The Expat Box

Anything you want you can find in Muscat, except for fresh cranberries on the eve of Thanksgiving. Generally, though, if you have the riyals to pay for it, you can buy it. I have even run across canned corned beef hash several times, which should jar you into the realization that my previous statement is absolutely true, for the law of item acquisition overseas is, "If one can readily find corned beef hash in stores rather than on the black market, then one is in a place where ANYTHING can be had."

A second guideline of living overseas is "Find the box". That is, when you meet another expat you immediately converse upon a finite number of topics in order to discover which box that person fits into. Nationality is the most obvious first box one seeks out, followed quickly by how long one has been here, and previous overseas experience (always seek out common passport stamps). If the personality checks out thus far, the next box to explore is occupation.

Muscat houses an astonishing variety of jobs filled by an astounding array of personalities from countries all over the world. I have met communications people, international school teachers, botanists, biologists, tour guides, and engineers. Hand any of these individuals the homeschool bomb, though, and they balk. "Ooooh, homeschooling are you? (no, this was not Yoda that I met recently, although being British set him not too far from the mark--and he has big ears, this Brit) That must be amazingly difficult!"

From an older, childless British woman: "Ah yes, homeschooling. I didn't realize that anyone here was doing that. And what are you doing for your children's socialization?"

From an Indian mother of five whose youngest is 7 and oldest is 32(!) "Yes, I have heard that homeschooling causes immense stress for the person who is acting as the instructor. Is that so? Do you find this to be the case?"

And the best one was from an American man: "Well I have heard that your children are really doing well with the homeschooling and are literate, but that your son is a little bit lazy. It sounds like you are doing a great job! He will probably grow up to be a politician!"

Once we have run through the boxing exercise, I usually find that the conversation ends after I have revealed that I am homeschooling, and subsequent conversations revolve around that topic in a polite, removed sort of way. The homeschool box is a tough one to be in as everyone believes they know what it looks like on the inside yet no one has actually explored it. Nor do they much care to.

Lately, the box looks...well, you be the judge. Having recently taken on a colleague's child, who is also a No Child Left Behind refugee, our little school has grown to four instead of the three that I had started with.

The biggest change is that Silas no longer spends his mornings under the table. Eleven weeks into the school year, the genius finally comprehended that, once he has finished his material for the day, he is done whether it takes him an hour or ten hours. Now he views the underside of the table as a waste of his time and chooses instead to study. When he does go into hiding, it is in places that are far more sophisticated than a table. The roof offers corners and compressors to hide behind, there are five bathrooms to choose from, our furniture sits at odd angles to deaden the echos (and consequently offer rich hiding opportunities), and his bedroom has its own nooks and crannies.

Tian has become an academic workhorse. She most recently penned a five paragraph essay on the plausibility of Marco Polo's writings in his book, A Description of the World. Today she and Silas were spontaneously evolving lines to poems about dragon eggs, and correcting one another as they recited snatches of a speech by Abraham Lincoln. She has mastered long division, read extensively on the center of the earth, and is constructing a clay map of Eurasia. She is the homeschooled child I always want to make fun of. While she and Silas follow the same curriculum, Tian follows it with so much more finesse and abandon. She is something of a dweeb.

As for Tehva, we have shipped her off to a morning preschool program at the university. She was simply becoming too much of a distraction with her non-stop frittering and random abuse of her brother and sister. Once we took on the fourth child for daily schooling, Tehva's screeching rants drove poor Catherine to distraction and set her rocking, fingers jammed in her ears, in order to calm herself. An eight by twelve room is not big enough to hold Tehva and a special needs child and a boy who cannot figure out the concept of a to-do list and a hopeless over achiever and the homeschool mother whom everyone assumes is one beer short of a six pack for even considering schooling her own children in the first place.

A reread tells me why no one asks about much beyond the fact that I homeschool. TMI.