“What are YOU doing reading an article about education?”

The title of this post is a reply to this comment on the home ed article I wrote for Parentdish:

“I bet they dont get out off bed till 10am then its bitty time. its not right anyway the boy will turn out to be a pansy potter.”

It is such an appalling comment that it made me laugh out loud. The ‘bitty time’ I actually get – I was recently talking to someone about how home ed still has a stigma, how people have an image of home educating families and ‘kids who are breastfed into their teens’ was one of the examples we came up with.

But ‘I bet they don’t get out of bed till 10am’? Well, what if we didn’t? Harry actually gets up at 6 at the latest and I don’t think I’m ever in bed past 8, but if we did stay in bed til 10, why would that bother the commenter so much?

But ‘the boy will turn out to be a pansy potter’… well. Where to even begin? I guess I’ll begin with ‘pansy potter’. Um, WTF? If you mean ‘gay’, why not say ‘gay’? If Harry does turn out to be gay, that’s fine with me, but this commenter seems to think that it would be as a result of spending too much time with his mother, which is both ignorant and misogynistic. In fact, it’s pretty good going for such a short comment.

When I was thinking about home ed, I did actually worry that it may make Harry and I too close. But now I’m not convinced there is such a thing as too close. Since he’s been at home we talk more, arguments are resolved more easily, we know each other better and – and this has been a surprise to me – we don’t seem to get sick of each other. How can that be a negative thing?

(Me and David do joke that Harry may end up like that kid in Sixteen Candles who, when his parents drop him off at the dance, shouts “I want to stay with you guys!”)