I’m taking it as a good sign that when he rotated the tent today—oh yes, pulled up all the stakes and cords and rotated it 180 degrees—the front door is now facing our house. Before this, in the random, because-it-was-there way of woodsman Will, tent got plunked down with the door facing the woods and its back to us. Our homeowner is now in week three of life outdoors, and apparently today was “spring cleaning” day. I went out for a walk mid-morning by way of the backyard and tent was bustin’ with activity, all the furniture hauled out and décor piled up like a flash yard sale. Or sudden eviction. Stacks of all the stuff he had tucked into there like clowns out of a Volkswagen.

Boy is very intentional about his 54 square foot home. Hasn’t cleaned his bedroom since 2017, but this little nook is tidy and spare. No shoes allowed. His Amish approach to housekeeping (a place for everything and be still my heart everything in its place) is both inspiring and, in light of past years and personality, slightly jarring. As with the new orientation: pointed toward us rather than away. Send a boy-rebel out to the woods and what comes back is taller, calmer, somehow more composed. Like the printer setting changed from draft to full.

Storms this week tested my ability to let go. One night, with the wind rushing and the trees swaying overhead, I kept waking to worry. We slept with the sliding door to our balcony open, and though the rain never came, I was waiting for that confirming clap of thunder or slice of lightning that would have me hurrying out to the tent to pull him in. I lay in bed hearing the wind and peering out at the trees. Are they supposed to bend like that? Some of them looked as though they would reach right over and smack the tent flat. At one point, just before five, I bolted from bed, searched around for shoes and marched out across the back yard, mom with a purpose. I was going to wake and rescue him quietly, without question and, though I can no longer carry him, I was going to word-urge him upstairs to his warm bed and all of us go back to sleep. Mama knows best. Once I got outside, though, the pre-dawn stillness silenced me. The wind was warm and strong, but it was not raging. Not the stuff of my nightmares. The air in the yard was stiller, more apprehensive than it had seemed to me inside the house. I was halted, no longer sure of my plan. Quietly I stood in the dewy grass watching the little tent, zipped up tight and silent. No sound from within. I hesitated a moment more, and then I turned and crept back to the house. Some storms, said the groggy daylight as it eased into the wood a couple hours later and winked at me, some storms are worth waiting out.

Once when Will was five we took a trip to Disney. He was a 50-pound dare-devil, but he was also 47.999 inches tall so he couldn’t go on the bigger rides. He actually cried when he couldn’t ride “Tower of Terror,” which has an elevator that plummets 11 stories going 60 mph. Such a bummer. Being relegated to Buzz Lightyear’s Astro-blaster for nine consecutive rides (no lines!) suited me fine while Bill and the girls risked life and limb. But our boy hungered for more. That “more” was Expedition Everest, an ancient-looking rust bucket roller coaster careening backwards in the dark at heights rivaling its namesake and speeds defying safe digestion, all the while being stalked by a terrifying Yeti. I cut myself off after four rides on this little charmer, so William went alone with Ellie. A five year old!! What was I, nuts? Watching the little train depart with boy and his sister buckled chummily into the second to last car, I panicked. His little head looked so far away and so tiny, clearly the youngest rider and clearly a terrible call. Strike one for motherhood. I looked around for the parenting police to escort me from the park and take my son away from me.

I fixed my eyes on the little train as it chugged its way up one of those teeth-rattling slopes that is always a precursor to the hell the rest of the ride will deliver, knowing what was in store and terrified this would be the one run that malfunctions, a tale too sad to tell in Drama in Real Life. Did she get his roll bar down? Could he fall through it? Could he? Is he frightened? Is that their car waaaay up there, what—three miles away? Is that theirs? What about that one—is that middle car beginning to derail? My own personal Tower of Terror, right here on the ground. Then I became like a little Himalayan troll woman myself, scurrying back and forth from the entrance line to the exit booth to the viewing station, staring up those “mountains” and finding out quite helplessly that to be off the ride while your prides and mostly joys are on the ride is even more terrifying. I think maybe I was even muttering aloud to myself, just a little as I scurried. Crazy for his safety and beside myself till his little action sandals hit solid ground, which they did. Unscathed. William is still talking about that Yeti.

Left to his own devices, boy takes risks. Sure as a bear does her business in the woods. Always has. But during this seismic shift called global pandemic, apparently when there is enough risk from the outside, what do you suppose occurs? I could not have seen it coming, not in a million years. Left to his own devices, Will risks himself. Not away, but toward. He steps onto the grid, testing it first with a big toe. Homeschool takes a giant leap for boykind. You’re reading? Oh that’s nice son. Wait, what? You’re just sitting out here in your tent reading? A BOOK? Without being asked?? You’re done with three of your subjects for the year? Well, that’s great son. You’re re-doing your civics project to make it better? You’re not happy with it? (cartoon springy eyes boing-ing out of my head in utter amazement). And those stacks of handwritten notes are for your GT project on the book you downloaded from the public library so you could listen to it while you cleaned your apartment? Huh. How ’bout that. Will —- do you think I could take your temperature, son? You feeling okay? The word “unprecedented” they’ve been flinging around comes to settle holographically over the little tent. I am studying him for birthmarks to be sure that this is truly my son and just some type-A poser who switched places in the middle of the night. The dance Will has done with schooling for the past eight years has often left her standing on the dance floor alone. Now he’s rewriting notes, looking up stuff on a Kindle Fire for his science assessments, working solo and overtime and once or twice missed the lunch bell. All on a handwritten schedule pinned to the tent wall. I didn’t even know he knew how to do what he is supposed to do. Full-blown tango going on.

