“Every mother in the world wishes her kid wouldn’t grow up so fast.”
Mom laughs as she holds me close.
“But I guess I’m the only one who’s actually doing something about it, right?”
By our fourth year of home schooling, when I’m 13, Mom’s work to return me to infanthood has become a part of our daily routine. Ever since she pulled me out of public school, she has been applying lighteners and hydrogen peroxide to my hair in an attempt to bleach it back to its baby blond.
For months, she has made me crawl around on all fours whenever we’re at home, claiming that a strict crawling regimen might somehow improve my handwriting. Like an infant, I spend nearly all day by Mom’s side, mostly alone together, as my brother is off at school and Dad is off at work.
Mom withdrew me from Brinker elementary school in Plano, Texas, in fourth grade, when I was nine. Four years into this experiment, no one from the state or school has ever once come to ask questions about what we study, or even to check up on me.
For Mom, that freedom is thrilling. Mom says that I’m a “creative genius” and it’s up to her to “cultivate” my “gifts”. She believes that for certain kids, like my brother Aaron, the structure of public school is necessary, but a “global learner” like myself needs a “free-form education”.
Inspired by her educator hero John Holt, Mom calls what we do “unschooling”. For Mom, unschooling means that other than my correspondence math course, she wants me to spend my days “pursuing my passions”, which usually involves a lot of shopping trips together, lunches out, and drawing or reading around the pool in the back yard.
In 1990s Texas, I had fallen into the invisible space of home schooling that the state only recently wrote into law
Even if my need for other kids sometimes feels like an actual physical deficiency, I see how much Mom wants me here. The last years have been hard for her. When we moved to Texas from Indiana, she lost her career and social life. Hundreds of miles away, her mother is slipping into dementia. But when it’s just the two of us in the house, Mom still often whistles through her days.
“Honestly, you are better than any grownup, Stef,” she says. “You are more than all I need, and there’s a lesson in that. You should never depend on people outside your family for the things you truly need.”
I often swear to myself that at some point I’ll tell Mom that I must go back to school, but I’ve never quite found the courage to do so. Still, whenever Mom and I happen to pass a police officer, I try to telepathically beg him: Please, please make us explain why a boy my age is spending his school day at the mall.
One day I will learn that there, in 1990s Texas, I had fallen into the invisible space of home schooling that the state only recently wrote into law. In that year (as will remain the case, in 2026) there is no requirement for a home-schooled child to take any test of basic grade-level learning, and a home-schooling parent doesn’t even need to have a high school degree.
Actually, a parent could be a registered sex offender, convicted of crimes against minors and under active investigation by child protective services, and still home school their child without oversight. Home-school laws differ by state but similar laws exist all over the country, due largely to powerful Christian lobbying groups. In 1994, however, I’m unaware of any of that, and I still believe that all I need for something to change is just an adult from outside the home to come and see how we spend our days.
And just my luck, because a visitor is soon to arrive. Another adult, whose presence in the house is sure to shift something – at very least, I know, the appearance of this particular houseguest will put my crawling regimen on hiatus.
Like a diabolical genie that my loneliness has conjured, Mom’s greatest tormentor is coming next week.
Dad’s mother, my Grandma Mimi, is an astonishment to me.
“Impatient is one word for her,” Mom says. “Controlling is another. Do you know the word imperious? I’ll say this for your Grandma Mimi, the woman is formidable. But what I wonder is whether she sometimes worries that she’s basically a walking cliche. The Jewish stereotype of the kvetching, ball-busting bubbe.”
“She’s not so bad,” I say. “She makes me laugh?”
Standing just over 5ft in her stilettos, Grandma Mimi always arrives from Florida in gold lamé, jangling masses of jewelry, and enough Chanel No 5 to set off one of my brother’s asthma attacks. She wears a platinum blond updo, a style she hasn’t changed since the 1950s, but I know that the hair itself is no longer authentic.
