When I look back on my childhood, it seems relentlessly Americana, but in the bad modern way: grew up in a suburb’s raised ranch, worked hard in high school so that I could pay lots of money to go to college, tried a career, found a better one, got married, bought a house, two cars, a timeshare and two cats, and called myself successful.  And then, somehow, the bottom fell out. It all started with the birth of my first child, and before I knew what happened, was reading philosophy, eating organic foods, choosing to homeschool, and joining the Back to the Earth movement. What the heck happened??

            I believe over the last few years I have perfected a process by which you, too, can fall completely out of the mainstream, just by following a few simple steps.

            Step 1: Be mainstream long enough to discover that it’s REALLY boring
            My husband and I got good jobs—computer programmer for him, high school teacher for me—worked our five-day work week, made plenty of money, bought all the required stuff (car, stereo, TV, computer, DVD player) and ate out a lot. That’s pretty much it. You rent movies, you go out hiking or biking or kayaking once in a while, but generally speaking, life in the mainstream is pretty dull.  I guess we could have added video games into the mix for extra fun, but even we weren’t that far gone. So what DO you do with your time?

            Step 2: Have children
            You want to shake up your double-income, just-you-and-me complacency? Have a baby! There is nothing like a bundle of cute little embodied responsibility to make you realize how easy you had it. Now life is hard, but that is a good thing—life was so boring before that because it was too easy. Children certainly challenge all previous certainties you had about your life… such as that you were remotely competent at anything. But you will be, eventually, and it’s easier if you …

            Step 3: Stay home to raise your children
            This step is not absolutely required to fall out of the mainstream, but it definitely helps in a myriad of ways. The simple act of staying home immediately removes you from an enormous segment of the mainstream crowded with people who run the hamster wheel juggling two incomes, their household, and their children. Another benefit is staying home allows you to abandon your old, complacent, easy life and convenient friends and really dive into your ignorance. The plus side? When you’re home parenting every day, it’s a very steep learning curve,: you have to get a clue or you’re dead. Finally, having less money allows you to really abandon comsumerism and redefine your true needs. If you don’t have the money to buy X-Boxes, ATVs, I-Pods and Blackberries, you automatically put yourself further out of the mainstream than you would believe. Can you imagine spending every day experiencing the world as it is, and not shielding yourself behind constant externally generated imagery and noise?

            Step 4: Read books
            No, not Danielle Steele, at least, not right now. Read books by people both of the mainstream and those trying to break it open for deconstruction and discussion. Daniel Quinn and Thom Hartmann were two authors who definitely opened my eyes to new ways of thinking about mainstream culture.

            Step 5: Make friends with people who have already left the mainstream
            I was lucky—this turned out to be one of my easiest steps because I found one friend and then sidled into her already-established community of macroculture rejecters. It is not usually this easy, but you gotta do it. You need that group of people around you who will reinforce your new perceptions of the macroculture as well as introduce you to more books and more ideas that will expand and consolidate your new view of the mainstream and your place out of it. My friends and I like to call it our “bubble”, our little world that we have established full of families who have the same sensibilities and goals, who choose to stay home to homeschool their children, limit media, and tread lightly on the earth as much as possible.

            If you haven’t found these folk yet, don’t worry, we’re out here, so keep looking!

            I know there are lots of other possible steps to help families out of the mainstream:  have terrible experiences with mainstreamed kids who watch too much TV and play video games ad nauseum (it helps when they’re your in-laws’ kids), discover that your own children lose their minds and exhibit frightening behaviors when exposed to various media outlets, and the like. There seem to be so many reasons to leave the mainstream, I often marvel that anyone would choose to stay.

            So I would love to hear the paths other women followed to find their own way out of the mainstream, dancing their own dance, drumming their own drums. One thing is certain—when you’re out of the mainstream, life is never boring!

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