Emily goes to school, part 1

When I was nine or so, my best friend Emily (who had also been homeschooled until then) went to school. This is the story:

Emily was going to go to school. To the Waldorf school, which was definitely not as much school as public school. But still.

“Mom,” I said, “Maybe I can go to school too.” I was standing in the hall, talking through the bathroom door. Mom had just gotten out of the shower. I’d heard the water shut off.

There was a long pause and I could tell she’d stopped drying her hair. “Why do you want to do that?” Her tone was careful.

“Well, Christine says it won’t be that different from being at home,” I said. I wasn’t sure if Christine had actually said that, but she was Emily’s mom, and she was a big part of the reason I was homeschooled in the first place. Mom had met Christine when Emily and I were only two-years-old. Christine knew a lot about natural childbirth and breastfeeding and slings. When Emily and I were six and seven we carried our baby dolls around in miniature cloth slings. Hers was navy blue, dotted with bright red cherries.

Whatever Emily had, I wanted. Her stuff was always better. Even when it was dirty or broken. Her room was full of mixed up colors, everything ran together. There were rainbow silks spilling out of the dressup box. Her furniture was painted chipping blue and dotted with dried glue bubbles. The floor was smeared with crushed pastels and streaked with chalk.

“They bake bread there and go outside in the woods,” I offered. Emily had told me over the phone. She was going to get stockings to wear with her big clunky boots. She’d cut most of her hair off herself and it stuck up in blond tufts, but she still looked like Tinkerbell and she wanted to see what Tinkerbell would look like carrying an actual lunchbox. “I get to have Perrier and a hardboiled egg everyday,” she told me. It sounded incredibly elegant.

I wanted to eat hardboiled eggs like Emily. It seemed like her family always had them—I imagined a big pot, like a magic cauldron, sitting perpetually on one of the back burners, with an endless supply of slick eggs slipping against each other. When you took one out, another one appeared under the water and bounced to the surface, jostling for its place.

(They still look completely delicious to me. source)

“See, you put the mayo just on the top,” she said, after she’d peeled her egg in the kitchen. She showed it to me. Christine had sliced the top off and held out the jar of mayonnaise. Emily slathered it on the egg with a butter knife and took a messy bite, scrunching her tiny nose like a baby shark attacking a helpless fish. Totally cool. Christine cut the top off another egg and handed it to me. I put mayo on it and took a timid taste. Gross! I hated mayonnaise. The smell was nauseating. Dad made me grilledcheese tunas for lunch all the time, but I always had to leave the room when he got out the mayo.

“Mmm,” he’d say, and lick the slimy goop off the spoon, laughing at me.

“Stop it!!” I felt like I might throw up. It was fine once it was mixed into the tuna salad, but there was something disgusting about it jiggling in that amorphous white mass.

I swallowed hard, forcing myself.

“Pretty good?” asked Emily, finishing hers.

I nodded uncertainly. “I don’t know,” I said.

I didn’t understand how she was going to eat it every day for lunch. I didn’t like the Perrier either. It was just seltzer with more bubbles.  It felt like it was electrocuting my tongue. When I thought about Emily taking her egg out of her cool new lunchbox and eating it, it tasted delicious in my mind. I didn’t know why it wasn’t actually delicious.

“You want to go because Emily’s going,” said Mom.

“No,” I said immediately, knowing that I’d never get anywhere with that argument. “I learned more about the possibility from talking with Emily, but I’m able to make my own decision.”

“I haven’t heard you mention this before now,” said Mom very seriously. She came out of the bathroom in her dark green robe with a towel wrapped around her hair. Jake and I fought over who got to wear Dad’s red robe with the hood when we were being elves or powerful wizards or Jedi knights. The green robe didn’t have a hood so no one wanted it.

“I hadn’t really thought about it,” I said. It was true. This was literally the first time in my life I’d had any desire to even consider school as an option. I mean, just think about what school kids have to do. First of all, they have to get up really, really early. I was supposed to get up at 9:30, but I never did. Mom thought it was important to get up early so that you could “start your day.” When I got up early I never wanted to start my day. I just wanted to go back to sleep and start my day in a long time. Mom said it was more productive to get up at 9:30, because then I could get work out of the way and have more time to play elves outside and the beanie baby game that Jake, Gabe, and I loved. We had a ton of beanie babies. We named them all after people we knew, and then we acted out stories about everyone with them. The whole homeschooling group was there. Josh was the rottweiler because he was so bossy and big. Taylor was the giraffe because he was tall and skinny. David was the platypus because he was so weird and awkward. I was the bat because the bat was just really cute and I liked it best.

I got really good at pretending to be awake in the mornings. I knew exactly when Mom would come up the stairs. I could feel it in my sleep. I grabbed the book lying by my pillow (there was always one there) and propped it open on my chest. She’d come in and say, “Oh, good, you’re awake,” and leave again. It always took her about a half hour to remember to come up again. By then she had been sitting on the couch with Jake and Gabe for about an hour, reading history and historical fiction aloud. I think they knew more than me from the time they were five or so. They remembered all the facts.

School kids had to know facts all the time. Because they were always getting tested. But then they never seemed that smart, which I figured was because they were around other kids all the time, so they probably couldn’t grow up that well. They were really good at being cool. Everyone knew that. They wore cool clothes and they talked in a cool way. But they were mean. Emily was a little bit mean, too, which was how I knew she’d be fine. I didn’t care that she was mean, though, because she was Emily and I’d known her since I was a baby.

School kids had to stay in school all day. That was a good reason not to be one if you could help it. Why would anyone want to stay inside a building all day long? I mean, unless they were painting or writing stories or acting out scenes from one of those ongoing dramas we made up about the forest elves who were fighting off the evil shapechanging wizards. And the school kids weren’t doing that. They were taking math tests.

But Emily was going to school. And the Waldorf school barely even counted, since they baked bread for class, and went outside in the woods all the time.

to be continued….

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I recently had an article published in Life Learning Magazine. It’s actually the first post from this blog. I wish I could link to it, but I haven’t figured out how yet.

The Innovative Educator profiles some unschooled bloggers here. I think I can take some credit…. 🙂