Whenever she comes to town, Mimi brings along a foam mannequin’s head, where her wig rests every night. She also brings a chocolate babka from a Fort Lauderdale bakery, which she likes to unwrap and carry down on a plate, claiming she baked it herself back home.
Grandma Mimi doesn’t dwell much on the past, but I know that back when Dad and his siblings were kids, after my grandfather’s health and career imploded in spectacular fashion (the news of his Ponzi scheme was splashed across the pages of the Cincinnati Enquirer, after which he suffered a series of heart attacks), Grandma Mimi rose magnificently to the occasion. She opened a real estate agency, and within a few years, Mimi became a kind of local celebrity: Marian Block, the lady real estate agent with real chutzpah, whose reputation spread all over town.
After my grandfather’s death, Grandma Mimi got remarried, and I remember meeting my new step-grandfather Meir just once. As I sat with Meir in a fog of his cigar smoke in the oceanfront apartment they shared, he asked: “Do you know why Jewish husbands die before their wives?” I swallowed and didn’t reply. “Because they want to!”
Meir let out a single, lung-rattling guffaw and was dead before our next visit to Florida.
This year, only minutes after she clip-claps into the house in her Dolce & Gabbana heels, Mimi gets right to her critique.
“The boy should be in school. It’s a Thursday! A boy on a Thursday should be in a school, learning a thing. He needs the – what do they call it? The curriculum.”
“Actually,” Mom says, “the new theory in education is that what matters most is teaching a child to love to learn, to let them follow their interests.” Mom’s voice when talking with Mimi is like the lighting in a convenience store, an artificial and too-bright intensity. “And I think that you would find that Stefan is quite up-to-date with the standard curriculum.”
Mimi hoists one of her hand-drawn eyebrows. “And doesn’t he get lonely here, without friends? Stefan, aren’t you lonely here by yourself all day?”
I shrug. When she squints at me, I notice there’s some sort of faint glitter in her purple eyeshadow. She shakes her head.
“To me, this is craziness. But you know me. I won’t say anything if it isn’t my place.”
“Yeah,” Mom says. “I know you.”
“Just please, will you do me a favor,” Mom asks me in an angry whisper the next morning. “Will you please be on your very best behavior while she’s here? Show her all the great things we do in home schooling? What a great and diligent learner you are? I know we shouldn’t care about her opinion, but I guess I just want to put her in her place a little.”
I nod, but over the next days, I’m not at all diligent about my work. In fact, I spend a substantial portion of that first day chasing around my pet hamster in her clear plastic ball. In the middle of the afternoon, when Mom is busy with her own part-time work, I flip on the little TV in my room and watch sitcoms for hours, the set loud enough to draw Mimi’s attention. As Mimi observes me from the doorway, I look into her watery, forceful eyes, and I can feel the tidal strength of her disappointment upon me.
I want to do what Mom asked me to, I really do, but I can’t seem to stop offering Mimi further evidence that she’s right, making for her a show of how little I’m educated, providing zero examples of all that supposed self-motivation and burgeoning genius Mom is always bragging about.
Grandma Mimi is the first adult, the first person maybe, who has voiced the worry I carry at all times
The next morning, I claim to be at work on a project, but I just spend the hours with my comic books, my bedroom door open. It isn’t long before Mimi discovers me there, sipping a Coke at 10.00am, flipping pages of Uncanny X-Men.
“So this is how you spend your day.” Mimi says.
I shrug. “My math class takes about 30 minutes. And then I just sort of do whatever I want all day.”
I feel my heart working scarily in my chest. I guess I know what’s coming. I guess I’ve invited it, even, but I can’t help myself. Grandma Mimi is the first adult, the first person maybe, who has voiced the worry I carry at all times, about my future, and about my loneliness.
“You know that I’m going to have a talk with your mother about all this,” Grandma Mimi tells me now.
