Sand Opera Lenten Journey Day 30: Punk Means Homeschool

Sand Opera Lenten Journey Day 30: Punk Means Homeschool

You search the Scriptures,
because you think you have eternal life through them;
even they testify on my behalf.
But you do not want to come to me to have life.

--from The Gospel of John Chapter 5

In the above moment from the Gospel of John, Jesus is having an original “come to Jesus moment”—saying that we keep looking for something in holy writ but we’re not willing to commit to the real life—to him. I can relate to that sense of resistance, wanting a short cut to an eternal life, and also wanting not to give up my self. It’s one of the things that attracted me to second-wave punk rock, back in the late 1980s—bands like Fugazi proposed an alternate way of living, not related to the logo on your shirt or the amount in your wallet, but how you carved your own way. My friend Jim Doppke and I started a secret band called Wrist, following in the tradition of thousands of garage and bedroom and basement kids who just wanted to make our own music.

A lot of conversation about punk focused on its provocations or its style, but that totally missed the point. To be punk meant to do things your own way and by your own means (DIY—Do It Yourself), to listen to your gut and the music in your head, not follow what others told you was cool. He wrote a song, after being harassed on the road by an aggressive driver, called “Punk Rokkers Drive Slow.” We listened to Tsunami sing “Punk Means Cuddle,” all of which I shared with my own punk rokk girlfriend, Amy Breau, who hadn’t listened to punk but was punk all the same. She did things her own way. She still does.

We watched “The Punk Singer” last night, about the riot grrrl Kathleen Hanna (of Bikini Kill and Le Tigre), and that’s what got me to thinking again about punk rock. Hanna struggled against a constant resistance to and even hatred of the truths that she had to tell, the fact that she felt as if she, alongside so many other women, were always doubted, their authority always questioned, their truths belittled or dismissed. Hanna sings: “If you could see / but were always taught / That what you saw wasn’t real. HOW DOES THAT FEEL? IT FEELS BLIND.”   

During the time of wars, Amy Breau and I raised our children our own way, responding to their needs and ours as best we could, homeschooling and trying to perform that difficult balance between challenging and nurturing, between protecting and exposing them to the world. Every day—and sometimes moment by moment—we were challenged to figure out how to do this thing, to raise these new lives. The poem below from Sand Opera, and Amy’s essay, “Playing Into The Wind” explore that journey.       

From “Hung Lyres” (Sand Opera)

@

I had no names to blazon their tender

curves, their riverine curves

so took the ones we inherit: auricle

to name the human bloom—

what does it mean, amputee?

lobed trumpet that listens to the oracle

of cymballed world: canal & drum

           

vestibule to the oceanic home

where windows are elliptical & circular

            is there such a thing as “orphan”?

& we host a motion labyrinth, a squid.

Maleus, incus, stapes. Cover your ears

dear child, your cartilage is not yet hard—

it’s too soon to know to hear is to bend.

Your silk purses will sow the wind.

Your flexible shells haul their own ocean.

“Playing Into the Wind” by Amy Breau (first appeared in Cleveland Magazine)

We started off as reluctant home-schoolers, unable to find a kindergarten fit for our eldest.  When Adele was 4, my husband, Phil, nodded toward my nightstand. "The titles grow increasingly dire." Where once sat a dog-eared copy ofThe Fussy Baby Book, now there was a stack: The Highly Sensitive Child, Raising Your Spirited Child, The Explosive Child.

None of us were sleeping. We had a newborn, and Adele still woke several times a night. Her run-ins with food dye were case studies on why Red No. 40 is banned in Europe. Once, after I'd abandoned a full grocery cart at Heinen's to get her home, kicking and screaming, she scaled a bookshelf and declared, wide-eyed, "There are holes in the walls, and I'm walking through them."

We had to sort things out. I was exhausted, handling tantrums and fielding phone calls from her pre-K teacher. What was I going to do about my daughter's refusal to put her sitting bones on the story rug or wear her coat when it was 50 degrees? Was she kidding?

One night, making dinner, I heard a story on NPR about imaginative play, how children galloping like horses aren't just engaging in — well, child's play. Imaginative play in childhood develops higher reasoning, flexibility and problem-solving in adults.

I put down the spatula. Pretty much every unwanted outcome — dropping out of school, crime, drug use — is associated with difficulties in these abilities to self-regulate. Those results weren't hard to imagine with our preschooler hepped up on food dye.

Was that what she needed? More time to play, run herself ragged in the woods, work out her being-in-the-world? 

The first year of home school was the best we'd had as a family. We had time — to paraphrase Theodore Roethke — to learn by going where we had to go.

Out of paper and newfound freedom, our 5-year-old constructed a toilet with a raiseable lid and a cart with functional wheels. She illustrated Russian fairy tales and embraced history books as invitations to costume and role-play. But what she loved, above all, was mucking about with home-school friends at Horseshoe Lake in Shaker Heights.

That year, as she played, Phil and I discovered our girl had a food intolerance. Once we put her on a low-histamine diet — avoiding aged and fermented foods such as cheese, yogurt and sausage — five years of intractable sleep issues resolved overnight.

There was more to sort out. But once we'd made the choice to step off the rails, what seemed at first a darkened field lit up, spokes of gleaming possibility stretching before us.

Another year like that? Yes. Please.

Several years later, with friends, our girls spent hours crafting an oversized kite. They worked out questions of material, aerodynamics and design, not to mention collaboration and leadership.

The kite never flew.

Somehow, I restrained myself as they duct-taped kebab skewers to a torn-up bedsheet, then swapped the skewers for thick branches. They floated hypotheses, kept alternating materials. It was downright empirical, that testing of physical boundaries, that sensory immersion of childhood that shapes how we understand the physical world.

In September, home-schoolers gather on Lake Erie's shore for not-back-to-school parties. A diverse and lively community — unschoolers and education professors opting for play-based learning; families concerned about bullying or academics; folks who planned to home-school from birth, and those who dip in briefly between schools, jobs, medical procedures.

Last spring, our friend Audrey orchestrated Medieval Day for home-schoolers at Squire's Castle. Bagpipes roused us from the 21st century through the bannered stone archway one family built with power tools, wood and paint. When we reached the castle, the Venerable Bede (sporting Phil's graduation robe and cap) rallied the knights, in medieval verse, to enter the field.

Other families set up archery targets and a homemade catapult, bocce, badminton, fencing demonstrations and tables where kids could illuminate manuscripts.

This fall, as Adele enters eighth-grade in a brick-and-mortar school for the first time, I'm amazed at the person she's become. It's less parental pride than gratitude, and wonder at the increasingly realized sketch of herself she's drawing into the world.

My former kindergartner, who once charged into Shaker Lakes wetlands that first year of home schooling, spent last year researching factors that influence reptile and amphibian populations at the Cleveland Metroparks Ohio and Erie Canal Reservation. I picked her up one evening, only to find her covered in sulfurous, inky swamp. Wader malfunction, she grinned.

Home schooling changed us as parents too. Our emphasis shifted, at some point, from assignments we gave our girls to the real work they assign themselves. We learned to trust our children's development and ourselves as parents along the way.

When our girl was struggling, I couldn't see how to let her go. It was easier to keep her close, manage whatever we could. But now, we're all so ready.

I remember, as she learned to skate, contorting myself to prop her up around the rink.

Eventually, she wobbled off on her own. I watched how her careening turned to rhythm, the way she'd leaned on me transformed into leaning lightly into the wind.

She was fine. I quit watching. I stretched my shoulders and set off around the rink.