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Kindergarten, the reeducation camp

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For better or worse (and without my ever having been entirely cognizant of it until this moment), our little family has been largely free to operate autonomously for years, our schedules shaped (but not controlled) by the predictable waxes and wanes of Congress, but little else. And cantankerous Congress -- where nothing of importance happens before 10 am and the most critical votes each year aren't cast till after the bars are sweeping out their last diehards for the night -- has been a good fit for a family of committed night owls, heretics, and contrarians.

Now the sweet lull of lazy August is interrupted by a new, unfathomable bureaucracy with its early-morning attendance, its authority figures of questionable English ("Ima?" I was tempted to ask the teacher of my child) who seem to radiate dislike for my son, its seemingly arbitrary rules, its totalitarian demands on time and financial resources.

The "damned independent" streak noted (approvingly) by my late Italian grandfather, which I stifle with difficulty to participate in the professional world -- and Jesse stifles hardly at all -- comes bubbling up in my throat as some kind of voiceless shock and impotent frustration. Adulthood stole most of my summer vacation but August has been sacrosanct this last decade. To have the comfortable patterns of our life so sourly disrupted -- and in August no less! -- feels like salt in old wounds, all the more so because it feels at this late hour like an attack on my oldest child's willfulness and creativity.

I know that submitting to the authority of cops and teachers and bosses and lifeguards and loan officers and mafia dons is a critical survival skill -- only my privileged race and economic class have ever allowed me to kick against the pricks as much as I have -- but still something in me rebels.
James and I are awake in a darkened house, restless and dreading tomorrow. He has cried and begged me not to make him go back. I say I have no choice, but somewhere in the back of my mind a little voice tempts me...

"He doesn't really have to go back," that voice whispers. "We could live off the grid as we have been, only half participating in society's rules and norms..."

I assume that making him go back tomorrow -- as we will do -- kicking and screaming -- as he will do -- is the right and good and responsible thing. But what if it isn't? What if it punishes him for the independence I love about him? Why do we have to waste so much of our lives on things that mean nothing?
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