by Kh. Anna Phelps
My name is Kh. Anna Phelps, married to Fr. John Phelps here in Goldendale, WA at Ss. Joachim and Anna Orthodox Mission. I am currently working as a real estate agent after my husband has gone to full-time priesthood. We are originally from Wasilla, AK where we had our first 7 children. We began exclusively homeschooling them there.
I love to write stories about our life in Alaska; homesteading; homeschooling; home birthing; business; entrepreneurship; houses; finding out that Christ truly loved me; breaking myself of soap operas, then TV, then talk radio, then Facebook/Instagram, and finally radio music. I love writing recipes, specifically good fasting ones (hopefully I can write a cookbook, God willing!), and generally giving people practical advice on all of these topics–oh and making sure to include lots of run-on sentences! I have dreamed of being the next Orthodox Christian version of “Dear Abby”, not that I’d be very good at it: I seem to love sticking my foot in my mouth and have strong opinions on most everything....much to my husband’s chagrin.
Today, I am writing the story of how my husband tricked me into homeschooling our kids.
Then:
I was raised in a rural Alaskan middle-class household in a beautiful cedar-sided home that my dad mostly built himself. We shared a well with our neighbor, and that good little well produced one gallon of water per minute, but we were rich in house, in view, and in community. There were hundreds of acres of woods behind our house that were completely untouched, so exploring the birch- and spruce-filled woods with my best friend was a regular pastime. Across the street from our house was the huge church lawn where all the neighborhood kids would gather after dinner every bright summer night to play soccer until the church bells rang at 9pm, and we all went home.
To say that my upbringing was idyllic is an understatement. Most of our neighborhood went to the same church and those that were committed to the Truth joined themselves to the Orthodox Church when I was ten years old. I was blessed to attend our local church school, but when I entered seventh grade I had to attend the large public middle school that was about a half-hour bus ride away. My shy self struggled only knowing one other girl from my elementary class, unlike the other kids who were joining the large school with their other classmates from their larger elementary schools. After getting dumped by my “only friend” at school and crying most nights, dreading the next day, my parents relented and let me attend a smaller Christian school that could offer middle school grades. I attended there for the second semester but went back to the public school for 8th grade where I discovered I had made friends after all–they even asked me where I had disappeared to the year before! I was able to enter high school with a group of non-popular but kindhearted friends. Although high school was socially difficult, I was able to survive. Graduating from highschool was the second best day of my life.
Two years later:
Raymond and I were in the first Holy Cross house (1995-96) up in Eagle River, AK with Fr. Paul Jaroslaw as our priest. We were courting and quickly getting serious about marriage. He wanted to go “talk to me” about some things before we could continue our relationship. I was nervous about this talk: what is so serious that we have to have a *talk*?
We hopped into the car, and it took us up to our favorite scenic drive along the rapids of the Eagle River. We wound our way up into the Chugach Mountain range, and he began, “I would want you to be a stay-at-home mom.”
My heart almost exploded out of my chest: this is what I WANTED to do with my life. I never wanted a career, and here’s this man telling me that he can provide for me and a family and saying that he didn’t want me to go out and make money, just to simply stay home and raise our children. I readily agreed that this was a great idea.
“I want you to homeschool our children.”
“Oh no....” I said in my head. I had NEVER considered homeschooling my future children. So, I thought briefly about my own school experience: not great, definitely not a “good” place to send kids, between the foul language and the rampant sex-before-marriage problem. Simple logic made me quickly realize that I would not want to subject my future children to such things.
“But I never have wanted to be a teacher” was my next thought. I said so to my future husband. He assured me we would do it together and it wouldn’t be as hard as it sounds. I slowly agreed that this would be a wise decision in the end.
“I’d like you to be willing to be a priest’s wife; I think that I’ll be a priest someday.” My heart sank. Doesn’t he know?
“But I don’t even like going to church!” I blurted out. “I don’t know how I could ever be a priest’s wife! My sister should be a priest's wife, not me; she actually likes going to church!”
He said, “It’s ok, you don’t have to like going to church; you just have to bring the kids to church and support me.”
“Are you sure? I am not pious or any of those things that priest wives should be. I would be a disappointment.” However, deep down, hidden away in my heart, I knew that I longed for God, and I had high hopes that someday I would grow up and get serious about life and put off the “lukewarm self” that I knew me to be.
“It’s ok, it’ll still be a long time before I’m ordained. I also will need to grow up a lot. I just want a wife who’s ok with me being a priest and knows that the church will require a lot of me and my time.”
Thankfully, my parents raised me to be extremely independent. My mom had convinced me that I would need a career to help the family and that wives can no longer afford to stay at home. She taught us kids to work hard and work every day, I knew life was about working. I believed her and believed that I was facing a life of being a mom and juggling a job like she always had. So, the idea of being just a mom and being supportive of his priesthood didn’t seem nearly as daunting. I reminded him that I wouldn’t like going to church, but I’d be ok with him liking to go to church. I reluctantly agreed that I would support him becoming a priest someday.
Now:
Raymond is now Father John and he has been a priest for six years. We have graduated our four older children with high school diplomas from our homeschool named St. Paisios Academy. We have had a difficult but fruitful marriage of 26 years. I don’t hate going to church, but I’m not the best at it. I do love reading spiritual books now and I try my hardest not to be lukewarm. Ironically, I have a part-time career as a real estate agent; and I previously started, ran for 15 years, and sold a successful mailbox business.
I have discovered a few key tricks to successful homeschooling–namely find curricula that work for the teacher first, then secondarily for the child; encourage the child to love learning and school won’t be a struggle...but some subjects might be difficult and that’s ok. My main piece of advice, I learned from my husband: “It’s our job to screw up our kids’ education, not the public school’s.” Once you stop being afraid of messing up and accept the fact that you WILL make mistakes and miss a lot, you stop being afraid and just let them soak it all in. If you forget to teach them something, they will ask you later, “why didn’t you teach me (fill-in-the-blank).” You then shrug and tell them go ahead and learn about it, and they will.