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My boys have a friend who used to be over here almost every night. A few
times I got really impatient with it and said "Joey, go home." But when he was
15, he quit going to school and said he was homeschooling too. He lives about
three blocks away, but he was not at home enough for them to ever talk to
him. He would go home MAYBE once or twice a week, for a few hours. Once he
walked over there to get an apple because we didn't have any. It was a disruption
of my relationship with the boys for a while, because either I took Joey with
us somewhere, or we didn't go.

Two things bothered me most about the Joey era (which lasted about a year and
a half):

I had never before that imagined WHY the state would require 180 days of
attendance for homeschoolers. "How stupid!" I had thought, but Joey was NOT at
his house 180 days that year. He was at our house for way over 250 of them.
He was sleeping on the floor in Kirby's room, usually.

Joey said, when I asked, that he was doing a correspondence school. "Like
American School?" I asked. He looked a little confused, and muttered something
in the very-vague affirmative. I don't know when he would have had time to
do that, but he did start being at his house a day or two a week, so it's
possible. I don't think it was happening, though. I think this:

I think his mom planned, if she got in trouble, to point at me and say he was
at our house and we were homeschoolers and he was doing whatever all MY boys
were doing.

Joey's mom died last year, of blood clots. She had been prescribed Comoden
(I think that's the blood clot medication, and I probably spelled it wrong) and
special diet, but she apparently didn't keep up with that, and she died.
Joey's not here nearly as much anymore, but he's here a time or two a week, and
that's fine.

Joey's okay. He's intelligent and honest and very shy and could've used
braces and way more attention from his family. Things like driver's ed are just
passing him by. I dont know what the situation is with his dad, who's a
plumbing contractor (I think) and seems not to work much. He has a dangerous older
brother who was in mental lock-up for a while for having tried to kill the
younger brother with a shovel. Because of that and the obvious lack of concern
for where Joey was and for how long, I didn't run him off altogether. I
talked to his mom twice. She was grateful Joey had a better place to go. I guess
she was unable or unwilling to just make her own home a better place. That
was neglect. She neglected her own health, too, and neglected to live until her
children were grown.

What we're doing can be passed on through ideas and inspirations and example,
but it's not transferable and it's not shared. Learning happens inside each
person. Parenting happens inside each family, in the relationship between
each child and each parent. There is optimal unschooling and there is
half-assed unschooling, and there's neglect, and generally others neither know nor can
prove one way or another what is what and who is how.

I'm glad for the internet and e-mail and message boards. We can share more
information in a week nowadays than existed altogether on the planet about
unschooling/open-classroom/alternative education/natural learning thirty years
ago. We have a HUGE advantage. But we're still doing something touchy and
alternative and that's not as easy as it looks.

I love these exchanges, but each unschooling mom eventually has to create
herself an unschooling mom and have her OWN knowledge and her OWN certainty and
confidence.

Sandra