Inside our house is a second house. A house of multicolor tubes and plastic panels, with a new extension added each time I save up enough allowance to buy a fresh doohickey from Petco. This elaborate structure sits next to my bathroom sink, and it’s home to two brown hamsters, Harriet and Herbie. Often, in the middle of another long afternoon, I’ll plunge my hand through the roof hatch and pluck them out to keep me company. I especially like to load them in through the sleeve of my shirt, to feel their little paws scrabbling over my skin.
“Now, Harriet, you stay out of my belly button! It’s not polite! Haven’t I already told you a hundred times…”
Well, I’m hard up for conversation. I’m 12 and would be in seventh grade if I went to school, but it’s been more than three years since Mom pulled me out of my public elementary. My older brother Aaron still hops the bus to school each morning, but Mom says that I learn differently, and I’m far better off in the “free-form educational environment” she can offer me at home.
I’m giggling at the tickle of Herbie’s feet in my armpit when I startle at the sound of footsteps. “It reeks in here,” Mom says, throwing the door wide. “Didn’t you promise me you’d clean their cage? Those things must be crawling around in their own filth.”
“Sorry,” I say, hoping Mom will not notice the hamster-size lumps that are presently roving around under my Dallas Cowboys tee.
But lately it seems that anything might set her off. Mom has been stressed about our family finances for a while now and also about the new work she’s begun to take on. She’s started tutoring schoolkids in math each afternoon, doing her bookkeeping and lesson prep beforehand, work that has severely cut into our time together.
“Just. Clean. It. Out.” Mom jabs her finger at each syllable. When she slams the door to head back downstairs, Harriet and Herbie’s tiny claws go tight against my skin.
When we started homeschooling, Mom and I agreed that it would only be for a semester, just to get away from a bad teacher in my public school, and for the first months our days together had at least an hour or two of focused learning. But my education has increasingly become my own business, especially since Mom got so busy with her tutoring work. I now spend a good part of my days alone in my room, doing a correspondence math class or else having “self-directed project time,” which might mean drawing comic book characters, rereading a Michael Crichton novel, or making up stories of my own. The days and weeks have sometimes started to go blurry on me, a scary quicksand of time I feel myself sinking into.
Downstairs, Mom has converted the home office into a miniature classroom for her tutoring business, with a chalkboard and everything. This new classroom happens to be just beneath my bedroom, and soon—like every afternoon—I can hear those tutoring kids’ voices rising through the floor.
“She did not!” some girl yells, and my room fills with the muffled echo of laughter. My lost world of school and of other kids is just under my feet, and even Mom is part of it too now.
“She did!” Mom says, laughing merrily along. “She did!”
Sullenly, I shuffle over to the bathroom, and it’s then—hoisting Harriet through the hatch— that I discover something wondrous has happened. Harriet has been gaining some weight for a while, and when I push at her belly, I feel the tiny fetal lumps growing inside her.
***
“You do know that I’m just helping those poor tutoring kids survive the dysfunctional, damaging system called public school, don’t you?” Mom asks at dinner.
“I know.”
“You get to be free in a way they’ll never be.”
“Thanks to you,” I say.
“You get to have a free mind,” Mom says, almost a mantra of hers.
In many respects, Mom prides herself on her pioneering, do-it-yourself attitude, but her rejection of public schooling and her theories of self-directed education come largely from a man named John Holt. Mom first read Holt’s work when she was twenty-three, an experience she has said was like “finding my thoughts all written down in someone else’s book.”
“To a very great degree,” John Holt wrote in his 1964 debut How Children Fail, “school is a place where children learn to be stupid.” In his 1969 The Underachieving SchoolHolt was even blunter: “Schools are bad places for kids.” These notions appealed to Mom’s radical side—and also to the feeling that she herself had been badly failed by the schools she had attended. She read and reread Holt’s writing, underlining passages, filling the margins with exclamation marks.
In the following years, Mom remained distantly aware of the small but vocal “unschooling” movement Holt had founded. But by 1992, when she pulled me out of school, homeschooling was already being overtaken by new forces. In homeschooling, many Christian parents found a way to keep their kids from the secular education system. A major movement of faith-based homeschooling had begun, and lawmakers in state after state were granting these families ever greater autonomy.
