Why, why, why do the mommy groups all plan their activities for traditional school hours?
Ok, I understand why it works for them. They can ditch their older children on the public school system and now want to use that time to do their various mommy activities. Unfortunately, they don’t seem to understand that those times are really not the best for their homeschooling friends–or if they understand it in theory, they either don’t understand it in practice or don’t particularly care–and either get miffy about our expressions of scheduling dismay, start the process of subtle exclusion from that social group, or both.
I’d love to attend some local parenting group activities. I really would. I’d love to be more involved in local birth and breastfeeding advocacy organizations. I’d love to go to cloth diapering workshops, play dates for toddlers at various parks, and moms-only coffee at the local coffee shop. Unfortunately, I do not have someone else available to educate my kids for me.
Believe it or not, the flexibility of homeschooling doesn’t mean I can go to some adult- or toddler-geared activity multiple days a week. I know you’re all shocked, but Captain Science has to do his schooling at some point, and that point needs to not be dinner time. Even if we were one of the “done by noon” homeschooling families, we still couldn’t make all these 10am activities for small children, because Captain S is still there. He doesn’t magically disappear during school hours. He can’t stay here alone while I cart Babypie and Tank off to play dates. He can’t go to music time or story time without being the inappropriately old, freakishly tall boy at whom the other parents look askance when he smiles at or talks to their toddlers, and frankly, I don’t want some stranger-danger fearing mama mentally profiling my sweet and innocent 9-year-old son as someone who might in some way be a threat to her baby, simply because he’s friendly and doesn’t have anywhere else to go.
As much as I joke about doing something and “counting” it as a lesson (example: “Going to Costco involves a lot of walking. Totally counting that as P.E. for today!”), we are not a homeschooling family whose educational philosophy is based primarily on getting out of the house and doing stuff. We aren’t unschoolers; We have quite a lot of formal curricula to work through in a week. We also have other lessons and classes, scheduled for, amazingly enough, school hours, and no school bus is going to come to take Captain Science to and fro.
In a perfect world, the “crunchy” mama set would realize that many of their number homeschool, but this world is far from perfect. I’m watching homeschooling slowly, ever so slowly, result in a gradual exclusion from many of my former social groups. Part of it might be natural growth, as our children are taking different paths, but I think that much of it just has to do with the fact that my “free” time is now decidedly less expansive, my entourage size doesn’t change based on school hours (it’s always Smrt Mama + 3), and I can’t meet up with most of my non-homeschooling friends/groups with enough frequency to maintain the friendships/sense of membership.
I feel like I spend so much time talking about exclusion — from the homeschooling world as a whole, due to secularity, from secular homeschooling, due to rigorous classical curricula. This is just one more facet of that. The inconvenience of the rigorous homeschooling schedule can be a stumbling block in maintaining pre-homeschooling friendships and activities.
