The Urbane Homestead

Meetings

Every once in a while you have a meeting that serves as little window, through which you can watch, twig by twig, the construction of the handbasket you and your colleagues are going to hell in.

Uh-oh

I had some bad news this morning.

One the way to work, listening to a lecture on Biological Anthropology, I learned that, as a woman without a daughter, my mitochondrial DNA is doomed to extinction. I'm joking about that being bad news, of course. But it was interesting that I did experience a moment of poignance, possibly because, while I adore every curly wild hair on Joe's head, sometimes I do wish for a daughter as well.

I'm not alone in this, I know: just yesterday Joe informed me, quite fiercely, that he wasn't going to speak to me again until I considered providing him with a sister. "Okay," I said immediately, "I've considered it." He said, "No, I mean you have to have one. Or I'm not going to talk." That lasted only a few minutes before he was off and running on some other topic.

Thinking about mitochondrial DNA reminded me of homeschooling. (Why?) I have a friend who homeschools her only child, a son. I've always thought that, in the postnuclear holocaust, Henry and I would be perfectly capable of tutoring a child through high school at least; our skills and interests are complementary and pretty much cover 100% of your average high school curriculum. On the other hand it would take a global disaster for us to be tempted to homeschool. Just the idea of spending all day, every day, all together gives us the guillermos.

It occurs to me, too, that sending Joe out in the world for education is a way of expanding our pie, as it were. We can all go about every day, gathering crumbs of knowledge and experience, and bringing them back to the nest to share. (Our knowledge accumulation pie is apparently a sort of mock apple pie with crumbs instead of Ritz crackers.) Whereas homeschooling would be a more effective way of passing on one's own accumulation of knowledge to the next generation. Knowledge as linear inheritance, vs. as tribal wealth.

In case you are wondering, the answer is yes, I have gone off the deep end here.