straightforward, clearly designed for people who should have learned to read years ago and therefore didn’t have any time to waste.  I checked the book out and my daughter and I started working our way through it.

The experience was awesome.  She and I went over one or two pages each day and it only took about fifteen minutes.  But each day she learned a new sound or a new rule for how to decode a word.  It started off really simple and almost imperceptibly got more complex.  Within a few months my daughter was a fluent reader.  She began reading stories to her younger sister every evening.  The book included templates for a few reading games which I could photocopy if I wanted, but it was clear the games were not needed.  I think we played one of those games but the rest of it came directly from the book.  We sat down on the couch together, opened up the book, and in fifteen minutes we were done.

I’ve had a similar feeling about the workbooks from Handwriting without Tears.  My children have been practicing their printing and cursive using those books since they were in preschool.  Although you can buy all kinds of extra manipulatives to make handwriting fun, and I do have some of those (mostly collecting dust), the workbooks are simple, efficient and thorough.  The children each do two pages a day and they finish their books well before the school year ends.  It only takes about fifteen minutes, and their writing always gets better.

This year I decided that Singapore Math was not working for us and it was time to try a different math curriculum.  My children go to a charter school once a week which is meant to serve as a supplement to homeschooling.  There is a limited selection of curriculum available through this school, so I checked out what they had for math.  It was this program called Math U See.  There are several levels which are not meant to correspond with grade level but rather with each child’s ability.  Each level includes a workbook, test booklet, and DVD.  The DVD is what makes the program truly awesome for me.  The DVD includes a 10 to 15 minute lecture for each lesson.  The parent has the option of watching it herself and then teaching the material to the child, or the child and the parent can watch the video together (guess which option we do around here!).  The video features the author of the program, an excellent math teacher, doing what he does best–teaching math.  He presents the material in a fun, easy to understand and engaging way.  My children really enjoy watching the videos and they get it.  After watching the videos, they do one or more of the worksheets in the workbook depending on how much practice they need.  It takes them ten or fifteen minutes to complete the worksheets and they are done.  Math U See has turned math in our home from an ordeal of trying to cajole and/or coerce unmotivated and frustrated kids into just doing their homework to a painless and even fun experience.  I don’t have to do any lesson planning and hardly any teaching.  I let the great math teacher do it, and I just check their work.  This makes it very easy to juggle.  If I have to step away from the DVD viewing for a minute to deal with a wet diaper it’s not a problem.  This program actually works in the context of a home where schooling is a part of the big picture of what takes place.

Spelling has been another area where we’ve struggled.  I picked up our charter school’s option, which was a system called Spelling Power.  At first glance it appeared to be quite complicated, but once I worked through the instructional DVD it made more sense.  There are a couple placement tests I have to do at the beginning of the year, and my child’s scores on these tests determine which words she needs to be learning.  There are lists and lists of words in the book, and my child just works through them in order starting with the one her placement scores indicate.  Once she is placed, each day I spend five minutes with her testing her on spelling the words in her list and immediately correcting any that are wrong.  Then she spends five minutes studying only the words she got wrong, and the ten step study plan is clearly laid out.  Then she picks out an activity card from the box and works on the activity for another five minutes.  Today her activity was to draw her words in pictures.  Having a definite artistic bent, she thoroughly enjoyed that activity.  The program is beautiful–short, sweet, and gets the job done and I just have to do my part and follow the program.

Between Math U See, Phonics Pathways, Handwriting without Tears, and Spelling Power, about half of the curricula I use is clearly designed with homeschooling moms like me in mind.  Some of the other curricula I have is not so great.  I’m still trying to figure out the grammar program I selected for my Fourth Grader, also one of the options available through our charter school.  It’s called Easy Grammar, but so far I think Cryptic Grammar would better describe it.  Directions on how to teach it are nonexistent, and it starts off with having my student memorize about forty prepositions.  The claim is that once my student can identify prepositional phrases, she can cross them all out of a sentence and what she’s left with is the subject and verb.  I’m skeptical but willing to give it a try.  Only, I can’t figure out exactly how to explain preposition or prepositional phrase.

That’s when I have to look no further than YouTube for inspiration.  When my fourth grader was in Kindergarten she was supposed to learn the continents.  I found this catchy tune on YouTube and all I have to do is play it a few times if I’ve ever worried any of my children don’t know them.  Trust me, after singing this song a few times they know their continents!

