The values of my fringe homeschooling family have become urban chic now.

Nothing brought back the rush of home-schooling memories like New York’s March feature on Cara Muhlhahn, 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, 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 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 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 to boost our immune systems.

Tags: Cara Muhlahn, homeschooling, Michael Pollan

David Sessions is a reporter at Politics Daily and is the founding editor of Patrol.

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