Member-only story
TRUE STORY
My Child Found His Penis at the Worst Possible Time
My true home-schooling adventure
Warning: this first bit is boring as hell, but if you stick with it, I promise it gets funnier.
I had four children in five years. It was before I discovered acupuncture and balance.
In the 1980s, when my eldest was 7, he came home from school one day and announced that he was stupid.
Later, I discovered via a WISC-R assessment that he scored in the top percentile for everything except one rather important area. He could not copy any symbol or writing from one place to another. He couldn’t copy anything that was written on a blackboard. Including homework assignments.
But he was not stupid.
Neurodivergence hadn’t been invented back then. It would be decades before he, and later I, discovered we were autistic.
I did not want my children to think they were stupid. Even if they were. Something had to be done.
So, I pulled my eldest egg and his 6-year-old brother out of school to home-educate them whilst juggling a 4-year-old and the youngest — a two-year-old already shaping up to be either an entrepreneur or a drug runner. It was even money.
