If Morganne had been a different child, our lives would be different.
As a baby, Morganne had a high need for contact with Mama. She needed to be held a lot, preferred our own home to anyplace else and disliked crowds. As she grew, she continued to need a lot of quiet time at home and to dislike being in large groups. She also needed to take her time getting used to new situations.
By the time she started preschool, we had pretty much decided that we would either home-educate her or send her to the local Waldorf school. At 3, she needed me to stay with her at preschool for 6 weeks before she felt comfortable with the teacher. She tended to get lost in the crowd in groups of more than 4 children. Because she was a "good" child and a shy one, she didn't get as much personal attention as the more boisterous children.
Obviously, she was not a child who would thrive in a public school.
When I went to interview the principle of the school district's homeschooling program, I went prepared to find a program that tried to turn home education into a pretend classroom. I asked about testing, curriculum and so forth. Eric answered my question by emphasizing that the homeschool program wanted to support families who wanted to educate their children, that many of the program's families chose to unschool, that the program was comprised of certified teachers who had homeschooled their own children.
At that time, I was struck by his constant use of the term "homeschooling families". Surely it was the children who were being homeschooled, not the whole families.
Morganne began her official homeschooling career at the same time that Garry and I decided to start our home-based business. For the first time in Garry's and my lives, we lived in a family where all of the members were based at home. Both of us had grown up and lived in families where most of the members spent their days in institutions -- schools, corporations, hospitals. The family was together only in the hectic mornings, the exhausted evenings and the busy weekends.
That all changed.
We are now all together, more or less, all day. Garry and I work at computers in the living room and one bedroom. Morganne and Matisse play independently for a while and then come to us with a book, a request or a cuddle. Our work and family time is carved up in smaller chunks, family and work blending and spilling over into one another.
We do a lot more family projects, now. We can work on a woodworking or sewing project for half an hour or all day, just as long as Morganne's interest lasts. We can adjust our lives to the needs of the members, not the needs of the clock. We don't rush as much.
It's a radical departure from the way we were raised. Garry has a closer relationship with the girls now. Our energy is focused on the family. We are a "homeschooling family", all of us learning, all of us growing, all of us working together as a team.
Post-industrial society, here we come!
Copyright © 1994-7 by
Heather Madrone. All rights reserved.