Not-Back-To-School Day

From Deb:

Yesterday, the local kids started back to school. To celebrate our not-back-to-school, we spent the afternoon at Lake Anna, a large man-made lake a little over an hour to the east. They had a lovely, clean beach, with nice sand that extended far out into the lake -- no icky, living lake bottom like they usually are, and fairly clear water that you didn't mind getting in the babies' mouths and noses.

I was feeling fiercely defiant the whole day. David was amused, and made a cryptic, not-quite-critical comment about the fact that I kept mentioning that the girls were NOT in school. I was able to spend a lot of nice, quiet time on the beach, and I realized during it that I am still burningly angry about the amount of desperately trapped feelings I had to repress at the start of school for probably 11 of the 12 years I was in public school. I wasn't psychologically able to experience those feelings then, because I wouldn't have been able to manage them. So that's what's coming out now. I resent having been forced to go, and I still experience that resentment to a degree that I find surprising now, almost 20 years later. And I was good at school, heck, I was valedictorian. I know that circumstances would be a lot different for my girls, that they would never feel trapped in the way I did...but I tell you, you'd have to pry them from my cold, dead fingers before they'd set foot in a public school as a student.

On the other hand, 15 years ago I vowed to leave the Philadelphia area forever, and just look at what are we contemplating now. So much for vows.