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!

            Community is difficult to construct in our modern culture.  We tend to manage little mini-communities—the adults we see at work, the parents of our children’s friends, our chosen friends we see in our free time. But these groups rarely intersect unless (possibly) you choose to step out of the modern culture and stay home with your children, or work at home, or homeschool, or all of the above. Trying to form and mesh with a consistent community is a skill I constantly work to acquire, and as I continue my work I have become aware that many people have this same problem—and no wonder! What are our models for forming community?

            My dad often bemoans his poor childhood “on the block”. He lived in a blue collar city where everyone’s dads worked all the time to make ends meet, and when he wasn’t in school he was on the street with his friends or in his friends’ parents’ houses. He didn’t leave a two- or three-block area of his city, because all his friends were right there. But my dad doesn’t really value that experience—he only remembers that his family struggled financially, and that he didn’t want that experience for his own children.

            Now I struggle to find community, not money, for my own children. I live on a “block”, though it’s a suburban version with quarter-acre lots of raised ranches and the like, and when I moved here I looked forward to my child making friends with kids who lived on this block. Except, he hasn’t, because there is no one here. Oh, many children live on this block, but they all go to public school and after that, they all attend after school programs. If we go out on block at around 5:30 pm, that’s when the kids are out playing for their few minutes before they have to go home for dinner and homework, if they even make it outside at all.

            So instead, I have been trying out various groups that the local homeschoolers have formed in the hope of finding a community (albeit, one I must drive to) for me and my children. I’ve tried out three or four groups now, and I’ve discovered one of the keys to a group’s success: the number of takers versus givers within that group. You have the people (usually moms) who give their energy and time to making the community work, and you have the people who simply wish to benefit from the community without any significant energy expenditure on their part. But, like most things, it isn’t that simple. We’re a bipolar culture, and I think we tend to see things as either/or, but giving and taking, like gender and sexuality, are on a continuum. Some takers truly absorb energy from those around them, giving absolutely nothing in return. Some are more savvy about it, and give just enough to keep the other community members from calling them on their lack of involvement. But on the other end of the spectrum are the givers, the people (again, in my communities, usually moms) who give and give and give and don’t expect anything in return. Some of these moms, have been burned before and assume that if you want something done, you must do it yourself. Others, I think, derive their sense of personhood from how much they give, and you giving back to them both confuses and frightens them. And some, like me, simply bought the cultural edict, hook, line and sinker, that that’s what mothers do.

            But nothing I have learned has taught me how to find that balance between taking and giving. But oh, when we find that balance! When we give to our communities, offer up our energies and our insights and our well-wishes, AND we take and enjoy the energies our fellows have to offer us…  The synergy, the exponential growth of energy and zest and accomplishment that happens when everyone is right there, giving what they have, relishing the gifts we all offer each other—it is an experience beyond anything.  And I believe it is our birthright, this kind of community. I have had groups that approach this, and it has been (and is!) such a fulfilling experience for me and my family. Can you imagine if every day, all our lives, we were fed like this by our communities?

I’m reading a fascinating history of parenting called Parenting for A Peaceful World by Robin Grille, available at the great site

www.naturalchild.com.    The author describes the evolution of parenting

over time in cultures around the world.   The history of parenting is

rather brutal, with children once considered non-entities that could be discarded, killed, and used at the parent’s whim.  He takes us through

the different modes of parenting and shows us where we are today.   He

sees our collective approach to parenting as evolving and developing, which is good news indeed.  He also sees how we collectively parent as the leading force that shapes how we are as a country, whether we perpetrate violence or encourage peace.  It’s a fascinating read, I don’t normally enjoy social-history books, but this caught my attention.

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