by Mary James

So... what about socialization? If you have homeschooled for much more than a year, you will no doubt roll your eyes at the very mention of the subject. But I would challenge you to remember that there was a time when you did not know the answer to that question. There was a time when you did not know that there was more homeschool curriculum in this country than a person could ever plow through. There was a time when you fretted over how to keep track of what you were teaching and, yes, there was a time when you wondered what in the world you were going to do with your toddler while you were teaching math to your first grader. Hard though it may be to remember, there was a time when YOU were a new homeschooler.

In 1998, my husband and I began to lead informational meetings on home education on behalf of our regional support group, the Christian Home Education Association of Central Texas. Each month, we would head to our local branch of the Austin Public Library to offer a table full of resources and a question and answer session for those investigating the idea of homeschooling. Having served on the board of CHEACT, I have had many opportunities to work with new and prospective homeschoolers, but after about a year of hosting these library meetings, I found that I was beginning to be really burdened for the families that were searching for information. Something about the intensity of their questions began to break through the cocoon that ten years of homeschooling had spun around me. I found myself looking back to the time when ninety-eight percent of my social circle was not made up of homeschoolers... to the time when I picked up my first A Beka catalog after a year of using kindergarten workbooks from a teacher supply store and thought I had discovered treasure... to the first time I walked into a homeschool bookfair and got absolutely choked up at the sight of 1,000 people just like me and 60 vendors with more homeschool curriculum than a person could ever plow through!

Working with prospective homeschoolers has, in a way, brought me full circle and caused me to rejoice in the Lord at the work He has wrought in my family. I am thankful for the freedom to homeschool my children, I am thankful for the work of the many families who put support groups and vendors at my disposal, and I am thankful that I found the answers to my questions. One way I have found to give back to the Lord a small degree of what He has given me, is to work with these new homeschoolers at the library each month. But after about a year of involvement, I began to feel a new burden. Month after month, I would find myself answering the same questions over and over. And so many times I found myself hearing similar stories from one family after another. Every now and then I would think, "... if you had just been here last month, there was a lady with the very same situation!" It occurred to me that if I could just get all of these homeschooling moms together at once, they would make friends and begin to develop their own support system. And so was born Smoothing the Way, a support group designed specifically for first-year homeschooling moms. I knew the Lord had placed the idea on my heart when the person I most desired as a co-hostess answered my request by saying this was where the Lord was leading her, too. I can look back now and see the circumstances that brought us together in this work and I marvel at how God goes before us!