Same people, different place

I admit. Amongst the jungle greens, vicious mosquitoes and screaming Tigers that have filled up my head to bursting, one thought has swelled. From small passing moment to big lumpy bump, reaching my throat, now it brings glittery tears to my eyes.

Home.

Not the home of bashed up tables and kid-painted kitchen chairs with wobbly legs. Not that home. The home ed people home. I am missing the people who come to home ed. The people who say we-can-do-better-than-school. The thinkers, eccentrics, intellectuals, hippies, philosophers, educationalists, uniques, visionaries, committed, family builders, community makers, and downright awkward, high autonomy, don't-mess-with-me, bolshy types. All of those people are normal in my world of home ed.

I tell myself that missing them all is a good thing.

Because it's proof, how wide and rich and various is that community. You school choosing folk are told routinely in the news about our isolated lives; our children lacking social contact, how we are marginalised on the fringes of society, cut off from everyone. But it can't be true, can it? Here I am, missing them. People who challenge our ideas; raise kids who argue for their own unique place in the world; who stretch our definitions of normal in all directions.

I miss them.

The right day then, to find myself meeting up in a coffee shop with home schooling parents thrown together in Hong Kong.

I can reassure you. They are absolutely as I understand the home ed people to be, and as you'd expect for this home ed world. Totally normal.