What My Odd Home-Schooling Mom and Angelina Jolie Have in Common

Nothing brought back the rush of home-schooling memories like New York’s March feature on Cara Muhlhahn [2], a radical midwife who flits around New York City coaxing babies out of their mother’s wombs au naturel even under high-risk circumstances. She could very well be right about trusting the body’s instincts, but much of the absurdly romantic home-birth pitch—talk of “altered states of consciousness” and “bliss without the pain”—sounds like good old-fashioned nonsense. It also sounds like my home-schooling mother who, when I was a child, never missed an opportunity to recount the horrors of hospitals, doctors, epidurals, and C-sections. The home-schooling moms I knew had a particular affinity for all of those amazing natural sciences that OB/GYNs like to keep to themselves. Nearly two decades later, I discovered that Park Slope moms are burning up with the same fever.

Growing up in a home-schooling family in rural Texas, I got used to thinking of myself as fringe. Like a good number of home schoolers, my parents distrusted television, the food industry, the medical profession, and, well, just about anything that average middle-class Americans considered normal. Most of my brothers and sisters were born in our parents’ bedroom and never made the pilgrimage to the local hospital for vaccinations. We spent lots of our days away from textbooks, trying our hands at growing and raising our own food and tackling grown-up chores. We did not catch many episodes of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or eat many Pop-Tarts.

Needless to say, I was, for much of my adolescence, preoccupied with proving I was “mainstream”—that despite all this natural, organic, precocious living, I was capable of consuming as thoughtlessly as everyone else. Now, as a post-college transplant to New York, I have to do a rapid reverse. Never did I imagine that what I once considered my parents’ annoying “alternative” choices would be lifestyle gospel in New York, praised on the cover of cool magazines, evangelized by all sorts of celebrities. Now, I’ve started to think of my parents and their obscure home-schooling friends living in tiny, isolated American towns as some kind of urban prophets.

When my mother first decided to breast-feed in 1990, it was less than trendy. What was at the time a doctor-recommended but still oft-ignored practice took off in home-schooling circles, just like other “natural” lifestyle choices. It was not uncommon to happen upon a group of friends’ mothers chatting away and suckling their infants—something I never saw “normal” women doing. (And something I never cared to see any women doing.) Even as a 10-year-old, I could sense the sense of superiority directed toward those bottle-feeders who couldn’t sacrifice their personal dignity for their child’s future. Now, as DoubleX co-founder Hanna Rosin wrote in the Atlantic [3], these women would fit right into the cliques of cool moms who rule Brooklyn playgrounds and deliver icy glares when someone decides to stop breast-feeding. Heck, they would fit right in with Salma Hayek and Angelina Jolie.

Eating, for the hip liberal urbanite, is, as Michael Pollan recently commiserated [4] in the New York Times Magazine, one of the most overwhelming, obnoxious, fussy, judgmental aspects of social life. But the culinary zealotry I discovered in New York was completely familiar after having been thoroughly schooled in the holiness of organic ingredients and home-grown vegetables. Once a month throughout my childhood, an Ozark [5] truck loaded with sacks of wheat, carob chips, natural peanut butter, granola, and other such fruit of the earth would roll into Waco, Texas, and a mom in our home-school group would make the drive to pick up the stuff we’d all try to avoid eating for the next few weeks. My family would go on temporary fasts from high-fructose corn syrup [6] to boost our immune systems.

Home-schooling parents I knew also sent their kids to the backyard to cultivate vegetable gardens, which they considered ideal exercise for kids who stayed home all day. When we got big enough to handle livestock, the food-related character-building transferred to producing backyard-raised lamb, chicken, and pork, much as the literary elite do today [7]. As the locavores gained strength in a galaxy far away, folks in my home-schooling orbit expressed a variation of the same environmental impulse. Being so closely in touch with what one ate was healthy, built character, and just seemed like common sense. If only I’d known when I was 13 years old and covered in sweat and sawdust that my vast experience raising and slaughtering chickens would be something other New Yorkers actually envy.

In an even greater joke of karma, home schooling itself seems to be catching on [8] among trendy urban parents, who in turn face the same defensive judgment my parents experienced 20 years ago. In a series currently running in Salon, Brooklyn home-schooling dad Andrew O’Heir describes a familiar reaction [9]: “For reasons I can about halfway understand, other parents often seem to feel attacked by our eccentric choices.” Last fall, a piece by [10] New York mom Joanne Rendell that endorsed “unschooling” prompted angry readers to claim that she was abusing her child. In a tone of mild exasperation with their friends’ self-justifying objections, both O’Heir and Rendell resort to wink-wink redefinitions of public school jargon like “curriculum” and “socialization.” Just like the Christian home-schoolers I knew who referred [11] to cleaning out the refrigerator as “chemistry lab” and marital squabbles as “PTA meetings.”

The unexpected realization that my parents’ lifestyle experiments have migrated all the way to New York has completely altered my memories. Now I am convinced that my childhood was a lot cooler than I realized at the time, and that I probably owe them an apology for thinking they were so odd. Because it looks like the constant barrage of hipper-than-thou lifestyle obsessions I endured as a child were exactly what I will someday need to become an authentic urban dad. I haven’t quite decided if I will be up for home schooling myself. But if I end up sticking with the urbanistas in my current social circle until we all start having kids, I may not have a choice.

Photograph of an apple and books on the homepage by Stockbyte/Getty Images.