YouTube has some great songs to help children understand prepositions and prepositional phrases.  The first one I found was this one, which is pretty good.  But my favorite one is this all out rock tune by a group called Grammarheads.  After singing the lyrics and rocking out to the beat, suddenly explaining prepositions and prepositional phrases to my fourth grader is no longer an issue.

If you are SuperMom, you know, the kind of mom who has a tidy school room set up in a basement or family room, the kind of mom who can’t wait to sit down to two hours of lesson planning as soon as the kids are in bed, the kind of mom who is happy to play every learning game and do every learning craft to make sure her child really knows the material through and through, and if you can somehow do the laundry, clean the house and prepare three square meals during the short breaks, then you are probably in good shape.

But if you’re more like me, with a little too much to do for the typical 24 hour day, where everything seems to take longer than any schedule will allow and where you just want to get the job done, then you might have had to let go of a few homeschooling expectations (myths) in favor of what is actually attainable for a more average mom.

Here are a few things I’ve had to come to terms with:

1.  Homeschooling does not mean I do all the teaching.  From delegating my children’s math instruction to the Math U See guy on the DVD or delegating geography and grammar instruction to music videos on YouTube to using a complete reading program between two covers and sending my children to charter school for the challenging subjects like art, science and music, I look for ways to leverage the hard work that other people have done or are willing to do rather than reinventing the wheel in my own home.

2.  Homeschooling does not have to take place in a clean house.  OK, we do try to maintain some basic order, but if the floor isn’t picked up we can still make it through the school day.

3.  Children’s creativity can be chaotic, but should still be encouraged.  When my children get a creative project in mind, it can literally involve every single room in the house.  Recently my children put together a circus with their stuffed animals.  This project involved them doing some online research (for jokes), sewing (they sewed costumes for every single plush toy using fabric scraps), planning and basically producing a show.  They worked on it for an entire day, then put on the show for me and their dad the following day.  At least three entire rooms were committed to the preparations, and the cleanup project that ensued later that day was intense.  But I got to thinking about how it might be if this circus performance were a project that was assigned for one of their classes.  How hard would I be working trying to coordinate it?  And yet the experience taught the children some actual skills.  The child psychologists who say children learn primarily by playing have a good point.  And when children are allowed to learn by playing, it’s really a lot less work for the parents.  So when they get off on a muse like that I happily allow the official school work to get shoved aside, I suppress the guilt I feel about it, and for the most part I don’t regret it.  My children amaze me more and more with what they come up with on their own.

4.  I don’t need to work too hard.  Granted, there will be ups and downs and some days that are downright frustrating.  But I have come to realize that if I have to work too hard all the time, I’m probably taking on too much and it’s time to look at other options.  Perhaps the textbook for a certain subject really isn’t working, or my child isn’t interested in that subject that year, and it’s really OK to take a break.

5.  It’s really OK to go with my children’s interests.  This goes along with the parent not working so hard.  I don’t do full blown unschooling, but I see a lot of value in it.  Both the unschooling and democratic school movements have taught us that children who are “behind” in a given subject can catch up to their peers very quickly, often within six to eight weeks, once they are motivated.  If my child isn’t interested in a particular subject one year, it’s OK to work at it minimally or not at all for a time in favor of encouraging the child to learn what they are motivated to learn that year.  It can sometimes be scary, especially with so many voices of authority warning us about the dire consequences of children falling behind on anything.  But I’ve already seen how quickly my own children can learn a subject that they truly want to learn.  If you have a choice between forcing a child to read at age five and struggling with it for a year and a half then giving up on it because it’s so frustrating and sending that child to a regular school for a year where she catches up in a situation without that history, or waiting until the child is six and begging you to teach her and having her learn in a matter of months, which would you take?  Like I said, I prefer to not have to work so hard.

6.  I have limits and that’s OK.  No, I’m not going to be able to use a radically different teaching style to cater to each child’s learning style.  No, I do not want to take all my me-time (read, after children are in bed) to plan next day’s lessons.  No, I’m not going to be able to spend six hours a day on school.  Yes, sometimes schoolwork has to go by the wayside because other things have come up.  No, it’s not cheating to take the shortcuts.

