#Drive, Introduction
Escape from school ... and other limitations
“I took [the road] less traveled by, // And that has made all the difference..” —Robert Frost
At some point between tetherball and four square, softball and learning the Hustle, I realized my cousin Scott had been writing to me from places like Hawaii, Borneo, Japan, and Hong Kong.
A fan of The Bobbsey Twins and logic puzzles, I found two things about his letters highly suspicious. First, he only mentioned school for the month or so he and his family lived in Hawaii. Second, Hawaii was the only place I could actually find on my brother’s globe.
I didn’t know much about the “mission field” that he and his parents had traveled to, either, but with each letter I wondered, Had he somehow managed to escape school?
I had to know. Certainly all kids on the planet went to school, even if I couldn’t find said places on the map.
“My mom teaches me,” he wrote.
“Your mom is a nurse. Yes, a school nurse, but definitely not a teacher,” I wrote back. I knew she had given him the gruesome details about our grandfather’s heart attack when he was in second grade and I was in first. That’s what nurses do.
“We get together with other families and Mom teaches things like science and health. The other moms teach writing and math,” he wrote.
Crazy-talk!
Not only was Scott globe-trotting for school, he wasn’t sitting in a dusty, enamel-painted-concrete-block building so old that my mom had gone to school in there. It was 1980. No one had heard of homeschooling yet.
This had to be cheating! —But, his mom wouldn’t allow that.
And apparently, he wasn’t. He even graduated a year early from private school when his family returned stateside for his high school years (more cheating!)
I was hooked.
My kids, should I ever be convinced to marry and have them, would be homeschooled, too. We might not trot the globe, as I had no designs on visiting random islands, a mission field, or Borneo, but my kids wouldn’t waste away at a desk like I had.
Coincidentally, my desire to be a writer began during the same years I was sending snail mail around the world to my cousin. Maybe it was even because I sent letters around the world? Nonetheless, I didn’t pursue it.
I’d dropped out of college and was working as a secretary before I started exploring using words strung in taglines and sentences for profit more seriously. I didn’t consider myself a professional writer until I realized I had more books, clip files, and stacks of journals than furniture.
Even now, after twenty years of professional writing and journalism, I struggle to commit the focus, the blood, sweat and tears that goes into writing a book-length memoir. I have little natural desire to publicly share the negative emotional sides of life that makes experiences and stories that pop off the page in 3-D.
Publishing my experience demands a bravery that still feels awkward. So, I call this newsletter practicing to outwit myself. Like having a driver’s permit—and all of you, your views and comments and feedback, are the authorized drivers that go with me. Because, what if, in reading, you ask questions that criticize my choices and call me out as the crazy, the abuser?
Like I was on November 19, 2012 when my family had our day in civil court, to secure a Protection From Abuse from their dad, my husband. I had followed LegalAid counsel’s advice to bring the kids, aged 12 and 15, to court.
And then, I was publicly castigated as a bad mom, literally on the record, to a room of 100 people by a female, family court judge. Both kids were required to take the stand because they had independently and separately, from me and each other, requested “No Contact” with their dad when interviewed by the public defender’s office.
And yet, the same judge praised him for speaking respectfully to my mother when she took the witness stand. Somehow, I always thought Judge Judy would have been on my side.
Was I a bad mom for teaching them to speak up for themselves, at such young ages?
Or was I a bad mom for letting them do so in her court?
It occurs to me as I write, that the judge found my personal testimony weak, lacking emotional impact. If not for the kids’ testimonies of how scared they were of their dad and tormented by his unpredictable outbursts and threats by the time he was escorted out of our family home by local authorities, maybe she would have let him off?
I guess he snowed that judge the same way I’d been snowed. The same way he’d snowed so many pastors and (paid, professional) counselors and friends with feigned humility, deference, and charm.
But the kids saw through him.
And, despite the judge’s disdain for me, we walked out with a PFA and “therapeutic visits” meaning, with a therapist present, when he saw them. Not that he attempted to see them after the first month until the PFA ran out.
Yep, Josh and Ally were all the evidence I needed at a time when I could barely speak in my own experience, shocked as I was to face the enemy who had fathered them in court.
A decade later, surveys say that their success as adults is my strongest evidence that for all of my metaphorical wrong turns, flat tires, and breakdowns, I chose some of the right roads for us. What follows is my version of that journey.
I welcome your questions, comments, and feedback of any variety. Thanks!