Dear Roger: Explain Yourself, Weirdo!

I'm homeschooling two of my kids. What the hell was I thinking? The youngest one was a fairly easy decision, shes gifted out the wazoo and the school systems idea of Gifted curriculum was to have her help teach the slower kids. She was getting held back, stifled and slowed down and because she is a bit of an dramatic and odd child, she was beginning to get bullied, and shes not one to take it passively, she was fighting back. I saw the writing on the wall when her monkey,"Jackson", got knocked out of her hands and into a puddle by an older kid, and she went for blood. I didn't need her getting suspended or arrested, so I did what was best for her and found an online program that would help support us and now she does her work at home where she doesn't have to deal with anyone doing foul things to her monkey other than her brothers, and if she does things to them...oh well, its all part of the education process.She already been jumped up two grade levels and she taking things that she never would have gotten in the public schools.
My other home schooler is my oldest son and that is the one that is the biggest trial to my sanity. He over-thinks everything, procrastinates, and questions every damn thing there is to question. He screwed around until he was almost 100 lessons behind and now he has been racing though them to catch up with everything. Hes doing good on stuff, when he actually works on it, but he tends to distract himself from the task at hand with a myriad of things like his guitar or his computer.
The one thing he is really battling with lately is having to write. I don't get that, just like I don't get how math comes soo easily for him. I love to write, it flows out of me at times and if I cant write, I get anxious and my skin feels tight. He likens it to torture for himself. He also is not too fond of reading, though he will. I don't understand that one, I read to him all the time when he was a baby, and he was surrounded by books growing up. My youngest daughter and youngest son Stubby, are prolific readers, to the point that both of them are reading waay above grade level and devouring books at speeds that some adults only dream of. Stub has special permission from his school to check out more books than most kids his age because he reads so much and so fast, and daughter is wading through the Harry Potter series like there is no tomorrow. I give my eldest books to read that I think will make a mark on him, teach him things about our culture and society, and he looks at them, sets them aside and forgets about them until he finds the movie or what not. I've tried to explain to him that quite often the movies do not do the books justice and even change things about them, citing the Clive Barker,"Dread" incident which still irritates me to no end. Not just for the fact I don't like seeing a pretty boy die,(though he did  it quite convincingly), its just that Clive Barker is one of my favorite authors and taking poetic license with one of his stories is akin to taking a crayon to the Mona Lisa.
Explaining this to him was as effective as him falling asleep with his head on the book. He watches me write each and every day and it seems to irritate him at times. In fact he makes fun of my typing style because he says I seem to be enraged at the keyboard, too harsh and aggressive. I do wear keyboards out pretty quickly, often wearing the letters off the keys within a year and I have odd places on my hands and wrists where the rest on the computer, but it is my one thing...my hobby, my passion and my solace. I write everything and anything just about and that seems to bug him as well. He needed an example of a descriptive narrative, I read him one of mine and asked him if he could picture the person and the place and he said that it was like he was standing there with them. He needed an example of humor, I had it, tragedy, I had it. I write everything. My grammar and mechanics may not be perfect and I need an editor so badly for some of my stories that the thought of the butchery and laughter alone is what keeps me from handing them over for an attempt at publishing, but I get it out of me, and I don't understand how he finds it to be such a struggle .
Last night I was writing a chapter of my latest story and the banter between two of the characters was of a sexual nature. Its a little difficult at times to go from writing the joking conversation of two 20 something year old men who are talking about sex, to answering questions from my teen son about MLA style, but I was doing my best. I caught him looking over at my computer screen and he asked me, "What the hell are you writing?!" So I gave him an abridged version of the story. I was struggling with what the two men would consider a reasonable wager over a contest and he surprised me by saying, "Well, if the younger guy likes the other guy, then he would  want something to do with sex, don't you think? They are young, healthy dudes, its obvious they kinda like each other and if it was a dude and a chick, that would be what was up."  I told him I thought it was too soon in the relationship and he looked at me like I was old. "Mom, get with the program. These are modern times. I'm a weird guy because I believe in waiting for marriage. Most of my friends hook up with a couple dates." Point taken, and for future reference, I think I aged 20 years during that conversation.
He still hassles me about my writing a little, but its not because I do it, now its because I wont try to publish it yet. Hes pushing me, especially over one of my stories I wrote that he read and loved. Its a fictionalized account of  growing up in East Texas. Ive been editing it and correcting some things and mulling it over, so maybe...just maybe.