7.  It’s not about me.  At the end of the day the important thing is that my children are learning and growing, not that I can take the credit for singlehandedly making it happen.  If something isn’t working for one of my children and fixing it involves taking a blow to my fragile ego, that’s what needs to be done.  I sent my oldest child to a private school for a year.  The opportunity opened up around the time that I was reluctantly realizing that homeschooling wasn’t really working out.  In other words I’d failed, and enrolling her in school was a blatant admission of that failure.  Nonetheless, doing so was in my child’s best interests and it had to be done, and I had to suck it up.  The outcome was great–she got what she needed from the school year, and the next year she was back at home and things worked out much better.  This year promises to be even better.  We’re back to homeschooling and my identity is not so tied up in it anymore.

Bottom line:  You don’t have to be a SuperMom to homeschool.  You don’t necessarily even have to be a very successful homemaker to make it work. There are lots of shortcuts and ways to lighten the burden and it’s fine to take full advantage of them.  It helps to not make homeschooling a status symbol.  It’s really just another way to love your children.

The determination as to whether a particular bold action was an act of courage or stupidity is often made only in hindsight, based on whether or not it “worked out.”  Prior to the outcome, it’s not so easy to tell the difference.  This means that if I am to ever hope to be truly courageous, I need to push through and get past the fear of being stupid.

All day long and during the night, Baby A takes in milk and turns it into gold.

A short poem by E:

Generous Jennifer is my name
Being generous is my game.

* Despite the title, this is a birth story

It all began on a Monday night while putting our then youngest to bed.  K did not want me to put her to bed, insisting on it being her daddy.  I, for my part, did not feel at all up to cleaning up the kitchen, so I pulled all the stops.

“Let’s lay down together in my bed,” I said.  Usually that is enough to convince her.

“No!”

“How about this, you and I lay down in my bed and let’s tell the baby it’s OK to come out.”

She thought about it, then smiled.  ”OK Mama.”

Then she addressed my bulging belly:  ”It’s OK to come out now, baby!”

Within a few minutes of laying down with K, I was hit with a contraction that had a definite this-is-no-longer-just-the-toning-kind edge to it.  Did baby have to be so literal?  I didn’t mean right then; I meant after a good night’s sleep.

By the time K fell asleep I’d had two more, but somehow I thought I’d still be able to sleep.  But those just barely on the edge contractions did not stop.  They weren’t happening too frequently either.  Nor were they anything I couldn’t breathe through.

At midnight I asked Erik to run an Epsom salts bath for me.  My intention was to slow the contractions down so that I could sleep.  That had worked beautifully when K was born.  We called our midwife just to let her know what was going on, and to be ready for a possible phone call in the morning.

At two in the morning I figured my body was relaxed enough to get some sleep.

By three in the morning I knew the quest for sleep was going to be futile.  Erik warmed up the bath for me again and I soaked.  I was definitely in active labor by then, and as I would realize two hours later, much further along than I thought.

We called the midwife again a little after four.  I told her to go ahead and come on over.  While talking to her I had a contraction that I had no problem talking through.  She noted this fact.  ”Yes, but I couldn’t talk through the last one,” I replied.  She said she’d be right over.  I no longer wanted to be in the bath so I got dressed and wandered around the house trying to figure out what I wanted to do next.

A few contractions later I felt terrified.  I know from past experience that this feeling means the birth is truly imminent.  I called the midwife back to let her know.  She was already on the road.

I had no idea what position I wanted to be in to make the contractions easier.  What I wound up doing for most of them was standing on my tip toes and arching my back.  I must have looked horrendously uncomfortable because Erik kept asking me how he could help me, what position I wanted to be in, what he could do for me.  I felt overwhelmed by all the questions.  I just kept saying “I have no idea!”

By this time all the children were awake.  K was the first out of bed.  She wanted to know what all the commotion was about, as in, why was Mama making all that noise.  ”The baby’s coming,” I replied.  She didn’t seem surprised at all.  After all, hadn’t she just given the baby permission the night before?  I saw L wandering about in the dark in her underwear.

“L, you might want to get dressed.  The midwife is coming,” I told her.

“I’m just looking for earplugs!” she said somewhat testily.  Erik told me later that her first reaction upon waking up to my primal birthing noises was to put the pillow over her head.  Apparently that didn’t work too well.  She wasn’t able to find ear plugs either.  At some point she resigned herself to being up and about at four-thirty in the morning and got dressed.  She offered to call the midwife for me but I told her she was already on the way.

