at home, on fire

Jun. 27, 2007

definitely not normal ...

My friend and I were talking about how, in a way, it is nice as homeschool families to just look "normal" ... you know, not stand out or, more preferably, not stick out. I agreed and we continued on in our happy conversation. I certainly had visual images in my head of not-normal homeschool people, having either met some, or just using my imagination. It wasn't hard to do.

Then this morning happened.

I decided to "look it up" as my daddy always said, and this is what I found ...

Normality (behavior)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In behavior, normal refers to a lack of significant deviation from the average. The phrase "not normal" is often applied in a negative sense (asserting that someone or some situation is improper, sick, etc.). Abnormality varies greatly in how pleasant or unpleasant this is for other people; somebody may half-jokingly be called "pleasantly disturbed".

From the Latin Normalis (f).

For example, the French sociologist Emile Durkheim indicated in his Rules of Sociological Method that the most common behavior in a society is considered normal. People who do not go along are violating social norms and will invite a negative reaction from others in the society.

Ok. Me and mine are definitely not normal. We may look it on the outside at a glance, even if we do dress a little differently than many of the parents we know, but we are anything but normal on the "inside", regularly violating social norms (even within the "church", oh my).

we homeschool, but not like the other parents in my local group who use recognized material. I am even branching out by writing my own curriculum and selling it to other ~~suckers~~ people
we are open to having a whole bunch of kids, though you would never know it to look at us
our church is most certainly not normal and though we are working out our thoughts on some of the bigger issues involved, we cannot imagine attending a "regular" service with any regularity
we usually, truthfully, do not agree with or embrace whatever seems to be the next best thing, be it a cool tv show or the latest purpose-driven, prayer of whoever Christian product
we always share our summers with someone ... this year it happens to be a young actor living with us for 5 weeks
we are growing as many vegetables as we can and choose to purchase locally what we cannot
we would rather play our own music, create our own art or just hang out than watch anything on tv
we choose cash over credit, hands down, and hope to instill this value in our kids
I actually like being at home, wasting my degree in blissful ignorance of what is expected of me

What struck me with all I thought of, wrote, and even left out, was the fact that, for us, all our seemingly abnormal tendencies are ,actually, quite normal. So I have a new phrase I am going to try on for size ... we are "pleasantly disturbed", and pleased to make your acquaintance.