Flashback to September 2008, a selection taken from emails I wrote at the time.

But it’s made me so freaking beyond lonely sometimes, I can’t even tell you. I mean it’s just like they say, about how much lonelier you can feel in a crowd. That’s totally what I’m experiencing – when I was at my reclusive best I was happy with my own company. But now that I’m on the fringes of this other community, watching them interact and seeing their easy intimacy with one another – it’s not so much that I covet it necessarily. It’s not exactly a “seeing what I’m missing” situation, either. It’s more that it makes me feel intensely aware of my own otherness. My not-quite-fittedness. My disconnection.

Plus I’m freaking out about my decision to take care of my mother once a week. That decision in itself, while carefully considered and made from a place of strength, has served to make me feel outrageously vulnerable just now. I am not naturally disposed to maternal roles beyond the norm – even learning how to mother my own kids can be a stretch sometimes – I was never the eldest or the one likely to take charge. I was baby of the family through and through, and while I learned to fake a certain level of maturity so well that I even had myself convinced, caretaking will never come naturally to me. (Let me clarify – I think that the urge most definitely does, but the wisdom and tools and general wherewithal does not. At all.) So it’s not that I think parenting a parent is an easy role reversal for anyone, I just feel even less equipped than most. I barely know how to take care of myself.

“They don’t have to love me.” “I don’t have to be scared of talking to my brother.” “I will not become my mother’s permanent full time caretaker.” “God is not dead.” My head is filled with too many mantras this month.

Sunday. You don’t want to hear from me on Sunday. It seems like no matter what I do – everything from sleeping through it to creating new traditions to ignoring it to writing poetry about it – I still end up draining the septic tank of my life on Sunday. Not even Jesus would want me for a sunbeam today.

I just had a small family reunion – and believe me, we’re not a close family, either. But it’s sort of a tradition now that every summer my brother comes up from New Mexico, and my extremely neurotic, possibly insane mother says “Oh, I could die any minute of some exotic and strange disease that the doctors refuse to admit I have, this might be my last chance to have all my children together” (on the one hand, you have to understand, she never recovered from my Dad dying and that’s very sad. On the other hand, she’s always been a manipulative control freak psycho in her heart of hearts) and so we get together and eat potato chips and pretend to have something in common. It’s awkward and strained with moments of hope interlaced and I always cry on the way home because it just reminds me that I’m never going to have a close family but I’m always going to wish we were. So there’s that. My Dad was kind of the class and the sanity in the family, and when he died everyone sort of splintered and now we all seem (to me) about half a step away from a Jerry Springer episode.

And besides, don’t let my radical turn fool you, I’m still the same girl at heart that chooses her education, religion, alcohol and men (okay, well maybe not men) on the same principle – take what works for you at the moment, and leave the rest for someone else. Probably someone haughty and judge-y and who’s going to pick on you later for letting your kids watch television or for lying to them about Santa Claus or because they won’t get enough socialization. But fuck ‘em. Everyone has an opinion.

And I’m a big believer in the idea that we do what we’re capable of once we’re capable of it, and every little misstep and procrastination and failure and freak out in a person’s past was necessary to get them to the place where they can accomplish what they think they should have been able to accomplish ten years ago. I have regrets, I even have some shame about my behavior or my lack of ability to step up or whatever in the past. But when all is said and done I believe that I’m honestly always doing the very best that I can. Sometimes my best is crap, see, but that’s life. I think this same thing is true about most of us.

A selection taken from old emails sent, representing June of 2008.

As you might have guessed, I was completely gobsmacked by the unschooling conference. By the end of the first day one of my biggest obstacles was clear – far beyond any social phobia or shyness or personal space bubbles, I’ve never in my life been a part of a community. I don’t even know where to begin trying. I always wanted to. I watched the My Big Fat Greek Family things with envy, wishing I had all kinds of people in my business like that. But no church, no family, no organizations, no clubs, no roots. Ever, really. And more than that, like I mentioned earlier, I’ve felt scrutinized since the day I became a Mom. The glares in the grocery store, the disapproving looks around the neighborhood, there is always someone looking at me or my children’s haircuts or their clothing and judging me and finding me wanting. (And when they aren’t there directly, they are there in my mind.)

And that’s even before you get into people who are closer, the ones that were supposed to support me. You know, my mother tells me all the time what a great Mom I am and how proud she is of me. The problem is that it’s all empty words because I know she has no idea what kind of Mom I am, and that if I had her describe what it is she thinks makes me a good Mom, it probably wouldn’t sound like me at all. Not that she’s the standard, of course, but you get what I mean. My support structure has been shaky to nonexistent from the beginning, and so all that I had to base myself on was the general opinion of society, and that was even WORSE.

So I walked through that conference surrounded by these crazy, beautiful people and about the only thing that every single one of them had in common was that their smiles were genuine and when they looked at my kids, they saw them the way that I see them, which is not something I’m used to feeling from just about anyone. The overwhelming attitude was one of respect and admiration for every child there no matter their age or ability or interest. And it was wonderful and magical and made me so damned angry! Because it made me realize that I’d deserved that feeling all along, that my kids had deserved that feeling all along, and why is it so fucking hard to find, anyway?

If I told you that I spent the day convincing my mom that Obama isn’t the anti-christ & then cleaning up mouse poop, would that make my day better or worse than yours?

You really can’t ever know, can you? You don’t know what lessons await you in this life, or them, or what mistakes had to be made in order to get to the right place. If there’s one thing I know about homeschooling it’s that it’s been a much more profound and life changing journey for me than it has been for my kids. After all, to them this is life. To me, I’ve had to go through 10 years of deprogramming to be any good to them at all, in some ways. When Khy was younger I had to hold one of my hands with the other one – basically physically restrain myself – to keep from trying to direct him on the “right way” to fingerpaint! He wasn’t taking up the whole paper, and it just about drove me mad. An extreme example, but completely true.

Right now I’m going to drop a quick note to xxxx and maybe one to xxxx and then Gordon Ramsay has promised to teach me how to make a smooth, smart, sexy bread sauce to go with my pheasant. (Heh heh – if you know what I mean. No, seriously, it’s really a bread sauce.)

I feel so out of touch right now, but as usual summer crept up behind me, grabbed my hand and then took off running at the speed of light before I’d hardly got myself turned back around and pointed in the right direction, let alone tied my running shoes. And by summer, of course, I’m referring more to the state of mind or the time of the year, certainly not the weather, which continues to be mild and soggy into June.

We have at long last bowed to the inevitable and are making the switch to a cell phone kind of life. I can hear some of you out there choking on your coffee, perchance remembering that I’m the girl that answering machines were made for and how pale my face turned on the day that I heard they were making phones that could go along with you (and therefore couldn’t be escaped from) but here we are. Dragged kicking and screaming into the future by our younger generation. Don’t laugh – someday it will happen to you, too, if it hasn’t already.