Judging Honkers

A couple weeks ago, the kids and I went to the farm of some friends of ours (also home schoolers) to pick berries.  They own a pick-your-own-strawberry patch.  Now, in case you tend to stereotype homeschoolers, you are about to be schooled on homeschoolers.  There are literally as many different reasons for people to homeschool as there are families who do it.  Many people tend to mentally group homeschoolers as ultra-conservative types who have about a dozen kids and a giant van covered in anti-abortion bumper stickers.  Their daughters wear long dresses.  The mom wears a jeans jumper dress with giant pockets, and the boys wear jeans from Farm and Fleet and, in these parts, quite possibly, a seed corn cap.  I know some of these homeschoolers, and I tend to call them "dress wearers".  I think dress wearers get a bad rap.  It is often assumed that they are anti- any other schooling options.  They are immediately (not to mention ironically) judged as judgmental.  I am sure that some of them are - just as is most of the rest of humanity.  The thing is, I have a few friends and relatives who are dress-wearers.  They are, in reality, some of the sweetest, kindest, friendliest people I know.  You may say, "Well, that's because you homeschool too."  Ah, we do, but we are not dress wearers.  In fact, not only are we not dress wearers, we are shorts and tank-top wearers.  We are divorced, non-nuclear family shorts and tank-top wearers.  I wonder if they call us "tank-top wearers".  

In effort to make you aware of other types of homeschoolers, there are a vast number of people (and a significant percentage of our co-op group) who keep their children home because they have one or more physical or mental handicaps.  These people feel it is their obligation to love, teach, and protect their children at home.  Why not?  That is their option, and I respect them for it.  I know quite a few atheistic homeschoolers who believe that the public school is not "smart" enough for their children.  They are very loud about what they believe is wrong with the system and why their children are not a part of it.  They have no religious or moral reasons for homeschooling at all.  There are tattooed homeschoolers.  There are "sit at your desk with your hands folded neatly" homeschoolers, and there are "hang upside down from the rungs of the rocking chair while you're reading Tom Sawyer" homeschoolers.  There are farmers and ruralists who live 20-25 miles or more from the nearest school and who need/want their children home to help with farm chores homeschoolers.  There are people who read news stories about school shootings a thousand miles away and want to make sure that doesn't happen to their kids - fearful homeschoolers.  In our particular case, there are step-families whose children spend part of their lives with other parents and who felt like they weren't seeing their kids enough when they were gone in school all day - homeschoolers.  Are many homeschoolers religious?  Absolutely.  The truth is - most homeschoolers are any and every combination of all of the above and more.  The head of our homeschool co-op once said that it was hard to be leader of homeschoolers, because they are "rebellious" and "non-conformist".  Ha!  I thought that was hilarious.  I was wondering why she would say that, but I think it's because she has dealt with so many homeschoolers that she knows that many of them have left the mainstream and chosen their own path.  They aren't very concerned, for the most part, with doing what everyone else is doing.  They've made a choice to divert from a forced path and make their own.  Is it a better way?  I don't think so.  Is it a different way?  Somewhat.  Can people whose children go to formal schools homeschool?  Yeah.  In fact, they do whether or not they realize or acknowledge it.  Everything they learn at home is schooling.

Back to the berry field... as we were finishing up picking our berries, a van pulled up next to ours, and about 12 people piled out of it.  This was an interesting mix of people.  There was a (very) white lady (approximately 60 years old) (dress-wearer) with a white head covering that resembled this:

As she piled out of the van along with several interracial adults and children in equally conservative clothing, I glanced down at my own attire and that of my kids.  I thought, "Oh, boy... I wonder what they're thinking about me and mine."  As tends to happen on farms, my children had all but disappeared into barns and outbuildings.  Austin found his friend and they went off to shoot innocent rodentia with airsoft guns.  Sadie found a tire swing.  Claire and Violet found some kitties (Claire to love and Violet to squeeze half to death), and Levi found a girl his age who seemed to enjoy throwing pebbles at a family of ducks as much as he did.  I was left trying to assemble them to leave but always coming up short one or two.  I sat down under the tent to wait for them to come to me.  Meanwhile the white dress-wearer - let's call her "Mary"... I'd lie and say that I gave her that name to protect her identity, but I mostly just gave it to her, because, although she introduced herself to me, I am miserably - to the point of ludicrously - bad at name recall.  If you were wearing a name tag the first time we met, I will likely remember your name, because I have good visual recall.  However, my auditory recall - especially for peoples' names - is abysmal.  "Mary" was introduced to me by our mutual friend, who added, "Marcie" also homeschools."  As she sat down in a chair near mine, I struggled not to be intimidated by her "hat".  She didn't seem the least bit disturbed by my lack of hat.  Anyway, she chatted away about her household of many children, and then she asked me about mine.  I said that we have five - which is a respectable number, I feel, for a homeschooling family.  Isn't it funny that somehow I feel the need to fit in by having a large number of children, but then I immediately out myself, because I feel like I'm cheating if I don't admit that it's a "yours/mine/ours" situation, and, therefore I didn't come by all my children "honestly".  (I only used to want none or two or three.)  I often do this (tell of our blended family) at the outset of interaction with other Christians, because there are (rarely) people who don't look favorably on our siuation, but they are the exception rather than the rule.  Funny thing is - I'm okay with people who look on our situation either way.  I don't get mad at people who see our situation as sinful, because it is.  I don't get angry at people for calling divorce a sin, because God calls it one.  I didn't get hurt when people who were invited to our wedding refused to attend, because they felt it was a sin for us to remarry, because that's their call - judgment or not.  Let me tell you, God didn't call divorce a sin because He was being mean, unfair, or hurtful.  He called it a sin, because divorce is mean and unfair and hurtful.  It's mean and unfair and hurtful to the participants - especially the children.  So call a spade a spade.  God did.  He didn't apologize.  God didn't randomly pick out what "the sins" would be.  He called things sin, because He knew those things would hurt us.  That being said, I believe God has fully sanctioned and blessed our union, and we all feel His pleasure at what he's put together.  After all, He is the Author and Manufacturer of grace, and He gives it lavishly.

