Sputterpub's Blog

It was about a quarter century ago, when Del got sued. The subpoena came as a total surprise, but she understood the complaint, somewhat, after she got past the scary solemn phrases.

A client had undergone a pension audit, and had to pay taxes and penalties afterward. The client was a pediatric dentist, and he’d purchased a new kind of insurance policy with plan assets. Neither the plan nor the IRS allowed that sort of insurance. Del knew the dude who pushed the insurance, had even beaten him back in the case of another, smarter client, and she strongly recommended that the dentist not touch the policy. When the IRS auditor found the insurance, he had a heyday.

Throughout the audit, before and during it anyway, Del told her dentist client that he should retain an attorney with expertise to argue his case. The client repeatedly told her he’d develop his own strategy, and so he and Del conversed before either of them responded to the auditor.

A month after the audit concluded, the dentist sued Del and the insurance dude. Neither had E&O coverage, but Del had an attorney client who got angry on her behalf and agreed to represent her for a cut fee.

The dentist’s complaint was surreal. He freely admitted that Del had urged him not to buy the insurance. But he maintained that her recommendation wasn’t effective; if it had been effective, he argued, he would have followed it.

He had a different issue with the insurance dude, but that didn’t matter. Del and her attorney spent what time they had to on the case, and eventually got it dismissed, with prejudice. That part was satisfying. What rankled is that her defense also took care of the insurance dude. There was no way around that.

Del learned one can’t choose one’s co-defendants. And the enemy of her enemy is not necessarily her friend.

Eleven years ago, Del became a grandmother. Determined to know her descendant, she took steps to help the young family. She arranged to be with them often. She became intimately familiar with the parenting philosophy of her daughter and son-in-law.

Of course she didn’t agree with everything they did. But Del mostly kept her mouth shut. She hadn’t tolerated her own parents’ attempts to govern her mind and body, and she wasn’t about to infringe on the autonomy of the young folk. She knew it wouldn’t work anyway. She understood it would only create, at best, rifts.

So she asked occasional questions about their determined attachment parenting and co-sleeping, but she accepted their answers. She wished her daughter would have sometimes chosen her own comfort instead of dragging a sweaty infant everywhere with her, but she could tell the decision was deliberate and the result was overall satisfaction. Mostly Del shut up and learned.

She had a little trouble with the infrequency of baths. She winced at the foul language – her daughter has a temper and her son-in-law’s vocabulary is limited. But the idea that gave her the most trouble was the homeschooling.

Del’s concern wasn’t about the learning. Her daughter was highly educated and she’d be the one in charge of the curriculum. Her son-in-law, something of an auto-didact, also had lessons to share. And the homeschooling movement had been growing; it was supported by school districts, enriched by science and math resources, measurable, and transferable to regular school should the family decide to make the change.

No: Del’s concern was about socialization. Del’s mother’s objection was about socialization. Del’s brothers and friends seemed to think socialization would be a challenge.

Del’s daughter and son-in-law had thought out their decision. Even though both of them survived their public school educations, although each would give at least three teachers kudos for brilliance and was not deterred or even slowed in the progress of development by anything that teachers did in classrooms or administrators did outside, they committed themselves to homeschooling (unschooling) their children. Aggie and Gil had three sons, born in 2006, 2008, and 2010.

Del tried to be useful. She contributed to their housing costs. She arranged a comfortable way  to visit them often. She folded a lot of laundry, supplied many meals, and taught her grandboys as aggressively as she’d taught Aggie and her brother. For Del knew her grandkids were bright and eccentric – as her kids had been and as she’d been herself – and she was convinced that any schooling selected would need supplementation.

The grandsons are now 11, 9 and 7. All three are working above the grade level in which they’d be enrolled if they enrolled. All three are polite enough, well-behaved enough, to be inflicted on the public. Del wishes they could associate kids of color, kids with physical and developmental disabilities, kids endowed with athletic talent, kids of average intelligence, but that hasn’t happened yet. The boys accompany their parents many places, but the parents’ social network is circumscribed by poverty and punk.

Del is sure the boys would have it tough in school, but she doesn’t think the toughness would harm them. They’re all bright and disruptive, like their parents and at least their maternal grandparents, but Del thinks bright and disruptive people are well-served by apprenticing among a variety of peers and adults. And while Del knows that the schools are even worse than they were when she attended – crowded, underfunded, teaching to the middle and for the tests – she remembers that days are long when you’re young, so even with seven hours spent on school property, there are many other hours to experience. In her opinion, bright kids have to learn to deal with boredom and to self-stimulate, and she knows no better site than school for those lessons.

But Del doesn’t make those arguments to Aggie and Gil. She’s mentioned each of them before; the discussions have been had. And she never gets to make them to her mother, her brothers, her friends, because they’re all so against homeschooling that Del is forced to defend the decision. It’s like Aggie and Gil are poised, wraith-like, behind her, while she argues the merits of not doing school. At least Aggie and Gil are more attractive than the old insurance dude…

Of late there’s been a provocative development. As a result of Del meeting and analyzing Orson, it’s occurred to her that school does not necessarily equal socialization. That is, Orson went to public school in coastal California. He was raised among a diversity of people and had a relatively typical suburban youth. He’s not well-socialized.

For that matter, a decade ago when Del tried Internet dating, she attracted three different guys who were similarly primitive. All had been raised in bay area suburbs and attended public schools. Del could also put her ex-husband in the cohort. Also her first lover. And the guy with whom she camped and argued in the 1990s.

It isn’t that Del is attracting immature men. Now that she’s mentioned this to her brothers and her best friend, they’re all coming up with examples. Mostly from the Boomer generation, because that is their own, but when challenged they can also name Gen-Xers and Millennials who are poorly socialized (or suffering from undiagnosed cognitive disorders), even after enriched suburban upbringings and the better public and private schools.

Currently the question is open. Del and those closest to her are considering what it takes to properly socialize a human being. The thing they agree about: it’s complicated.