When the Norm Isn’t Right

I love my life. I am grateful that I happened to be born into a loving, middle-class family in a free country. I never missed a meal, a night of sleep, or an educational opportunity.

I am now 44 and the ways of living that I learned aren’t feeling right to me anymore. I’m in this limbo period; there’s a new path to forge and sometimes I stand there, contemplating what to do, for a long time.

This literally happens almost every time I go to the store now. And every new school year when I think about what I want for our kids.

I grew up going to the store for food. I was never taught how to grow food. When we needed food, we drove to the store and bought things. In packages. How it was grown or raised, we didn’t give it a thought.

Today, though I can go to the store and find just about anything I can think up, it’s not working for me anymore. All that access to myriad foods from around the world, and the stuff I really want is the most expensive because it’s either local, humanely raised, or family-produced. And it just costs too darn much.

Tonight I was so hungry. Especially for meat. I eat meat about once or twice a month. A big bag of Foster Farms chicken was on sale for $6.99 but, despite its family-run claim, I didn’t buy it (literally and figuratively). What I really wanted was just a little bit of ground beef. But the moral kind – the kind in which the cow roamed freely, ate grass, and died humanely after living a cared-for life. It was $9 per pound. The smallest package of it, at $11, would have given each of us a few spoonfuls. I left the store without it.

Another thing my culture taught me how to do mindlessly is waste. We never grew up hearing consternation over all the packaging surrounding our food, and where would it all go. We just put it in the trash, and the trash man took it away. We never thought about where “away” was.

I’m getting really tired of taking things out of packages and putting plastic packaging in the trash. I know where it’s going. It’s not going “poof” and disappearing. It’s not that hard to remember to keep bringing my cloth bags to the store and reusing the plastic bags I rinse out and dry between uses. But I still have to keep training myself to go without the things that are prepackaged. I’m baffled that people still buy things for the conscious sake of using them only once and throwing them out – like birthday party decorations, paper plates, plastic utensils; like endless foil to cover casseroles at picnics; like a dozen balloons for any happy occasion. I’m even more baffled that some people who can recycle just don’t.

But how can I judge? Just because they use a few more things than I, I’m still guilty. I am in no state of absolute consumer morality.

A lot of times I end up standing in the store, looking at items (what’s in them, what corporation “made” them, and what packaging surrounds them), and walking out without a whole lot to bring home.

I’m finding another “normal” life thing difficult. School. I was raised going to school. Almost all of us were. The thought of homeschooling never once crossed my mind until our older son asked to be homeschooled in second grade. Since then, I’ve read all kinds of books about it – Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling by John Gatto, a teacher named both New York City Teacher of the Year and New York State Teacher of the Year in the ’90s who then retired and wrote books against the institution of school; The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home, a well-known bible of a manual by Jessie Wise and Susan Wise Bauer; Guerilla Learning: How to Give Your Kids a Real Education With or Without School; etc.

I told our son I’d give him a couple years of it. This is our second. I’m now having a really hard time with the idea of putting him back in school next year. The world tells me he needs the social environment that only school provides. That he won’t catch on to the endless nuances of human life if his years don’t happen within those social and educational walls. He’ll miss out on school dances, bus rides, yadda yadda yadda. And certainly, I think he needs to answer to other adults; care for other kids; turn in assignments I didn’t assign; learn from skilled people from all kinds of backgrounds.

But here’s the thing. He loves to learn. Do kids in school love school? Love learning? Crave being in class rather than out of it? Enjoy science class more than YouTube? Of course not. Aside from the rare anomaly.

Here’s another thing. He’s maturing. He’s becoming more sensitive to what we have to say. He cares about us as a family. He’s in his first teen year and he doesn’t care about all the petty, stupid, dramatic, woeful details that groups of kids hanging around idle at lunchtime have to think up in order to entertain themselves at school. I hear the crass, cynical talk of other kids his age in the library as they play video games in the YA room; I see the same looks and expressions of boredom and carelessness today that I saw on faces throughout my middle and high school years. Is experiencing all that a necessity to maturing in the proper American way?

I don’t know what to do. I’ve thought many times about how I need to start a science institute for kids who crave knowledge and hands-on experience. The kind of place that would make most adults want to go back to school. It would prepare kids for their futures at MIT, and I’d call it TMI. Oh, how our son has craved “too much information” all his years on this earth. So far, he has been the main one finding ways to fill his void. Can I count on school to do a better job of it? I’m not sure.

So often, I stop and think. And think. How am I going to live life in this age? Will I follow the examples set for me, or will I chart my own path? Will I listen to the advice of the masses or take risks few have taken? Will I trust in well-worn cultural patterns or design new ones for our family?