community quandaries

Here is the girl who reports with astounding attention to detail on every birthday, word wall addition, time out, and social intrigue from her day in kindergarten. I must admit, on the few occasions I've spent time with her classmates, I have been equally enthralled by them. And in September, when the four of us went to Back to School Night, we felt irrepressibly happy. I am certain it was about being in a harmonious public space after such a long sojourn in a private suburban world. That night felt like returning to a part of myself that had been long neglected. We were thrown together with all sorts of other families whom we would never befriend in our regular life. But because of our common investment in this little school, we found points of connection across difference. When I am feeling discouraged about an inane worksheet Frances brings home, I sometimes think of Back to School Night. 

But there are other goods. Yesterday while making bread I sat a bag of flour on one half of  Laurel's Kitchen to keep the page open to the recipe I use. That cookbook opens with an essay by Carol Flinders called "The Work at Hand." Strangely enough, I've never read it - not til yesterday, when a few pages floated up to meet the flour, exposing these passages to my view:

When we turn our home into a place that nourishes and heals and contents, we are meeting directly all the hungers that a consumer society exacerbates but never satisfies. This is an enormously far-reaching achievement, because that home then becomes a genuine counterforce to the corporate powers-that-be, asserting the priority of a very different kind of power.
...
We are on a frontier, surrounded by wilderness, and the job at hand is to make a clearing - to clear a space and determine that what goes on within that circle will be a prototype of the world as you would like it to be. The thrilling thing is to see those small circles begin to touch upon one another here and there, and overlap - sturdy outposts, grounds for hope. (pg 30)

I know there are potential problems with this way of thinking, but the observation strikes me as true. If we do not make choices within our small circles that reflect our hopes for the whole world, then we must be cynics.

Mike and I have been doing this odd thing lately. We toss ideas about how we would homeschool our kids, as if this were in some way a possibility (thus far, I assure you, it is not). Yet how we love to fantasize about mornings spent reading poetry, playing with shapes and numbers, drawing botanicals, and writing stories! Our pedagogical reveries tap into a yearning I have been feeling of late - a yearning to set up our family life in a way more radically true to our ideals.

When Frances explains to me with great sincerity that the most important thing to learn in kindergarten is how to color in the lines (No one can go to first grade until they learn to do it, Mama!), I am positively deflated. I want to retreat to our sturdy outpost, spread out the big roll of brown paper on the floor and engage in some wild Pollock-esque splattering. Since we moved here I haved long for community. Could it be that the best way to realize that sense of connection is to cultivate the tiny community in our own home?

Two competing narratives about how to be a family in the world are vying for my allegiance. The exuberant kindergarteners say: throw in your lot with us! Mass culture isn't great, but that's where the people live, and perhaps we cannot be who we are meant to be without each other. But. But maybe there are other places and ways to connect across difference. Because when I volunteer to ring up Justin Bieber memoirs at the Scholastic 'Book' Fair and then walk past the breakfast bins outside the classrooms filled with chocolate milk and some kind of packaged morning cupcakes, I am so discouraged. These things do not nourish, heal, or content! They are vulgar and corrosive and make us want more awful stuff. I wince to think of children being fed (or rather, starved) with such fare.

So I slip into fantasies about a homeschooling coop - a small circle that might grow. A collective that would recognize the joy children take in learning and discovering, and do its best to avoid squishing it. Of course I would go insane. Of course Frances would start a hunger strike in protest. The only way it could work is if all of you, dear reader pioneers, decided to come pitch a tent in my backyard and found this educational outpost with me.

Open invitation, people.

(Maybe these pictures from the Christmas pageant will help convince you.)