It’s five in the morning. I have been awake for over an hour. I can’t sleep – maybe it’s some hormonal thing or maybe there’s too much on my mind. I decided to get up because I have way too much to do for work and all I really want to do it spend some quality time with my daughter today helping her with her school work.

I am so afraid, no matter how hard I try, that’s not going to happen.

I went to the parent support group yesterday for home school. What a wonderful, diverse (yet oddly similar) group of people. I don’t think I have met so many passionate, committed people in one place in quite awhile.

The experienced people were so “Zen” about home school; they weren’t worried that their children might be falling behind or particularly stressed about how they were balancing everything.

The virgins, the ones like me, sat there wide-eyed, spitting out our questions that were both specific and unformed. Questions like “how have you taught math with manipulatives?” and “how many hours a day do you teach?” to “how to you do home school and work full time?” Like I said, we were all over the place.

I left feeling a little better about not having to do things “right.” But I still panic. Katie is still unhappy about friends. She isn’t meeting anyone new yet – anyone she feels like she could be friends with – and she’s missing that daily hit of kids that she got from regular school. I don’t think she’s missing anything else.

She’s getting way more sleep, we don’t watch TV at night anymore (or fight over homework deadlines), we are engrossed in a book we are reading together. She’s had more opportunities to do many more things like field trips, babysitting, more elaborate play at home (because we aren’t rushing around all the time). But she’s lonely. And that’s something that a mother can’t really fix.

So I am up early, trying to get work done – okay, after I finish blogging to get all this out of my head – trying to get work done so I can spend some quality time with Katie today.

Maybe, just maybe, by putting it down in writing, I can make it happen.