I bought a little red ukulele with my birthday fun money two months ago. I had wanted one for a long time, most recently being inspired by a boatful of fearless twenty-somethings getting ready to sail the seven seas. They would stay up late into the night, talking and laughing and singing ballads to ukulele accompaniment. These tunes would drift into my hatch and set me to dreaming of palm tree-fringed lagoons on Pacific atolls.

Now the merits of this instrument are many. It is small and portable, making it perfect for life on a sailboat. It has a mellow, sweet sound; even when played inexpertly it sounds nice. It is easy to learn—figuring out a few chords on its four strings sets you up to play dozens of songs from the beginning, a reward that I find addictive. Its recent growth in popularity, probably due to the ubiquitous Iz rendition of “Over the Rainbow,” means that is easy to find chord diagrams and songs and Youtube lessons online. At $30-50, an entry-level soprano ukulele is inexpensive and easy to acquire. And they’re so cute. I know you’re not supposed to select an instrument based on its appearance, but when I saw that little red ukulele with the shark-shaped bridge, I couldn’t resist.

And it has not disappointed me. My constant companion, it has transformed the tedious dinghy rides to and from shore into practice sessions. Hours at the park with kids who play basketball or ride skateboards are now opportunities to learn a new song. And the quiet hour after everyone has gone to bed and the dishes are done is my equivalent to singing in the shower. Granted, the time I spend playing the ukulele is time I used to spend doing other things, some of them arguably more productive. The novelty may wear off and I’ll go back to doing those things, but the gift of music is one you get to keep. Long passages when we’re just sitting in the cockpit, starlit night watches when my eyes tire of reading, beach days under an umbrella: these are idle hours transformed by music into entertainment, creativity, and hopefully, beauty.

Recently, I gathered a group of friends at Dockside Tropical Café for the monthly Ukulele Night sponsored by the Florida Ukulele Society. A ukulele band with a bass, tenor, and soprano ukulele plays onstage and the audience plays along on their own instruments. At our table, ukuleles appeared out of nowhere. In addition to my red one, we produced a yellow, green, blue and natural wood ukulele. In that setting, it doesn’t matter that no one plays well. That sound system can drown out any mistake! The band does covers of classic rock to pop hits, from the Rolling Stones, Beatles, Chuck Berry, and Bob Dylan to Gnarles Barkley. Anything seems possible with this adorable, versatile little instrument.

After so many years of homeschooling and with its relative popularity, I didn’t think I would need to address this question. Evidently, our special situation “boatschooling” the children, or the fact that we now have high-school-age kids, arouses curiosity (and sometimes criticism) in people who have misconceptions about our life.

Some might think that being on a boat means that we are raising our children in an isolated, remote environment, with limited outside interaction, but they would be mistaken. At our current rate of offshore travel, we spend mere days each year out of sight of land, enjoying that peaceful state of solitude one only finds when crossing an ocean or a desert, far from human habitation, under a sky lit only with heavenly bodies. The rest of the time, we are living in a marina, cruising along the coast, or island hopping, where we run into lots and lots of interesting people, many of them with children of various ages. We are not trapped at home, but out and about in stores, museums, parks, and libraries.

Perhaps a clarification of terms is necessary. If what they mean by “socialization” is the process by which children learn to be sociable, carry on a conversation, make eye contact, resolve conflict, and enjoy the company of other humans, then we have no problem. Our kids have opportunities to mix and mingle with people of all ages and from all walks of life. Some of our kids are outgoing, and others shy, but all of them are expected to be polite, cordial, and respectful. And when we are out on our own, traveling with just the seven of us, they are forced to deal with people in close proximity, to get along with people that are sometimes difficult, and to form strong and lasting family bonds. What more could we want for their social lives?

If by “socialization” they mean the process by which children are placed in a homogeneous group like you find only in schools, prisons, and the military, and induced to suppress their individuality and reduce their performance to the lowest common denominator, becoming “normal” like their peers, then perhaps we should examine this paradigm, and maybe even question it. What has become the accepted norm in the average public school is not acceptable to us. Here are some uncomfortable truths about these norms: it is accepted practice to drug small, wiggly boys so that they can focus on academic tasks instead of sending them outside (where there is arguably lots to learn), to have armed police officers and “lockdowns” in schools where there is a perceived threat so that even parents are denied access to their children, to test children as young as six and to teach nothing but the test, and to have “zero tolerance policies” that flout common sense and yet fail to prevent bullying.

If kids are average, they’ll probably learn what is necessary to pass the tests and have a “normal” life, but if they are special or gifted, God help them! They will never receive the individualized attention they need to either catch up or to excel, and will receive plenty of social pressure to hide their exceptional traits (or be the victim of bullying). To become socialized is to learn to hide who you really are and imitate the others. And what are the others like? Look around: kids of all ages are staring at screens instead of socializing with people in their physical vicinity, politeness and common courtesy are things of the past, and good character has been replaced by the pecking order of popularity. Who would want this kind of “normal?”

