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| My son |
One of my hobbies is still writing fiction. I always have a hard time figuring out when to end a story. I get so involved in my characters, I want to know what happens to them later on. It has been since 2014 that I blogged and today it seems fitting to end this story. It's a happy ending. Today, my son left on his first study abroad trip. This is him at 0-dark thirty this morning, up and ready. According to the flight status, he's just flown over Alaska and will be landing in Japan in a few hours. He's not going for long, two weeks, but he's going. Last week he finished his first year of college, final grades won't even be out until later this week.
Yesterday, I read some of my old blog posts. I talked about his hopes for the future, his plans, his desire to study Japanese. They were only hopes then and the longings of a mother that someday he would get to live that dream. This is just the beginning.
It's not that I didn't believe dreams belonged to people like us, but that real life sometimes smacks hard and these last few years have not been easy. Last year my father died. He had been stationed in Japan during his draft days. Z and his grandfather talked with excitement about the possibility of this trip. He passed away before we knew sure Z was going.
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| My father |
This blog has been the story of our homeschooling journey. While the homeschooling part is over, the journey is still happening. I realized when I took Z to the airport today that I had worked there when I was his age, 18. Z looked so grown up today. When we started this log, he was but a boy, now he is young man I am proud to call my son.
I feel this is a fitting epilogue to our blog, not just because Z is having his first international adventure, but because I know someone reading this is wondering how to support the goals of their children without the faintest idea of how they will come to pass. Someone is trying to provide a decent homeschooling education to child while dealing with the trials of real life, maybe trying to balance school and home, wondering how your child will handle college or real life if they won't finish their math homework - because it's always math, isn't it. Somehow we made it through the homeschooling years and you can too.
I will leave you with my favorite passage from The Iliad:
