Radical

This blog has been quiet this week because nothing else in our lives has been. We’ve had a birthday, a family member we’ve not seen in 11 (11!) years visiting, braces removal, and lots of party planning. So much party planning that I am starting to think in yellow and purple, as a matter of fact.

Tomorrow, our daughter walks across the stage at the state homeschool graduation. She’ll wear a cap and gown, she’ll move her tassel from right to left, and we’ll hand her a diploma certifying that not only did she meet our requirements for closing the door on her official high school career, she met the state’s as well.

And like that, the door to a season will close. Now, it’s just this season, and it’s just with this child. But oh, my heart. It is the end of so much.

In January of 2002, I sat beside my precocious 4 and a half year-old, reading Charlotte’s Web on our ratty loveseat and thinking truly radical thoughts. What if we didn’t send her to preschool in the morning? What if I stopped trying to fit her (and us) into a box that didn’t quite fit? What if I stopped trying to teach her to read and just acknowledged that somehow, she already knew how? What if we gave up on the notion that she needed constant exposure to peers to be socialized? What if we homeschooled?

All of this led to more radical thoughts, and more radical steps, until finally, there I was one morning, dragging the melamine-topped, child-sized table and chairs into our dining room, fitting a triangular pencil into my little girl’s hand and saying, “If you can read it, you can write it.”

And so began the journey that winds its way to a final, enthusiastic culmination on a small stage tomorrow afternoon.

We’ve spent the last week pouring over 12 year’s worth of memories in the form of photographs, reliving every baking soda and vinegar volcano eruption, every papyrus paper making, every 4H fair season. Looking at it now, that thing that seemed so radical at the outset clearly mellowed from “are we getting this right?” to “this is how we do life” very, very quickly. Without fanfare, without a rule book. We have beautiful images preserved–not just in my mind– of a sweet, freckled girl reading at sunset in a tent in Tijuana not because the school policy for 5th graders required 20 minutes of silent, sustained reading every night … but because it never occurred to her that this was a school book and she ought to view it with suspicion at best, and contempt at worst. We have photos of the jeopardy-style quiz games we used to review history facts, and of the amazing display of artwork she was able to present after a summer class conducted by a talented, professional artist who happened, also, to be a homeschooling mom. We have photos of camping trips that were more than nights in the woods, but excuses to visit cultural and historic landmarks. We have photos of French lessons in progress, of group film classes, of a girl sitting behind the wheel of a car for the first time. We have photos that prove that the fear that she’d have no friends, or be unable to fit in with her peers, were rooted not in reality, but in some alternate universe.

We have photos of a life well-lived. Tomorrow and Sunday, it will be a life well-celebrated as our family and friends come together to say that this journey, which was undertaken quietly, within the confines of our own home, was played out in a community that has both benefited and contributed to the growth, character, and education of the young lady who stands before us today.

That small, radical step in my dining room has led us here, to this sweet spot of closure. But perhaps the most beautiful, the most radical part of all is that even with the culmination of a diploma being placed into my daughter’s hands, the most radical piece of the entire puzzle does not end. True, she’s not headed to a 4-year university in the fall. But rather, in the style of this unique, meandering journey we’ve helped chart for her, she’s excitedly signing up to audit a college French course this summer, before she decides precisely what it is that she’ll be doing in the upcoming year. Just because. Ask her why she’d pursue something out of which she gains nothing, why she’d invest time and energy in throw-away pursuit like a class with no credit, and she’ll look at you as if you’ve grown a third eye.

Because that dining room lesson was a shot across the bow that taught my daughter that time spent seeking to deepen one’s understanding, energy invested in gaining knowledge is worthwhile. Even when no grade is going on record, and even when no one is watching. Learning is pleasurable. It is ongoing. And it is one of the uses of your time which you rarely regret.

Which is, as you know, radical. And oh, so rich.