Erik’s attention was divided between me, who really didn’t know how to best use his support, and riding herd on the three girls whose needs and wants were more straightforward.  I think he started fixing them breakfast.

But he was still trying to help me out.  I was in the kitchen when I had my big transition contraction.  That’s the one that seems to go on and on and I think it will never end.  Only I still didn’t realize that’s what it was.  I just chalked it up as an extra long one.

Once again Erik was full of questions, and they rang in my ears like something obnoxious and overwhelming.  Questions, questions, questions!  Then suddenly my mind honed in on a desire, something so wonderful I couldn’t wait to taste it, and something that would be so easy to get.

“I want a grapefruit,” I said.  ”Can you please cut me one?”

“That I can do!” Erik said cheerfully.  A few seconds later, there was a grapefruit half in a bowl on the table all ready to eat.  I took the bowl and spoon and moved them to the counter.

“I’m afraid to sit down,” I said by way of explanation.  I ate about a third of that delicious juicy grapefruit standing up.

Then I felt like peeing so I went to the bathroom for what seemed like a routine stop, thoughts of finishing up that sweet and juicy grapefruit dancing in my head.

I felt another contraction starting once I’d finished my business.  Instinctively I put my hand down there and felt the water bag bulging out.  Already?  Then the contraction overtook me and I started really yelling.

“Something’s coming out!”

Erik rushed into the bathroom.  I was still sitting on the toilet.  He asked me if I wanted to get into the bathtub, but I said no.  I didn’t know what to do so I just stayed put as the water bag bulged out further.  Where was the midwife?

The water bag popped giving me some relief, and then the head crowned.  Erik got into a position to catch the baby, and I’m sure I asked him a few times if he was ready, because ready or not, the baby was coming.  The head popped out and then the shoulders.  I felt it, but couldn’t see a thing.

“Do you have a good grip?” I asked Erik urgently.

“Yes I do, he assured me.”

The baby’s torso seemed to be stuck forever and I wanted that big thing out.

“Can you give it a little tug?” I asked Erik.  I knew you never ever pull on the baby’s head, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt to tug a bit on the shoulders.  I thought that’s what Erik did because the next thing I knew the entire baby popped out along with a whole bunch of liquid, but later Erik told me he didn’t tug on the baby at all.

Erik caught the baby and brought it up to me, placing it against my lower abdomen.  The baby immediately began to breathe and in a few moments started to fuss.

I sat there holding my new baby, feeling like my insides had just been turned inside out.  Slowly it dawned on me.  It’s over.  I don’t have to gear up for labor.  It just happened.

It seemed like forever that we just sat there in the bathroom holding our baby and just breathing, but I’m sure it wasn’t longer than a minute or two.

K saw the birth, and her take was that the baby came out of me upside down.  L and E, the older girls, saw bits and pieces but they were otherwise busy running to and from the front door watching for the midwife.  When they saw her turn into our driveway, they ran out to meet her and hurry her inside.

She came and found us holding our baby.  She found a towel to wrap around the baby, and then sat with us for a minute or two longer.

Before long she assisted me to my bed where she could more easily tend to me and the baby.  It was at that point that we learned it was a boy.  Another surprise, as I was convinced it would be another girl.  We estimated that he’d been born right around five in the morning.  Needless to say, we all fell in love with little A.

An hour or two later, after things had settled down a bit, the midwife asked me if I was hungry.

“Well, I’d sure like to finish my grapefruit,” I replied.

Erik got a sheepish look on his face.

“It’s gone.”  I don’t remember if he told me he’d finished it up or what he said, but I was disappointed.  I really wanted that grapefruit!

I settled for yogurt, and gobbled a bowl down while the midwife told me she was glad to see me eating already.

The unfinished (by me anyway) grapefruit was just one of a half dozen we had recently acquired from the Sharehouse.  Somewhere in the next few days in the midst of the joyous and groggy postpartum haze I ate all the other grapefruits in that bunch.

Every.  Single.  One.

A sermon that I’d really like to listen to someday that I don’t think gets thought about too much would be titled:  ”How to leave a ministry.”  I definitely hear lots of encouragement to get involved in ministry, but it doesn’t seem to occur to too many people that even in ministry, all good things must come to an end.

The reason I’m thinking about this now is that I’m in the process of leaving a ministry role I’ve had for the past two years.  When I was first contemplating the fact that it was time for me to move on, I found there were some things about how I was going to leave that were quite important to me.