Got to be careful where I land this here helicopter. I have been hovering, like many other parents today, but now, I don’t want to slice through those tent wires. Took everything in me not to go out on day two when the rain was preventing his breakfast fire. The wood was wet, he was wet, everything was wet and cold and just as dismal as could be—’bout the last place a cheery mom with a breakfast alternative belongs. Single snapshot of a lone boy in the rainy woods, head down wandering around searching for sticks and tinder dry enough to start a fire while I stood at the stove boiling water and making toast. The whole helpless overage of a parent to a child who will not be spoon fed. Heck, this one won’t even eat store-bought food: wants to slay the dragon himself. Takes everything in me not to sheath the knife (on the floor by his bed, strategically placed each night), bemoan the hole (eight feet wide and six feet deep, involving hours of otherwise perfectly useable time), or ask to check his language arts. Will gets futzy if I even touch his dirty clothes on the floor. Apparently, I am to stand on the ground looking up, having said yes to the ride of a lifetime. It’s just not natural to be this laissez-faire. Even the bears let their mamas get their panties in a wad when junior’s in trouble. Then again, a mother deer all but abandons her fawn so he can remain scentless and dappled in the underbrush, perfectly invisible to predators. That’s me. I am so self-restrained I could take on a Yeti.

After the Monday homeschool in the pouring rain I produce a hand-me-down laptop Uncle Skip sent last October. Will is ecstatic. Mine? Can this be mine? Boy has blown through two ipods, two or three digital cameras, a Kindle Fire and a Nano or two in his young life. All hand-me-downs, all (if there was money exchanged) at his expense. If he didn’t buy the thing he destroyed I charged him to replace it. Closed universe approach. His new-to-you iphone was taken away November 2019 (I can tell from the life 360 battery alert) for poor performance and unacceptable behavior at school, so he is about as “plugged in” as a 1987 Walkman prototype onto which he has loaded (what else?) the hit list from your junior prom. C’est bizarre.  So trust me when I tell you this laptop was a good idea. He is beside himself, like Christmas has come to the woods. Rain schmain. He spends the afternoon getting to know his new device. I do not mean games. I mean the way he gets to know most of his world: by studying what it is made of. Now, he spends hours downloading updates, researching software, manually re-installing the graphics card he deleted by mistake–conducting the sort of programming I could pay $200 for in a fancy schmancy STEM class for youth at the U of R. Boy has self-educated to the level they teach in Freshman computer basics, I’m sure of it. All the while listening to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. In a tent. In the rain.

Homeschool now runs with a noticeable upgrade. Will tells me that “my” method wasn’t working for him. Chip away at each subject a little bit each day. Instead he prefers to finish the do-able, clear his desk and delve into one subject at a time for those larger projects. Not all of the curricula is approved. For that matter, much of it’s not even assigned. That’s the kind of kid William is. I am still trying to contact an Australian astrophysicist who popped in the news a few weeks back for having had to undergo emergency surgery to remove tiny magnets from his nasal cavity. Bored in his lab because of quarantine, he was trying to invent a wearable alarm that would warn people when they absently went to touch their face. In the article, Dr. Adolescent mentions having read about the same unlikely mishap happening to an eleven-year-old boy and I think, he’s talking about my son! That’s my eleven-year-old boy! Will had a slightly less heroic “experiment” go as disastrously wrong at school one day. (See previous blog —”William’s Day”) Last April. Four months later we go to get his braces put on and boy is all kind of tuned-in and inquisitive when the orthodontist escorts us to her little office to view X-rays of his mouth and jaw. Will is studying the screen with the eye-lock of a med student, so attentive and voicing questions I remember thinking, Hmm. Future in orthodontists, maybe? Then he asks, “So if, like, there was any metal in my head I could see it on the X-ray, right?” and I realize the incident was still with him. Very much with him.

