A joint post by Ouisi & Dave
Ouisi:
Hey. You didn't respond to my text.
Dave:
You sent a text? Hang on. . . oh crap. "Send response by noon." Well, that didn't happen.
Ouisi:
Help me out here. I'm going to write about some of the things that makes Mom such a great parent.
Dave:
Um, panic. My brain just went completely blank.
Ouisi:
Okay, I'll start. One thing our home was defined by was a lack of electronic clutter. I grew up without constant TV and radio and other entertainment. Patrick grew up with that: all the time, at least two things turned up
loud, and with nobody really paying attention to it. The multimedia was
background noise. We both wanted to create a quiet home for our family
where it's easy to focus and feel peaceful.
It's a small-talk question. "You used to live in a small town? How many kids were in your graduating class?" people will ask. Or, "I went to Thomas Jefferson. Did you go to high school around here?" That one is easy to dodge if I don't feel like getting into the issue: "No, I grew up in Tennessee."
See, there's no telling which reaction I'll get once I disclose that I was homeschooled. Will it be "Oh, that's interesting," or "Really? My brother-in-law homeschools his kids," or the dreaded, "That's so strange. I never would have thought you were homeschooled. You don't seem like it."
It's not a fun conversation to have. For many people, public school is such a basic framework of reality that they can't believe I could grow up homeschooled and not have any resulting mutations, like an extra limb or gills. Having been homeschooled doesn't make me cool, the way that growing up in a foreign country makes people cool. It doesn't make me clever, the way that attending a competitive prep school makes people clever. It makes me. . . wrong. Neglected, probably; repressed, certainly; and absolutely uneducated.
When I was smallish-- maybe eight or ten-- I found myself on a bus sitting next to a young woman. We made small talk. I mentioned that I was homeschooled.
Suddenly, the woman's face scrunched up. Her eyes narrowed. Her mouth pursed. And she proceeded to tell me that homeschooling was the stupidest thing that anyone could do, and that I would never learn anything, and that I wasn't learning how to socialize, and that my parents must be real idiots or hate me if they were homeschooling me. She knew better, because she was a public schoolteacher.
I hadn't said anything to her about the quality of public schools in the region (god-awful) or about the benefits of homeschooling. All I'd done was mention that I was homeschooled. I sat there, stunned and silent. Children know it when they've met a bully, even when the bully is an adult, and I thought she must be a nasty, insecure person to pick on a little kid. I also thought she was nuts for terminating a perfectly polite conversation in order to snarl that I was not properly socialized.
But she knew who her enemy was. It was the little kid sitting next to her. I was the upending of everything she believed in and worked for. So she hated me.