Even if Mom has no religious motive, she’s glad for all the freedom from oversight that those folks helped win for her in the statehouse as it has allowed her to have what she needs most now. “What would I do without my Stefan?” she often asks. It has been a hard couple years for Mom, not only because of all the work she’s had to take on. Hundreds of miles away, her mother is sliding deeper into dementia. Ever since we moved from Indiana to this brand-new subdivision in Plano, Texas, Mom’s social life has been all but nonexistent. “Honestly, you are better than any grown-up, Stef,” Mom has told me. “You are more than all I need.”
***
One morning, I wake to the sound of a tiny, persistent wailing. I toss aside my covers, flip on the bathroom lights, and find that inside the plastic cage, Harriet has just birthed an extra-large litter, eight blind and pink creatures, wriggling around like two hands of freshly dismembered fingers.
I spend a lot of time in the weeks that follow observing this new hamster family, watching as the pups open the black beads of their eyes to the world. I can still balance all eight on two hands, and I sometimes let them run over my face as I lie in bed, but I know better than to name them. In fact, we’ve already kept them too long.
To house ten adult hamsters, the pet store clerk said, would require an even larger and more elaborate cage than ours. If we don’t evict them soon, they’ll start to hurt each other, or themselves. “They’re made to leave the nest,” the clerk said.
The ache of imagining our hamster pups gone, of wanting them to stay babies just a little longer, gives me a terrible empathy for Mom. “The happiest I ever was in my life,” Mom likes to tell me, “was when you would just hold on to me like a baby sloth while I worked around the kitchen.”
Over the three years we’ve been homeschooling, Mom has committed herself to the project of turning me back into that lost sloth child. Determined to restore my brownish hair to the ultra-blonde color of my infanthood, Mom made me lie for hours upon hours in the sun with lightening product in my hair, and when that didn’t work she just started to pour hydrogen peroxide directly onto my scalp. Not long ago, Mom read a scientific report suggesting that a crawling phase is important for a baby’s fine motor skill development, and she hatched a theory that it might not yet be too late to crawl my way to better handwriting. For months, she’s made me get down on all fours whenever we’re at home, and crawl from room to room. Very often at night—with my knees and palms throbbing from carpet burn—I swear to myself I’ll tell her I need to go back to school. But by daylight I always lose my courage. “I don’t think I would survive without you,” Mom has told me.
But on this much, at least, I am determined: I won’t let those hamster pups suffer my same fate. One day, my brother and I gather the pups in a shoebox and carry them downstairs.
“Let’s take them to the store,” I tell Mom. “And find them good homes.”
Mom swallows, nods, and drives us to the pet store.
On the way home I’m thinking that I can do the same for myself. This sadness I’m feeling now for those pups is a taste of the pain Mom will feel when I go. But I will survive, and she would too. I can’t, after all, stay a baby forever.
When I wake the next morning, I go to see how Harriet and Herbie are managing without the kids. I’ve been hoping they might get the spark back in their love life, maybe turn out another litter.
“Please come,” I yell. “Please!”
Within seconds, Mom is next to me.
“Is she?” I ask.
But I already know. She is frozen there, upright in one of the tubes. Harriet, bereft mother, has died of heartbreak.
Harriet’s lifeless eyes are awful now—they’ve gone milky, glazed over—and I’ll never forget the sight of them. One day, two years from now, the image of those eyes will still haunt me when at last I tell Mom that I must return to school. The memory of what the loss of those pups did to poor Harriet will never leave me altogether, as I will feel myself breaking Mom’s heart all over again countless times in the years ahead: as I flounder my way through high school, then on to college, and then into an adulthood far from home. In New York City, I’ll become a husband, a father, an author with a bustling social life, but always each step away from Mom and our homeschool years will be freighted with my fear of what the pain of my leaving might do to her.
It won’t be until I’m well in my thirties that at last I’ll come to understand how common fear like mine runs among homeschoolers, both current and former. To confront your homeschool teacher or to hurt them in ways they might never forgive is to risk losing not only a parent but also your entire childhood social sphere, the worldview in which you were raised. It is potentially an act of self-exile from a home country to which you can never again return, and maybe this fear is one reason why there still aren’t proper regulations on homeschooling, why homeschool kids can still so easily vanish from the world. With the odds stacked so heavily against speaking out—and homeschooling still a relatively new phenomenon—many of the necessary stories have not yet been told.
But for now, at twelve, I just remain where I am. I stand there with Mom in front of the hamster cage for a silent minute or two, until she goes to find a box to bury Harriet. Even still, I stay put, staring into Harriet’s terrible vacant eyes. At last, when I’ve seen enough, I drop to my hands and knees. And I crawl back downstairs, to Mom.
Stefan Merrill Block is the author of Homeschooled: A Memoir.