To start at the beginning, the Sharehouse ministry was launched by two local Evangelical churches, including the one my husband and I attend.  The days and times have varied but pretty much from the beginning, the Sharehouse was open to the public in our rural community to come and “shop” for free food and second hand items for a couple hours once a week.

This required making sure there were volunteers staffing the place each week.  A lady from the other church and I started off kind of taking care of this.  We did it in a very clunky way.  We’d each recruit a couple people from our respective churches each week, the two founding pastors held a couple brief training sessions and things got going.  I volunteered pretty much every time it was open and ended up for a while fielding questions about how things worked from the volunteers on a regular basis.

At some point I mentioned to the pastor of “my” Evangelical church that there was clearly a need for a volunteer coordinator and I’d be happy to take on that role on an interim basis until an actual member of either church could be found to fill that position.  Being the resident Catholic congregant I’m quite sensitive to the fact that the pastors generally prefer a full fledged Evangelical member to hold the more visible leadership positions.  The pastor told me to go ahead with it and so I did.  Fairly soon afterwards the lady from the other church had to back out due to increased family obligations or something along those lines.  So then I started compiling a list of volunteers from both churches and calling a few each week.

As the ministry progressed, the two founding pastors caught up with developing and implementing some more formal procedures, including how scheduling would work, which streamlined the process considerably and also more precisely defined responsibilities.  I started scheduling volunteers for three months at a time and I was made to understand that my responsibilities were pretty much limited to scheduling, so I started referring other types of volunteer questions to the two pastors.

Over time I developed a system using a free email marketing software which automated certain aspects of the process and made it very easy to communicate by email with all the volunteers.  Each quarter that I scheduled got easier and easier as I figured out more ways I could streamline the process even further.

The two pastors also handed off their roles as Sharehouse coordinators to other members of their respective churches.  My husband became one of the new coordinators.

At the end of this past summer, I accepted the position of Director of Religious Education (DRE) at my own Catholic parish.  In the months following accepting the position it became clear that my responsibilities at my own church were going to grow as I grew the religious education program.  About the time that things started to get really busy, it was time to schedule another quarter at the Sharehouse.

I was able to juggle both ministries for a while but I could see that this wouldn’t last.  I wrote an email to “my” pastor, who was still acting as Sharehouse coordinator at the time.  I told him about my new job and how excited I was about it, and that it meant that eventually I would need to step down from serving as the Sharehouse scheduler.  I didn’t have a set end date in mind, but I wanted to bring it up right then because I wanted him and the other coordinator to have plenty of time to find a replacement scheduler.  I also said I wanted to be able to train the new scheduler.

I scheduled the next quarter after sending this letter, and it was interesting because I was asked if it would be OK for me to schedule that round as a new scheduler hadn’t yet been located.  I answered that of course it would be OK; just as I’d said, I wasn’t in a hurry to stop or anything.  I think the usual way people resign from ministry is something along the lines of giving two weeks’ notice and then the job gets dumped on someone else even if a true replacement hasn’t been found yet.  One thing I knew I didn’t want to do was have either of the church pastors have to take on the scheduling even just once.

When the next round after that came along, the new scheduler had been located and accepted the position.  It was just in time for getting  the whole process started.  I arranged a meeting with both the new scheduler and one of the coordinators so that we could go over the entire process.  It turned out to be a two hour long meeting and I think I talked nonstop.  I took them through the email marketing program I was using, started to set up some of the emails which would have to go out while they were watching and methodically went over all the other little details that went along with the job.  We decided the initial emails requesting information about volunteers’ availability would go out that week and we would meet a week later to actually go through the scheduling process.  That meeting was to take place yesterday morning, actually.

As if to hammer home to me that yes I did indeed make the right decision to back out of this ministry, I found myself this week slammed with having to make a number of last minute preparations for a Confirmation retreat to take place this coming weekend.  In fact, I scheduled a meeting for that later on that day and was hoping I’d have a bit of time before that meeting to at least begin preparing the two talks I would be giving at the retreat.

It was actually a little strange not receiving the usual replies to the emails that went out requesting people’s availability–we had programmed the replies to automatically go to the new scheduler.  I wondered how that was going.

Monday morning, my questions were answered by an email I received from the new scheduler saying that she’d gone ahead and made up an initial schedule and that it would only require some tweaking based on my feedback.