“You don’t need to do that. I usually work harder than this, really.” Despite my general deadbeat attitude these last days, I’m panicking now. I can see how much Grandma Mimi is in fact looking forward to the open-field battle of this “talk”, and I know I’ve supplied her with the ammunition. “You really don’t need to tell her anything.”
“Stefan,” she says. “Someone needs to fight for you here. Lucky for you, a fighter is just who your grandmother is.”
“What is wrong with you?” Mom asks the next morning. She has just come back from a drive with Mimi, and as soon as she got home, she yanked me into her bedroom, where she is now yelling at me in a whisper. “Didn’t I ask you to help me? Didn’t I ask you to work extra hard this week?”
I’ve done the worst thing I could do to Mom. I’ve betrayed her to her nemesis: that’s what Mom’s face, so angry and near, is telling me now. She thought I was the one person completely in her corner, but now I too have joined the ranks of her enemies.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t think I was being so bad. I just –”
“Can’t you see,” she shout-whispers, “that I’ve given you an opportunity here that almost no other kid on the planet will ever have? The opportunity for true greatness. But you are wasting it. You are selling me out to that woman, just so you can, what? Go to that awful school and lose everything that makes you special? Why, Stef? Why the hell would you want to do that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Give me a goddamn break, you don’t know.”
Even before she snaps up my shirt near the collar, I know that it will be a long time, maybe never, until I’ll be able to apologize my way back from what I’ve done.
“You need to listen to me,” she says, tightening her hold.
And then, with both hands, she pushes me back. For an instant my feet kick at the air. A bright pain explodes in the back of my head as it smacks against the dresser. The light scrambles in my eyes. I’m on the floor now, and Mom is standing over me.
I [had] to give up the old hope that someone might come into our house and change things for me
“Are you going to listen to me? Are you going to listen to me now? Stand up.”
I stand, my chin to my chest.
“Why are you looking at me like that? Because I gave you a little push? That was nothing. Nothing,” she says, but I can see the guilt in her face, troubling her anger.
“It was nothing,” I repeat, even as the floor goes unbalanced at my feet, and nausea blooms in my chest. “Really, it wasn’t anything. I’m really so, so sorry.”
I’m thinking that maybe if only I apologize now, and keep on apologizing, her guilt will win out over what I’ve done and what I’ve said to Grandma Mimi. In that way, it’s the fact that Mom just hurt me that might mend us. And I must fix things between us, because now I know this much is true: I have to give up the old hope that someone might come into our house and change things for me. Whatever happens next, it will be up to me to force my own way out.
At last, a year and a half after Grandma Mimi’s visit, I will indeed find a way to insist on my return to school.
I will step into the terrifying adolescent crowds of Shepton high school for the start of my freshman year, but every day will offer another compelling reason to give up on the world, and return home to Mom.
After nearly five years in the sole company of a middle-aged woman, I’ll be a kid who chooses to eat his sandwich in a toilet stall in order to avoid the lunchroom social scene, a boy who other and larger lonely boys beat up when teachers aren’t watching, a poor student who knows how to impress his own mother with showy rhetoric but does not know how to pass a test. Still, I’ll keep showing up at that school, and eventually I’ll graduate and leave Texas altogether.
It won’t be until decades later that I’ll see so clearly the great irony of Mom’s immense love for me: that it was both the lock on my door, and its key. It was her desperation to hold me so close that trapped me there at home all those years, but it was also her absolute faith in my abilities that gave me the courage to turn my back on her and set out into a large and often overwhelming world.
And when I finally seek out other former home schoolers, I’ll realize how lucky I was. Not every home-school story is a sad one (indeed, home schooling can be a positive, vital alternative for many families) but I will also see how much worse – in the form of physical, psychological, and sexual trauma – can happen behind the legal veil of home schooling, and how many other home-schooled kids are not given the resources to find their own ways free.
Today, it’s estimated that more than 3 million American kids are being home schooled, but we can’t know the actual number because in many states parents can home school without filing notice.
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