just walk away

john dancing with his great-grandma

Tim's in vision therapy these days, has been for a bit now.

I'm not normally around mainstream parents much. There's no special reason for that. I'm not around alternative parents much either. Life evolves, I guess.

So.

Now I'm at vision therapy and in the waiting room a couple times a week, and I'm overhearing mainstream.

Arguing over homework. Arguing over vision therapy and the home exercises for that, over what the kid needs to do before the day is over. Honest to God, it's just... unbelievable.

I feel like I want to tell them to just walk away. Go home. Take your child home and forget all about school, about bedtime and assignments, and as an old friend Michael said, banish the word should from the language.

Just walk away.

They're spending like ten YEARS beating their head against a wall for nothing. They honestly could do pretty much nothing and achieve the same result.

We love homeschool, but this is not an ambitious smart-guy competition around here. Whatever. Smart guys is smart regardless, and people are intelligent in different ways, which is a very a good thing.

As Little Jay would say, "It's all good."

And homework, and arguments, and especially arguments ABOUT homework are not good things. They're terrible.

My mom said, "Even if you said this to them, they'd never believe it."

True.

Oh gosh.

They're arguing about things and it's all a set up. The arguments aren't even about anything real, or anything of any value, anything about them--it's all bullshit piled on them by SCHOOL.

By other people. Who are stupid.

Forget about it.


The lady who runs the vision therapy lab turned to me after the other parent left, and I quipped, "Tim's peaceful. We haven't had an argument in years."

He was over to the side, hands in his pockets, checking out the eyeglass frames.

Her eyes flew open. She said, "I don't know if I can even HAVE children after this job, hearing what people go through--what raising kids is like!"

I told her it's different when they're your own kids--totally different.

Plus Tim is the ninth child of ten and he's a good man. We have no contentious conversations. He never does anything bad. We agree on everything,except the fact he's still wearing shorts in December, but they're his legs, and he's happy.

She laughed, and it was such a nice sound.

Plus there's this, and you know, the world used to be full of families who had a lot of kids. It wasn't a freakishly weird thing to have a big family when I was a child. People did. Families with five, six, eight, ten kids were not unheard of.

But now?

No way.

So culturally, there really are no more of those kids who are the eighth of ten or the fifth of seven--those youngest kids in a big family, who get those very relaxed (worn down), older (tired) parents.


(I could not have parented at the same intensity level I did in the beginning for now about thirty years. Not possible.)

But I'm thinking those younger kids in big families also are a subset of people who add a distinct life experience and world view to the rest of us, and we don't have them anymore.

Okay, have a lot of kids, people. And keep them around the house until they're bigger than you are, and they insist on leaving. There's a plan, eh?

I know, I know.

But always love, love, Val