I thought “Oh boy, oh boy!  Short meeting!  Yay!”

The meeting was short and could have been a lot shorter had the four of us not spent some time simply hanging out and lazily talking about various miscellaneous tips about scheduling that I’d think about (most of which were probably redundant from the previous meeting anyway).  There were a few necessary changes that I spotted right away, and then that was pretty much it.  The new scheduler and coordinator told me I’d set it up well and they felt confident moving forward after the previous training I’d given them.  Because at the moment we are all sharing a dropbox folder, I can see that the necessary changes are being made to the schedule and it will probably go out to all the volunteers shortly.  Once this month is through, my term as scheduler will be officially over–all I have left to do is make sure all the volunteers scheduled this month confirm that they are going to be serving and call them if they don’t.  But starting next month, that job also falls to the new scheduler.

Once the meeting was over I hurried over to where my next meeting would be held and had a very productive two hours before my friend and fellow retreat coordinator arrived and we could go over the retreat plans.

After my friend left I thought a bit about letting the Sharehouse scheduling go, as I’d thought about it some throughout the process of letting it go.  On one hand I’m relieved to have that off my plate.  On the other hand, I’m a bit sad to not have it on my plate anymore.  My time serving in this capacity has been a tremendous learning experience for me, and I’ve also been told on many occasions just how valuable my contribution was.  A part of me is going to miss those affirmations as well as the whole involvement with the Sharehouse ministry itself.  Since my husband is one of the coordinators, I’m also to a large extent letting go of volunteering there–one of us has to stay home with the children!

So it’s not this total happy thing.  I get sad about it at times.  But then I get going on something to do with being DRE and I then get so happy that there is one less encumbrance to me doing a good job with this new ministry, one that I really truly have free rein to not just perform a duty (however valuable) but to be actively involved in discipleship and evangelism (things that because I’m Catholic were not open to me within an Evangelical ministry).

But mostly I feel very satisfied with the way I left the Sharehouse ministry.  I told people well in advance that I would be leaving.  I gave them plenty of time to find a replacement.  Then I took the time to effectively train the new scheduler as well as cross train the coordinators.  As far as the volunteers can see, all that’s changed is the name at the end of the Sharehouse emails they receive.  The current round of scheduling took place on time and with no problems, and everyone will know when they are going to be expected to serve within a week.  No one was left with an extra job dumped on them; no one was left in the lurch.  There was a good transition from me to the new scheduler and we both feel confident that she has everything she needs (her own skills and experience plus what I was able to give her) to do the job well for as long as she wants to do it.  I know that what I have developed to streamline Sharehouse scheduling will not be abandoned or reinvented (only improved on as time goes on) since I was able to thoroughly pass on that knowledge.

As I’ve mentioned I learned and grew so much through serving as the Sharehouse scheduler, and I know much of what I learned prepared me for my current and more challenging ministry.

But it’s also made me think a lot more about passing on the torch of my current ministry.  No, I’m not looking to quit anytime soon.  But I’m seeing the great value in building this ministry in a way that will allow it to function just fine without me.  I’ve already had the experience of having substitutes cover for me on Religious Education nights that I couldn’t be there, and a huge part of what I’m emphasizing is making sure that the teachers in the program are well formed spiritually and mentored both in their walk with God and in growing as teachers.  I’ve already thought about things I do and how I can delegate some of those tasks to other people in my church.  And I’ve gotten quite conscious of the fact that I don’t have to provide everything–I can make use of all kinds of resources available to me in my parish and through the Archdiocese of Denver.  And yes, I’ve started to give some thought to how I might approach training and mentoring a replacement or backup DRE.  I mean, wouldn’t it be nice to occasionally take some time off and know that the ministry will still be OK without me?  Or, to know that the ultimate “what if something happened to me?” question will be answered by “the ministry will go on just fine.”

So strangely enough, leaving a ministry well actually has helped me to consider how to run a ministry well.  So going back to a teaching or sermon topic, yes, I think the subject of how to leave a ministry is well worth exploring.  Any takers?

I originally started sharing this story to make a point, and then I forgot what my point was, so I’ll just let the story speak for itself.  It’s my experience of being involved in a parish while it was going through a rather big scandal.