There is one remaining question. How will our children integrate into society as adults? They may be non-conformists like their parents, people who don’t just follow without question the mandates of others, people who are unhappy “plugged in” to a system, square pegs that can’t be put in round holes. Our children may turn out to be quirky, odd, different, or exceptional; they might not be like everyone else, and that’s a risk we’re willing to take. Of course, the opposite may be true as well; since they’re being raised by non-conformists, the only way to rebel will be to become normal—to go into debt, live in a neighborhood of cookie-cutter houses, and drop their kids off at school on their way to an office where they work in a cubicle! I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

We all know what a dysfunctional family looks like. Most of us come from one. In my college psychology textbook, the composite dysfunctional family looks like this: the dad (or mom) is an alcoholic, the mom (or dad) tries to hide it and becomes co-dependent, the oldest child tries heroically to compensate for the parents’ weaknesses and becomes neurotic as a result, the middle child rebels or runs away and becomes the black sheep, and the youngest child tries to win affection by becoming the family jester. Sound familiar? Problems in this family are not resolved but are hidden, avoided, passed off and/or fought loudly about. The parents’ baggage is handed dutifully over to the children, so they can carry it guiltily into their own marriages and families, merging it with the baggage of a spouse, and passing the combined load onto the children, and so forth and so on, time without end.

But what is the alternative? What is a functional family? Maybe it’s so rare or so boring the psychology textbook didn’t see the need to illustrate it, or maybe I didn’t identify with it and can’t remember. One of the reasons we unplugged from the “regular” life was because we don’t like the way our culture defines and undermines the family unit. It’s “normal” for parents to be running busily on separate hamster wheels, growing apart until they can no longer stay married, then spinning off as singles, or re-pairing to repeat the cycle. Kids are often collateral damage, dropped off for most of their childhoods at overcrowded day-care centers, government schools, friends’ houses, and sports practice where they’re forced to find their own way while their parents try to earn a living and pick up the pieces. I pass no judgment—forging a healthy family in our time and place is near-impossible and it requires a superhuman (or even supernatural) effort to change the familial patterns established from childhood.

I do not discount the ability of love to overcome these challenges, and the desire of all parents everywhere to do what’s best for their children, but merely propose that the norm is dysfunction. Jay and I are incredibly grateful to our parents, who, despite their own difficult childhoods, raised us to the best of their abilities, helping to give us the confidence and discipline we needed to pursue the lifestyle we’ve chosen. Even so, our childhoods were relatively “normal” and we went to public schools and followed the proscribed path until we found ourselves in the suburbs living “the American Dream” (complete with its hamster wheels) and wondered, “Is this it?”

One of the books that inspired us to leave our normal life and try something new was Tom Neale’s All In the Same Boat, in which he states some of the reasons he took his family cruising on a sailboat:

We do it because it’s fun. We do it because it’s beautiful. We do it because we love nature and the sea and the winds and the sky. We do it because it allows us to raise a family the way a family should be raised—and to know our children. We do it because it gives us more control over the way our family lives and survives, over the education and nurturing of our children, over the air we breathe. It gives us more control over our lives…

We didn’t even know what that meant when we started out. Seven years later, we are still figuring it out. What we know is this: despite some bad habits we carried with us from previous generations, we have a functional family. It is, by no means, a well-oiled machine, but it does function. When there is a problem or a conflict, and there are many, we don’t drown it in alcohol, we don’t run away from it, we don’t fight loudly about it, and we don’t ignore it or try to hide it. We have “family meetings” and when bad things happen, we pull together. Jay and I do marriage maintenance, and we try to spend individual time with each of the kids. By God’s grace, we do the hard work of loving each other in a small space. And it is hard work—there are fights, hurt feelings, harsh words, a constant need for conflict resolution skills and forgiveness. But there are also fun times: excellent dinner discussions over good food, games, music, and laughter. Sometimes I feel like we are failing to love each other adequately, but when I take a step back and look at the big picture or someone gives me an outsider’s perspective, I recognize that even in our struggles, we are a functional family, and that is one of the best gifts of a cruising lifestyle.

I’m married to an incredibly conscientious, hard-working man. When we sailed up the East coast last year, he flew to clients from every coastal city at which we stopped. He took conference calls while we motored up the Potomac. He worked while I took kids to the sights in our nation’s capital.  When we went skiing in February, he worked in the cozy comfort of the condo while we braved the elements and played in the snow.

Don’t get me wrong, the man does know how to have fun. It’s just hard to get him out of his zone. He never takes a sick day, works on vacation, and rarely turns down work.  I appreciate this work ethic (it enables me to stay home with the kids, after all), but how do you get this poor man to take a break?

1. Guilt. Ask him questions like, “If you were on your death bed, would you say, ‘Too bad I didn’t work more’ or ