There is a theme in many children’s books nowadays about how children need to understand that mommy has to work. Of course, this theme is not isolated to children’s literature. Many children, including myself, have (or had) to live with this everyday. Mommy has to work. We need to have the finer things in life. Like the ability to take a trip to Disney World.

Let me tell you about Disney World. My parents took us twice when we were growing up. Disney World in 1972 was pretty new; pretty dazzling. I was 5, my little brother, 2. Along the way to Disney World, we both got the chicken pox; mine was pretty mild, my brother’s case was a little more severe, but it was nothing worth hospitalization. Anyway, we get there, and were scared to death. Mommy took us on the Snow White ride, and we screamed and screamed until she put her hands over each of our eyes. I had nightmares about it for the whole rest of the time we were in Florida, and a general fear lingered in my life for several years afterward. I can’t tell you what I was scared of, except that ride is engineered to scare little children, just like the movie, Snow White.

We returned to Disney World in 1981, when I was 14, and my little brother was 11. This time, we preferred Busch Gardens, because it had better rides. We would have rather stayed in the Midwest and gone to Cedar Point, truth be told. Disney World in ’81 was hot and full of long lines for non-thrilling rides. I’m coming to realize that the price for those two trips to Disney was too high.

We also went to Disney Land in ’80 (without Daddy), and Mommy took us to Denmark in ’78, and we all went to Mexico in ’79, ’83, and ’85. We had a serious summer trip every year, and my mother went to Greece to work on her PhD, and my father went to Botswana to study something or other, too. We stayed with various relatives, and babysitters and daycare, and eventually home alone while they pursued their careers in academia.

My mother talks a lot about how she sacrificed having a larger family for her PhD. She didn’t want a larger family anyway. She will tell you jokingly that she really doesn’t like children that much, but I think it has more to do with societal pressure to be responsible for showering fewer children with more stuff, than any innate desire on her part.

The people who sacrificed for our family were my brother and me. We had to understand that mommy had to work. Mommy had to work in order to finance our lifestyle. We had two cars, never fewer than 2 televisions, a summer vacation trip every year, even though Daddy had to teach every other summer semester in order to pull this off. Did I mention the cruise in ’74? We took Grandmommy Una Bell, Daddy’s mother, on that one.
 Mommy stayed home briefly after she got married. She set about the work of making a home with skills she’d learned from her mother, a widow. This didn’t last long. Daddy started asking her when she was going to get a job. His mother had been a teacher. She didn’t sit around the house twiddling her thumbs, she was out furthering her education, teaching, contributing to society. . . So, Mommy took a job as a social worker. That’s what she’d been doing in Cleveland before she married.

Shortly thereafter, they joined the Peace Corps together, and lived in Somalia doing Peace Corps work as teachers together for two years. They got pregnant on their way home from the Peace Corps stint, and came back to the US, where Daddy promptly enrolled in Graduate School. I was born while they were living in Married Student Housing at the University of Illinois. Two months later, Daddy got his Master’s Degree, and we moved to Chicago, in with Uncle Lonnie, Aunt Liz, and Lorenzo, their son.

We didn’t live with them too long , and Mommy stayed home with me until I was 2 or 3. Zeke was born exactly a month before I turned 3, and Mommy went back to work, and Graduate School when he was small. She got her Masters Degree in our early childhood, and Daddy got his PhD. Zeke stayed at a babysitter’s house from his babyhood, and went to a preschool sponsored by the Community College, Kennedy King, where Mommy taught by the time he was 2 (ish).

I went to a private Kindergarten on a Catholic School bus, and was dropped off at Mrs. Reed (the babysitter’s) house after school. I’d meet Zeke there until he was in Kennedy King, and Mommy would bring him home with her. We lived in Chicago, and my parents didn’t want us in public school, but it was getting harder to afford the private school (that I hated, by the way). We were bracing for me to attend public school for 1st grade, when Daddy got a job in Nashville, TN.

I was 6, Zeke was 3 when we moved to Nashville. I was old enough to get off the school bus and go next door to stay with the neighbors until my parents got home from work. Mrs. Acker was an at-home mother to Michael and Joey. Michael was a year younger than I was, and Joey a year younger than Zeke. Mr. Acker was a Doctor, I remember. Zeke was in day-care/pre-school all day, and Mommy would pick him up on her way home.

Sometimes I would have preferred to stay home than go over and listen to Joey and Michael brag about their Hebrew School. I think I remember staying home alone sometimes from the age of 7. We moved to Kalamazoo just two years after moving to Nashville. By then, I was 8, Zeke was 5—finally old enough for Kindergarten! And he’d been in school for 3 years already, my mother quipped.

Now I would walk by myself to the bus stop, and after school, I’d come home to an empty house. Mrs. Urban, in the Alley beside our house, was ‘on-call,’ but we didn’t go and stay at her house until our parents came home. We’d play in the alley, or just go in the house and watch TV. There would be instances of getting locked out of the house, which would be scary, and we were under no circumstances to let anyone in the house while our parents were out.

They would be in and out, too. By this time, both were Professors, and they had sporadic schedules. Mommy got her PhD in ’77, amidst health problems that landed her in the hospital, and missing school programs, etc. During all the big absences, like hospitalization, and the aforementioned trips to Greece and Botswana, we had a Grandmother come stay with us, or we’d go stay with her. The Grandmothers paid more attention to us than our parents did, now that I think about it.

Daddy’s mother corrected me about lying with a threat about going to hell that scared me into not telling any lie of any kind for 5 years. Mommy’s mother pulled out a Proverb to teach me not to mess with my brother. That Proverb, 9.6, has been with me my whole life; I even turned it into a cantata in 1990.

