As I write this, it is rainy and gray and muddled. We, living in the American northeast, are in the middle of the notoriously inhospitable New England winter. As I usually do at this time of year, I am again feeling the need to find focus. And finding focus is hard. (Finding the ground even harder!) As I start and restart this column and move text around, trying to write, I realize that I need to pull back and revisit what I wanted this column to be about.

It was supposed to be about my journey as an unschooling father. I hoped to connect with other unschooling/homeschooling parents to discuss what it is that we do with our lives. Choosing to raise and educate our children in this way is as much about our story, our journey – and in many ways more so – as it is about theirs. It is a story that we write for ourselves, and – true to form with our educational beliefs – our children will have to write their own.

Not an uneventful plot point in the story that is Nate is the death of my father when I was four months old. I still remember the day in grade school when a classmate found this out and was shocked, couldn’t believe it. It was like that for me too, yet it was also always there. It was a strange balance, between being the not-so-forgotten elephant in the room and being the faded, uninteresting wallpaper all at the same time. This naturally colored my own journey into fatherhood.

My wife had a feeling that our first child would be a son. She remarked to our midwife that she would be ridiculously happy with a boy child who looked just like I did in my baby picture – bulbous head and all! (I did eventually grow into that head she reminds me.) She felt that lacking a father of my own, I had a destiny to be a father to a son myself, to right some cosmic ship or finish off what he wasn’t able to. She just felt it. As usual, she was right.

For my second child, I wasn’t so green in this business, but I wasn’t so sure about it either. But out he popped a boy as well. This must have been the universe’s way of pushing me closer to the cliff’s edge, the uncharted territory, possibly (and I didn’t know it then) a journey that would . . .