  

Well, Mary didn't blink an eye when I told her of our situation.  She asked, like many people do, how things were going - if all the parents were seeing the children, how we coped, etc. - which I don't see as nosy - just curious.  Mary told me her older daughter and her daughter's children and her own youngest child (probably around 18) were with her that day.  I noted that her husband must've been African American, because her children were obviously bi-racial.  She talked of how her daughter's husband had died within the last year and that it was very hard on their family.  Her family came over later, and she said something to her son about seeing The Avengers... which was hilarious to me, because I so didn't see them at any movie at all - much less one with The Hulk and Thor.  Her son didn't disappoint in the homeschool stereotype department though when he said, in a dorky way, "Well, mom, I didn't pay much attention to the lines, because that just really wasn't my kind of movie."  (*Please let the record indicate that I have a strong fondness for "dorks".)  Ironically I also saw them at the movies a few nights after that.

Well, Mary didn't seem to have judged me at all that day, but I had judged her.  Without knowing anything about her, I had assumed that she would probably be self-righteous about her situation and choices versus ours.  I've been the victim of that same type of judging before - many times.  It's like reverse judging, and it's far more popular than the traditional type these days.  It's the kind where people (often feeling guilty over something in their lives) judge a person as self-righteous without having any concept of the person's character or motives.  And, like so many things I love to notice:  It's frought with IRONY.  By that I mean, when I call someone judgmental (or even think it) I have judged him or her myself!  It's just as wrong - just as destructive - just as preclusive of fulfilling personal relationships with one another as the traditional kind.  After all, I find that there are few if any people who have not had a brother/cousin/friend that has undergone something similar to our situation.  People are far less likely to find it odd than I sometimes worry they will be.

I often try to imagine scenarios in which I can give another person grace.  It's like a "grace challenge".  I say this, because I realize often that there are situations when I know people could look at me and go, "Um, wow - what an awful mom," or "what a selfish person," or "what a messy housekeeper," or fill in the blank with a hundred other different things that I can be from time-to-time.  A few months back, I'd had a doctor's appointment in town and I was waiting for one of the kids to get done with an orthodontist appointment, and I was starving because I hadn't eaten anything all day and it was 2:00 or so in the afternoon.  My van was filthy from our dirt road, and I was sitting in the parking lot at McD's playing Words with Friends on my phone.  As I was stuffing my face and yelling, "Oh, that is SO a word!" at my phone, I started to laugh - thinking if anyone was seeing me right now - oh, the things they could assume about me.  

(eating black raspberries on the bike path)

I had a good opportunity to use the grace challenge a few days ago.  The kids and I had come off the bike path and into a park where the kids like to play awhile before we ride back home.  When we arrived, I noticed a woman in an SUV with the windows down and the ignition running.  She was sitting glued to her phone.  While I was running around with kids, holding odd ends of the teeter/totter down for them or pushing them on the swings or sitting down here and there, the woman started to honk her horn - loud and long for some children (who I can only assume must've been deaf) who were about 100 yards from her vehicle.  She didn't drive over by them.  She didn't get out or go over to them... she just HOOOOOOOOONNNNNKKKKEEEEEDD...and honked and honked and honked; for about 5 minutes this went on.  The scrapper in me wanted to go over and knock the stupid phone out of her hands and tell her to stop bugging everyone with her honking and get her butt out of the car to call for her kids.  I mean, I'm all for understanding that momma needs a break sometimes, but come on - disturbing the peace of everyone in the whole park so she can teach her kids that when momma honks that means they... can pretty much totally ignore her for another 5 minutes or so till she drives around to the side of the park you're playing in to honk some more?  That's just selfish, right?  Ah, but who am I to judge.  So I tried to imagine that she might be a paraplegic who is hard of hearing and whose children are also hard of hearing... and that her phone got somehow tragically glued to her hand, and that this somehow added to her agitation.  Okay - I only tried to think of all that after I ranted to Austin about her and he reminded me how I'm always saying that people might have a good reason for the seemingly obnoxious things they do and not to judge.  (Teach them logic, and they'll beat you to death with it.)  Oddly though, it made me feel more favorable... not just because it was amusing, but mostly because I was finding myself able to choose grace instead of anger.  But maybe you get my point?  

We all have moments in which we act unbecomingly and they're not just "off moments".  We are off people... full of sin, ugliness, and death.  The true miracles in life are when we act with kindness, selflessness, and love.  Are Christians better at that than others?  No.  In fact, aside from God's enabling, we are completely incapable of good.  We are, perhaps, worse than others.  More capable of evil.  More enticed to wrong, and better able to carry it out.  There is an old hymn called I Need Thee Every Hour, and I used to wonder, every hour?  That's a lot of need.  Now that I'm grown and more responsible I think, only every hour?  I need Thee every minute... every second of every day.  I need Thee.