Anyway, I got the distinct impression that my little brother was my responsibility. If he skinned his knee, he came to me to patch him up. This didn’t always work out so well. One time, when I was 17, and he was 14, he asked me if he could borrow the car and take one of his friends home. He begged, and pleaded, and cajoled, until I finally gave in. No sooner had he left, than Daddy came home and asked where he was. I was horrified to admit what I’d done, and Daddy called me stupid for doing it. Thankfully, Zeke came back home and was ok.
I found myself learning through trial and error, like in that incident, what was right and what was wrong to do. Zeke would get in trouble a lot, like hanging out on Glenwood Ave. with his little thug friends and shoot cars with a slingshot. Mommy even bought him his high-powered sling-shot, but blamed racism for Zeke’s getting caught shooting rocks at a car. He became increasingly angrier, getting in trouble at school for mooning someone, fighting girls, etc.

Zeke came up to visit me in college, and got caught shoplifting. He also started getting drunk and high a lot, crying out for my parents to notice, and they didn’t. I started ‘needing’ a boyfriend, and again, the specter of raising myself came into play. I knew I wasn’t supposed to invite anyone to the house, but I was there alone so much that I did invite someone over. And then, when my parents came home, and saw me breaking the rule, they let it go.

I ended up skipping school to be with my boyfriend (one time; my conscience beat me up about this), and my parents never knew about it. It was a huge relief when they put their foot down and told me to end the relationship. That was the kind of guidance I’d wanted all along. If they would have forbidden the relationship from the beginning, I would have been so much happier.

 I wonder if hunger and thirst for parents and their guidance can lead to boyfriend/girlfriend lust. In other words, I wonder if I had been fulfilled of my parents at home if I would have even gone looking for that kind of love and fulfillment elsewhere. I doubt it.

By leaving our children alone to figure things out for themselves, we are creating a culture of stranger danger. Don’t let anyone in the house, because strangers are bad. Don’t talk to anyone you don’t know. Never tell anyone your name, or, gasp—your phone number! To this day, I don’t identify myself on the telephone until I’m like leaving a message for someone.

Let me ask you this: If you can’t tell anyone your name, how do you get friends? If you’re supposed to get friends from your parents taking you around, introducing you, how do you get friends when your parents aren’t around? You either don’t, or you are subversive. My brother and I ended up doing a little of both. My mother viewed the desire for friends as weak and stupid. She had them , mind you, but our desire for friends was weak and stupid.

She didn’t understand why we might mold ourselves in the images of our acquaintances in order to get friends. I do. We didn’t have any home training. If all we ever got was TV, books, an occasional confusing lesson here and there, fed by cold indifference, how were we supposed to know better? And my parents thought they were doing right by us because we were middle class.

How many children have to be sacrificed on the altar of middle class values?
Fast forward. I’d like to say that we came to the decision that I’d stay at home to give our children a childhood. I have a friend who can say that. No, I kind of backed into this position. It had something to do with having studied music in college; not a whole lot of people beating down my door to give me a job. For that matter, I couldn’t find work in my field that would be worth the trouble of leaving the house. Believe me. I tried.

I think that God was blocking me from all opportunities, because He wanted me at home. I finally confessed that during an argument with my Minister (at the time), about my not sacrificing my family by spending more time at the church, earning my meager $65 a month for directing two choirs, not to mention volunteer work as a class leader. I just blurted out, “God wants me to stay home and raise my children!”
The truth came crashing down around my head, and I knew it when I heard it coming out of my own mouth. The Minister was wondering how that was going to help the church, when Curtis graciously helped me out of that situation by insisting that I quit that job.

I was at home full-time when I enrolled Yanni in school. I soon found myself at the school everyday volunteering, dragging Xay with me. He got ringworm at the age of 2 from hanging out at the school, but I didn’t get it that we weren’t supposed to be there until Curtis demanded I look at homeschooling.
I thought homeschoolers were weird and they didn’t really care about society, just their own children. Where would our society be if we all cared about our own children?!

Curtis knew how to bargain with me. He told me we wouldn’t buy a house until I agreed to homeschool. We had been asked to either buy or leave our rented house at the time, so I was in a desperate situation, but I didn’t want to move out of Kalamazoo Public Schools, because I was very happy with Yanni going to her school. Curtis’ demand forced me to look at homeschooling, and to look at what she was getting from the school.

I had been scared to look at homeschooling, because I thought they might have some good points, points that resonated with the nagging conviction that I couldn’t be doing all I should by Yanni because she was in school all day. So, I read a book about homeschooling. And then, I looked at Yanni’s classroom objectively. I noticed all the chaos in the classroom. She had people jumping up and dancing on the table, fights, threats, and young, inexperienced teachers. This turned out to be just the tip of the iceberg.

When I got her home, and started teaching her myself, I learned that Yanni had a habit of never finishing any assignments. Her thinking was muddled at best, and she didn’t even like Language Arts, the subject she had excelled in at school.

So, as the onion is peeled, I’m finding new layers to change, new levels to ascend to. As we struggled through the unfinished work stage, Curtis got sent to Indianapolis to work. He’d spend the weekends at home, and leave Sunday night to go back to Indianapolis. This went on for a month or so.

 I was really resentful that Curtis couldn’t just quit this job. It was obvious to me that he was supposed to be at home. I was pregnant with number four, and really not happy with the prospect of raising four children all by myself.

I went in the WORD and discovered that the instances of men working in there did not have them leaving the home to go out and do this thing called work. They had enterprises, like vineyards, etc. at home, and when they worked, they were always nearby. I became convinced that it is not God’s plan to have a man leave his family in order to provide for them. Remember, He made Abraham the father of a nation because He could trust him to cultivate his family. You can’t cultivate your family long distance. So, we set out to make Curtis an enterprise at home.