I have this little quirk about things having to “go together.” Like, you shouldn’t order the Asian chicken salad with the Mediterranean veggie sandwich. Asian and Mediterranean don’t go together. Even if you like the Asian a little bit better, you need to get the Greek salad with your Mediterranean sandwich.
You shouldn’t serve tacos for Sunday dinner. Tacos are casual, and Sunday dinner should be… nice. And you shouldn’t wear a nice blouse with blue jeans, either. T-shirts go with blue jeans.
And of course, you should never read a book that takes place in 19th-century England when you are studying the Vietnam War, or take a trip to the planetarium even though you are studying animal science. You should wait until you are doing astronomy, so it all goes together. It only makes sense. Everything has to make logical sense.
And red tea kettles do not belong in earth-toned kitchens. (Neither, for that matter, do black appliances.) This drives me crazy.
Sometimes it’s a harmless little quirk, this pursuit of ultimate consistency, this need to have everything fit into its own little box… but sometimes it becomes an obsession. Sometimes it factors too strongly into my thinking and makes things more complicated than they need to be.
Renegade strawberry plants should not be allowed to grow in a flower garden. They’d be out of place. They wouldn’t fit in. How could that be a good thing? Strawberries and flowers don’t go together: the former are for eating and the latter are for looking at. Two different worlds.
And homeschool families should not send their kids to high school. That doesn’t go together. Then you don’t fit in with the homeschool community, and you don’t fit in with the school families. Too hard.
Especially, white middle-class homeschool families living on 3 acres in semi-rural suburbia should not truck their kids into the city to a reduced-tuition urban school. What sense does that make? Even if they like the school, how do those things belong together? Two. Different. Worlds.
Never mind that we’ve already done it for years. It still feels like starting over, and it still feels uncomfortable.
Maybe we should just do what’s comfortable, what’s logical, what’s sensible. Stay firmly entrenched in the realm of homeschooling, or at least go with the very-homeschool-friendly, nearby, suburban, conservative, homogenous school.
Because everyone knows that strawberries don’t grow in flower gardens.
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