Father’s day gone MAD
Brett barely got a birthday this year (and it was his fortieth!) and now he’s barely getting a father’s day. Poor Brett. He deserves a parade and instead he’s getting a turkey sandwich. We’re going to have a Father’s evening celebration this week when life gives us more room for celebrating.
I was thinking about Dr. Tiff’s recent decision to put her kids in school next year and Little Blue School’s reaction. I tell you, I hear both their screams.
Last year it felt like Noah lost another homeschool playdate friend every time we turned around and it hit me somewhere around the solar plexus. Some of these weren’t so surprising — they were friends who always planned to put school on the calendar or friends who were ambivalent and struggling — one was a hard-core homeschool family and we were all shocked. Oh lord, the emails! They were flying around as we deconstructed it (and I know her ears were burning because she knows how we all talk). What I heard most often was, “I totally get why she did it. There are days when I am thisclose to doing the same damn thing.”
I think it’s enormously brave to change your mind about something that’s as fundamental as how we school our kids. I think that dropping out of school is brave; I think that dropping out of homeschooling is brave. I admire parents who wrestle with big decisions, who wrestle with their ambivalence and who have the audacity to say out loud, in public, “Look, I changed my mind.”
But I have mixed feelings, too, when a friend leaves homeschooling. I want everyone to love homeschooling. I want us to prove all those naysayers wrong by not only raising happy, healthy winners of spelling bees but also by maintaining our own motherly sanity in the process. I want this because there are so many people lined up to tell me how wrong I am to stick to my guns on this.
The other part of my mixed feelings is that I sometimes wish I could send my kids to school. (I know I can so rather I’ll say I wish I wanted to.) It would be easier to have my kids in school because then we wouldn’t have to constantly be pasting that stiff grin on our faces when the soccer coach, the Hebrew teacher, the nosy neighbor, the critical relative ask, “Why on earth are you homeschooling?” Frankly I’d love to pass as normal. (This is me at my whiny best.)
We’ve made a lot of choices that put us on the fringe of various groups, “Yes, she’s adopted. No, we’re Jewish. Actually we’re interfaith. Well, we homeschool.” I know that as fringes go these aren’t exactly on par with other fringes but they’re there and sometimes it’d be nice to spend more time in the middle. And sending the kids to school would be one giant leap into middlehood so I kinda envy my friends’ leaps into middlehood. Not that it was an easy decision for them, not that middlehood was their motivation — it’s all about projecting my own personal neuroses on them.
I am both absolutely 100% committed to homeschooling and starkly ambivalent. The education part hasn’t got me worried. I kinda nailed that whole homeschooling philosophy somewhere around our first year of struggling (I may revisit it when Noah hits his teens and/or Madison hits homeschool age). I worry more about maintaining the lifestyle and my sanity. It’s hard to take the road less-traveled and having fellow travelers makes it easier. When one of us understandably heads back toward the mainstream it can make me feel suddenly, scarily fragile.
Ahh well, “Keep your eyes on your own plate!” That’s what I’m always telling myself. I’m way too prone to thinking that other people’s experience have something to do with me. This is yet another life lesson to me that projecting is a terrible waste of time.
Well put. It’s odd, that you echo my feelings when someone decides to leave our school and go back into traditional public school. I understand it on some level, our school takes an awful lot of committment as a parent and a family. I too daydream about dropping my kids off and picking them up and having my own life in between. So I know why they may make other choices. But on another level it’s wounding, I went everyone to be in love with our school and think the sacrifices are beyond worth it.
Strange you should post about this as I just wrote an entry about my feelings about a friend leaving O’s school (for another school). So it’s not just homescholling that brings up these pangs.
http://susoz.typepad.com/personal_political/2006/06/double_whammy.html
I think you’re right - what else can we do? - about keeping your eyes on your own plate, but still, it’s painful to go through this - lots of little endings.
I don’t know - middlehood is actually one of my goals! I want to be normal for once, damnit! just kidding. I think school is going to be difficult for us as a family in some ways, but homeschooling was becoming very difficult. I’m just hoping to strike a better balance for our family. Something, well… down the middle. See, I told you middlehood is an honorable goal! Thanks for responding