I repeat: Not all of the curricula is approved. Today, instead of tackling items 1-4 on the list, he and Bill knock something off the list that hadn’t even made the list: the ACME five-gallon hands-free squirrel trap, strategically placed at the foot of our bird feeder. Physics unit study. It’s an elaborate design, really, made out of a 5-gallon paint bucket featuring a hinged, self-latching lid and boobie-trapped bait and trigger method that may well catch one of the furry pests–in a few years when the man scent wears off. Will is discouraged when it doesn’t yield a Heffalump an hour after they set it up. Physics unit study quickly morphing into character lesson on patience. Cue the parent-speak: Good things take time, son. Think of fishing, right? Fishing is all about time. You have to wait a really long time. Sometimes you don’t catch anything at all. Think about hunting. Think about home schooling. Sometimes you don’t see any progress at all…

After six weeks of home school and two weeks of tent life, I get my squirrel. Trap swings shut on this little line, a beauty that will last me a week, a quarantine, a lifetime. He has come downstairs from his nightly shower, armload of clean laundry for the week ahead and a headlamp, minion-like, around his forhead. He turns before exiting the room to clomp down the last steps to the door and announces, smiling and shaking his head like even he doesn’t know where he’s coming from, “I am so excited for school tomorrow. I’ve been so BORED all weekend. SO bored! At least I’ll have something fun to do.” I stare at him, stunned. I would close my mouth manually but I am paralyzed by laughter on the inside that rivets me to the spot, dumb receiving smile on my face, probably nodding my dotty head. Where’s a neodynium magnet head alarm when you need one? I am ’bout fall over. Will—son…? Do you suppose I could videotape you saying that? That’s just something I would like to remember…. Forever. 

I am a strong proponent of the gradual nature of education. After all, that line was eight years in the making. If I wanted results from this experiment sooner I was, well, out of luck. “Nosce te ipsum,” said Heraclitus, the Greek father of education. Know thyself. Great philosphers and educators have debated the nature of knowing and learning for centuries, and we think we’re going to benchmark, SOL, AP, IB, XYZ it out of them today? Right now? Frozen in time, my son might not recall his birth date, his middle name, or what he ate for lunch. But given time he can explain in detail how he just spent the last two days downloading the installer software to upgrade the graphics card manually to restore the five hours of set-up he deleted in a single stroke until my head hurts. A man never steps in the same stream twice (also Heraclitus, probably his most famous line that his mother might have videotaped, had she been thinking) translates to a boy never thinks the same thought twice. I guess there’s a reason they call it a current. A friend tells me the great leaders and successful people of today were C students because while they were in school earning mediocre grades they were busy thinking about all the great and novel stuff they were going to tackle when they weren’t. “Well,” says Will getting up from the lunch table and leaving every dish, crumb and spill for mom to deal with, “back to my fish.” He did. He really said that after my spiel. I clear his dishes. What’s a little coddling for a boy who speaks metaphor?

The journey to self-awareness is long and steep and is not to be confused with today’s narcissism. It may involve terrifying heights, precocious ambition and some hair-raising segments going backwards in the dark. But there is no way, no way, you can self-discover under the top-down involvement of another. My curricula is not thy curricula….Anymore than it can be measured, marked, tested, assessed. Read the metaphors, people. We are not loading a gun (Bang! you’re educated!) or coding a computer program. We are planting seeds, growing; we are conducting an orchestra that begins in singular cacophony and ends in symphony, we are following a recipe with a lifelong list of ingredients that need to simmer and meld. Every metaphor used to describe education is organic. Living. Dynamic and flowing. We are training up a child in the way he should go. Not testing him on the way he is. We are not parking him on some arbitrary finish line and grilling him what he knows. I’m glad the guy who invented the SOL sleeps easy at night but he or she has ruined critical thinking, creative exploration, wonderment and failure–thereby cancelling any hope of true learning. Time to clean house. If this pandemic takes with it all the static, life-sapping clutter of assessment we will have emerged healthier, whole, and ready to learn. For real.

What does boy want? License to do whatever he wishes, buckets of used electronics, snack food and free data? Endless rounds of World of Tanks on his new laptop? Not so much. Maybe the over-indulged 8-year-old dreams of these things. But my son wants the self-maker stuff of freedom and autonomy as pure and classic as a coming of age novel. He wants respect, unconditional love, and a confirmation that we (his folks) have thought through our somewhat conservative rules, that we live by them ourselves, and that we are brave enough to love when our children choose to do otherwise. He wants a blessing on his little patch of space and time that he can call truly his, and tend it his way, and become. He wants to know himself. He will study and read and do the lessons assigned him, but he’ll learn best what he can own. He wants me the %$#@! away from that tent, so he can discover and thus truly learn that knives cut, fires burn, computers crash, the ground is hard, and the pre-dawn breeze through the trees outside is a beautiful music that can soothe your fear of an impending storm.

I like the new arrangement. Little homestead looks like a magazine ad for tent living, out there beneath the trees. Well appointed and tidy. I can stand at the kitchen window and look out on the homey little abode, little mud mat porch with his sneakers and boots neatly parked outside, and through the nylon walls a little light on. It is somehow more inviting now I’m not staring at the backside. Screen window coverings unzipped, I can see the silhouette of him, working a way at his homemade desk. Zipped closed again, the two halves of the front door and the lower panel look like a face, rain-fly eye brows slightly raised, smiling with utter contentment, satisfaction and self-awareness.