Why I Wrote The Bitter Homeschooler's Wish List

It was a sunny summer day, and I felt great. I'd just finished a project I was passionate about. So often I'd read postings on homeschooling loops asking if there was anything written for family members who didn't really understand what homeschooling was and were taken aback by the fact that their own grown child had chosen such a strange path.  I'd written and sold articles about homeschooling before; now I'd finished a whole book on the subject.  A necessary and, I hoped, a good one.

Hoped? No. I felt arrogantly sure that it was a fantastic book. I'd worked my hindquarters off creating this slim volume. I'd written and rewritten and read aloud and bored my nearest and dearest senseless. I'd solicited and received feedback from other homeschoolers every step of the way. I had even caught myself in errors and ruthlessly corrected them.

I brought a copy of the book to my local park day gathering. I said I wanted any feedback anyone cared to give.

What I really expected was that the homeschoolers I spent so much time with would read my book and have a good time. This was the group that liked my sense of humor; with them in mind, I'd written myself ragged figuring out the funniest ways of saying what needed saying to the friends and families of homeschoolers.

I did get a lot of laughs. If there's a better feeling than hearing others read your words and laugh out loud at them (assuming, of course, that you're a humor writer), I don't know what it is.

This day was supposed to be about making any necessary changes in my manuscript; really, for me at least, it was a celebration of completion and community. I basked in the day's sunshine and my friends' praise.

If I'd been listening, I'd have heard the karma police pulling into the driveway.

My comeuppance came from an unexpected source, because Nicole is about the sweetest person on the planet and would be horrified at the bare idea of dealing comeuppance to anyone higher on the moral number line than, say, Stalin. She never meant to give me such a wallop, and the only reason I'm announcing publicly that she did was that I needed it and am deeply grateful she was there for me.

Nicole has a terrific, wry British sense of humor. I love to make her laugh because she always gets this brief, wonderfully startled look on her face just before she doubles over -- what I think of as her "ooh, don't let the grownups hear that one" expression.

Today, though, I wasn't seeing her signature wide eyes. She smiled at a few of the one-liners that my friends tossed out from their brief inspections of my book, but her expression was clouded. When the others were finished thumbing through the book, she quietly picked it up and, with the excuse that her youngest daughter needed her nearby, went across the park to give my words a good going-over.

She returned to our picnic spot some thirty minutes later and put the book down again. She looked thoughtful and a little anxious.

"I don't mean," she began, "that it isn't well-written, because it's wonderful. As a homeschooler, I thought it was hilarious."

My heart sank. "But I think," she went on, "that if some of my relatives -- the ones who are really freaked out about the fact that I'm homeschooling -- read this, they'd really be put off by it."

She caught my expression, and her own went from concern to abject apology. I'm sure that I looked as if I'd taken one of those falls that makes you wonder if you'll ever remember how to breathe in again. I certainly felt as if I might not have reason to bother with such an exercise. I'd failed miserably at the very work I was supposed to be good at. If the best feeling is hearing your own words praised and enjoyed, the worst is being caught out in a blunder any first-year writing student would blush to make.

I'd said -- right there on the cover page, in the very title -- that this book was for friends and families of homeschoolers. But I hadn't written it with them in mind at all. I'd written a book that homeschoolers would love, a book full of all the things we think of saying to the civilian world in our frustration and exhaustion.

This wasn't a book homeschoolers could give to their bewildered grandparents. This was something they themselves could read and enjoy, but it wouldn't do a thing to foster real communication or understanding. It was little more than a bunch of smug pot-shots.

I'd been so interested in showing off how hilarious I could be when I put my pen to it that I'd let my ego get in the way of what the book was really supposed to be.

I remember feeling devastated. I think my practical side was relieved, too -- this was fixable. I know I was exhausted in advance, thinking of the work that needed doing. This was no quick little breeze-through, on the hunt for misplaced periods or missing commas. This would have to be a complete rewrite.

I sat down with the manuscript and read every word as if I were a rather imperious British dowager who's been presented with the news that her favorite niece has decided to teach her children at home. (Never mind that the book was written primarily for American readers. Nicole was the one who'd showed me where I needed to go, and she's British. So an English aunt it was.) I thought about that aunt long and hard, and realized that she was being so prickly, and frowning so much, because she cared. She was worried that someone she loved was making a mistake.

I thought about her. I made her a real person, one I loved and respected even if I didn't always find it easy to get along with her. I did everything I could to get behind her eyes, or at the very least be in the same room with her. I pretended that the book I was writing was words I had to say right to her face. And I rewrote the book -- not just page by page, or even paragraph by paragraph, but word by word.

Every sentence that might sting was ruthlessly plucked out. Every phrase that had been sharply funny was deleted and replaced with what I desperately hoped was warmth and reassurance. If I couldn't make that old aunt smile, I hoped to at least be able to soften the frown on her forehead a bit.

I finished the book in this spirit. I was humbled by the work. It wasn't what I was good at. I was more comfortable with my sassy, flippant side. But that wasn't what was needed here. If I was going to do this, I was going to do it right.

I hope I did. I know I felt a deep relief when I finished. I'd done the writing that needed to be done rather than the writing Little Miss Me felt like doing.

I was relieved. But I was disappointed, too.

The things I'd written before were good, in their own way. They might not need saying in this particular book, but they'd made my friends laugh because they needed saying somewhere.

I put them aside. I worked on the book.

I got the idea for the magazine. I put almost everything aside and worked on that.

One night, when I was flipping through files, looking at the articles I had for the first issue and wondering what else I needed, I noticed a document whose title I didn't place right away. "Wish List"? What was this -- the books I wanted for Christmas?

It was something I'd been tossing around as an idea. Not wanting to lose everything I'd torn out of my book for friends and families of homeschoolers, I'd jotted down some of the sharper stuff, and a few other things besides. I wasn't sure what I'd do with it; it was too long for a T-shirt, too short for a book, and as for an article -- what editor was going to buy something like this? Too mean, too edgy. Surely they'd have to blunt it down a bit. And that would ruin the whole point.

But I was an editor now. I was working on the first issue of a magazine so outlandish that even people who supported it in theory weren't sure it could ever work in practice. I had a lot of perfectly good, practical, nuts and bolts articles. It would be nice, I thought, to have something short and funny to lighten things up a bit and fill a little space.

I sat down and started concentrating. Half a dozen sentences turned into a couple of dozen entries. I felt a little like the sorcerer's apprentice -- having worked so hard to get this started, I wasn't sure I could shut it off.

All the discipline and focus I'd turned on my book was now shining through a different lens. As warm and unthreatening as I'd aimed to be before, that was how sharp and no-holds-barred saucy I was pushing for now. Why not?  The only people who would ever read this were homeschoolers -- and not many of those. I had maybe a couple of dozen subscribers at this point, and lucky to have them for a magazine that was a little more than theory but not quite vigorous enough to be an established fact.

Throwing myself into writing the list, really kicking up my heels and letting it be the sharpest writing it could be, felt a bit like using the real names of the people who worked at the college that had given my homeschooling friend so much grief about admitting her son as a full-time student. I worried for maybe a minute and a half. And then I thought in so many words, "What's the worst thing anyone can do? Make me more broke and obscure?"

This might just be the only chance I'd have to work from a position of that kind of strength -- the power of having nothing to lose.