When I was in graduate school I was a parishioner at the Cathedral parish in Las Cruces, NM.  It was an exciting time to be involved in church ministry.  Several people from the parish down the road were instrumental in bringing the LifeTeen ministry to the diocese, and the Cathedral was determined to be the best venue for this youth ministry which immediately involved over 200 teens.  Father Louie, the priest chosen as the spiritual director and the main celebrant at the LifeTeen Masses, was an incredibly dynamic speaker who called things as they were (even if was hard), knew how to preach, and who related amazingly well to the youth.  I quickly started attending the LifeTeen Masses and got involved in the ministry, which involved taking significant leadership in youth retreats, leading youth activities, and being one of ten or so Confirmation teachers to a class of over 100.  It was one of those times where I learned a lot about both the good and not so good side of Christian ministry, made some good friends, and experienced a lot of growth in my faith.

Around that time the Cathedral implemented perpetual Eucharistic adoration.  This means that the Eucharist is exposed constantly in a side chapel and two people commit to praying there for an hour–enough people commit so that there are always two people in the chapel round the clock.  Prayer takes place seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day.  My schedule was unpredictable enough that I did not commit to a particular time during the week but I often came after work, or sometimes after late night socializing with friends, several times a week.  I am convinced that all this prayer on the part of many parishioners played a huge role in the outcome of what follows.

After LifeTeen had been humming along for about a year (I don’t remember the details about the timeline any more), Father Louie made the unfortunate discovery that the Cathedral parish was missing a significant amount of collection money.  When it was all said and done it turned out that the main priest at the Cathedral (not the Bishop) had a gambling addiction and had gambled away $300,000 of offering money.  He was able to keep his habit secret due to some weird accounting practices allowing for secret accounts (among other things) which probably started for innocent enough reasons but which over the years (decades?) had gotten out of hand.  Father Louie was the whistle blower.

The Bishop with some reluctance got on with addressing the issue and assigned a Monsignor (whose name I’ve forgotten) in the diocese to oversee the church side of the investigation (the local police had also been notified and were conducting their own criminal investigation).  I knew this Monsignor mostly from having attended daily Mass at his parish on occasion and having had those brief conversations as you’re shaking the priest’s hand walking out the door afterwards.

As more and more news came out both through the newspaper and from church insiders (and I knew a few), people in the diocese understandably got upset and there was much talk about it all over the town.  By this time Father Louie was already complaining about not being treated well as the whistle blower and he had a lot to say on the matter.

After several months, the Monsignor called a meeting in the parish hall of the Cathedral where he succinctly but thoroughly presented the story of the scandal as he knew it as well as the steps that had been taken and were going to be taken to both address it and make sure this kind of thing wouldn’t happen again.

The priest who had gambled away the collection money was told to sell his home and many of his possessions to at least partly repay what he’d stolen (I believe his house appraised at around $100,000), which he did.  He was removed from his duties as parish priest and sent off to some sort of treatment center in Chicago for people who suffer from extreme gambling addictions.  I never saw him again but I hope that he has been successfully rehabilitated and is doing well in life, hopefully even fully restored to the ministry.

The entire diocese, and I believe possibly even several other dioceses in New Mexico, were going to be subjected to a major external audit of all the financial business in every single parish and all accounting procedures were going to be brought up to more current and transparent methods.  Specifically, all secret accounts everywhere would be abolished, and general good accounting practices would be implemented.  I think the impact of this may have extended beyond the state of New Mexico (or other Catholic parishes had experienced similar issues) because right now financial accounting in US Catholic parishes, including the one I currently work in, is extremely meticulous and thorough, requiring all kinds of signatures and records, and statements are regularly tabulated and made public.  I don’t think a parish priest would be able to spend $5.00 of church money at McDonald’s without at least three people knowing about it.

Father Louie experienced some pretty harsh resistance when he first brought the matter to the attention of his superiors, and it was determined that he had been seriously hurt in the process.  He was asked to take a short leave of absence from his priestly duties and spend a month on a healing retreat as a way to help him process through and recover from the ringer he had gone through.

Along with all those explanations were frequent apologies made on behalf of the Bishop to the people in the diocese for all the pain we had gone through and for having our offering money gambled away instead of spent on the work of God.

I remember sitting in that meeting thinking wow, it looks like this is being handled amazingly well.  The perpetrator had been confronted, made to pay restitution and sent to a place where he could get help for an addiction which had obviously gotten the better of him, the entire way all the parishes would be handling money would be overhauled, and even the whistle blower was being shepherded.  I totally expected people to leave the meeting satisfied that their questions and concerns were addressed and that justice was being done.

