Jaci Dawn

The first roadblock to our decision to homeschool our children was that we didn’t know anyone in real life who did it. The second roadblock came from friends and family, and even our church: anyone who can pronounce the word socialization will suddenly question every parenting technique you use. The first roadblock was easier to overcome.

The only person I knew of who homeschooled was an author in Washington State. I knew he homeschooled his four children because he wrote a book about it that consequently fell into my hands, and I read it. That he would later be better known for his novels was a side benefit: for me, David Guterson’s non-fiction treatise on homeschooling, Family Matters: Why Homeschooling Makes Sense, became my road map to home educating our children. If this man, who was a public school teacher at the time, decided to homeschool his children and could make a strong argument on the issue of socialization, then so could we.

Other friends refer back to authors like John Holt  or books like the Moores’ Better Late Than Early.

Our decision to homeschool was made in the late 1990’s. I started to meet local people who did homeschool, all Christians of different denominations. I had one friend in particular who lived just around the bend in the highway, and we often got together so our children could play. She worked full time as a nurse (you can homeschool and work outside the home) and I was a stay-at-home mother. Our children were close to the same age and we had the same underlying faith.

We progressed into homeschooling and soon discovered there were hidden pockets of homeschool support groups locally. Some were specific to a church where all the families were encouraged to homeschool for religious reasons. A nearby school district put together a short-lived co-op to support local homeschoolers and to offer them some of the benefits that publicly schooled children had. Our county library eventually developed a homeschool center.

We discovered these places because we were now using the lingo of homeschooling and they were on our radar. They had existed before, in some form or another, but because we were not looking for them, we did not know they existed. Now we were looking for them – and they were there.

Music lessons, theater, art.

The library, museums, book stores, antique stores.

Sports were nearly always through some community program and not the schools (although we did not participate in sports).

The local community college offered free classes to homeschooled students who could meet certain criteria (over the age of 15 unless the child challenged the test – we did know one boy who started there at age 13). Note: this perk was subsequently challenged by the public schools and other community colleges in the area and it consequently went away, but not before Arwen & Levi made full use of the benefit.

The kids were covered, but what about me? I had that one friend who homeschooled; none of my other friends even considered the idea.

The Internet existed, but not every home had a PC. Social networking consisted of websites like egroups. Egroups was later replaced by Yahoo Groups. I belonged to a small group of horselovers and it was through that media that I was introduced to the online support group that saved my sanity. There are now myriads of such support groups: on Yahoo Groups, Facebook, MySpace (does anyone still use MySpace?), and other social media posting boards.

The Internet saved me. The online support group I joined was a diverse group of homeschoolers who were exploring a radical idea called “unschooling”. I jumped in to a conversation (called a “thread”) and that was it – I was assimilated. That was sometime in 1997. I am still part of that support group, and the people who have passed through those emails are now some of my very best friends, some in real life, some on Facebook, and all through “the ccu-sisterhood” (apologies to the men who have occasionally braved those sacred halls).

I started as a school-at-home homeschooler and quickly found out how difficult it was to manage to do lessons with resentful children. I moved to a more eclectic style, following the advice I received from these online gurus, some of whom were full-on unschoolers in every radical sense of the word. They also supported me when I decided to send Chrystal to public school, then private school, then charter school.

If I needed to rant about a husband who wanted more out of the kids than they were willing to give, I had a sympathetic ear (and often a wise one that said, “Maybe he just wants to feel like he’s part of the team”). A child wrecked a bicycle and made a six-point fall (one point for each part of the body that hits the gravel)? Instant prayer support. My neighbor’s son shot my child in the head with a .BB gun? A calming circle of hugs (the child was fine and the x-ray proved he did, in fact, have a brain in his head).

What if my child can’t seem to wrap his mind around cursive writing? What to do? Maybe cursive writing is not that important. Who says it is important? Why is it important? Can you be willing to let it go?

That kid still doesn’t write in cursive.

Better yet, if one of the online members was going to be in the city near you, there was an immediate clamor for “do you think we could meet? In person?”

I learned the most important things in homeschooling are these: coffee. wine (for mom). dark chocolate. Led Zeppelin. The ability to quote from The Princess Bride. Forgiveness. Library cards. Overdue library books (and checking out more books for your daughter on your card until she can pay off her library fines).

And last, learning how to say Please pass the bean dip when family doesn’t understand your choice (or other real life peers).