Instead, during the Q and A section, there was just a ton of anger as people made statement after statement accusing the diocese of a major cover-up and calling for the Bishop’s resignation.  People were convinced that the only reason the Bishop dealt with this at all was because he was forced to whereas he had known what was going on for years but had ignored it.  People wanted Father Tom (the gambler) in jail, not some posh treatment facility, and I’m not sure what else they were calling for but it all sounded ridiculous.  Some people just wanted to express how they felt, which was fine, but there was this sense I got of “Can’t you see that this scandal has been addressed?  What more do you want?”  I had to reluctantly come to the conclusion that what they wanted was blood and revenge, not restoration.

Not too long after, I bumped into the Monsignor at some social event and without really thinking about it, asked him how he was doing.  He got really sad for a moment and said in a bit of a broken voice:  ”It’s been very difficult and painful.  People have been saying the most hurtful things to and about me.  Please pray for me.”

We had a LifeTeen retreat somewhere in there, and I will always remember that retreat because we did this four part skit about redemption which was this courtroom drama where a sinner was put on trial for sinning, found guilty, and of course in some way (I forget the details pertaining to that skit) his guilt is resolved as of course Jesus has abundantly forgiven all sinners who trust in Him.  I got to play the part of the prosecuting attorney, an incredibly vicious woman named Lucy Fer (pun absolutely intended), a part no one thought I had it in me to carry out (because I was too nice), but apparently I did it well enough that a few of the teenagers on the retreat were struggling with hating me.  I certainly thoroughly enjoyed playing the villain.

One night during this retreat Father Louie and I sat up pretty late at night as he shared with me his experience of being the whistle blower in the scandal and recounted to me how awfully he was treated.  I don’t remember the details but he was crying and went on and on for a long time.  I didn’t have much to say.  I mean, what do you say under those circumstances?  I had this uneasy feeling that maybe I was being confided in too much but I didn’t quite have the strength of character to resist wanting to know all the juicy behind the scenes information or the “honor” of being treated as a confidante to someone in the center of such a major happening.  I started to think he was taking this way harder than he needed to be and that at some point you have to let go of things, forgive, and move on.

A few weeks later, with that conversation still bothering me, I made an appointment to see Father Louie in his office to share my concerns with him and encourage him to let it go.  I certainly did not want to lose him as a LifeTeen priest.  Also, some of my friends who were also at the retreat had complained to me that they’d overheard Father Louie talking to the teens about his feelings and they’d felt that wasn’t appropriate.

I tried to encourage him to let go and forgive and move on, that there were great things for him that he wasn’t seeing from being so focused on the scandal, but I was way out of my element.  He quickly overpowered me with his talk about how much scandal there was in the Church beyond even what our own diocese had suffered.  He had a two inch thick manila folder on his desk.

“Do you know what is in this file?” he asked me.

“I have no idea,” I replied.

“This is a file of cases involving priests sexually molesting children!” he said with a tone of disgust.

“That entire file?” I asked incredulously.

“I have two more just like it,” he replied.

He went on to give me a lecture about how innocent, naive and unaware I was of just how evil and wicked my own Church was and how you can’t just know stuff like what he now knew and let it go, forgive and move on.  The weight of the evil was simply too enormous.

At the time I knew nothing about the priest sex abuse scandal (this all happened years before it broke).  I didn’t want to discount the possibility that this was true, but I struggled to grasp how that could possibly be relevant to what Father Louie and our diocese were going through.

“I don’t know anything about all these other scandals,” I said weakly, “but I do believe our scandal was handled as well as could be expected, not that people didn’t make mistakes or anything, and you have done your part in it, but now it’s time to put it behind you and focus on being a good priest.  Those kids in LifeTeen really need you to be there for them, and you can’t right now because you are so consumed with your own pain.”

“Yeah, that’s exactly what Monsignor told me,” he spat.  ”He wants to send me on this healing retreat!  As if that’s just going to make all this go away!  They just want me out of the way.”

Father Louie refused to go on the healing retreat and eventually left the priesthood, very much a broken and angry man.  Both in that conversation and on the retreat I could see the seeds of destruction already taking root, and I don’t think I have ever felt more helpless than I did in that moment witnessing it.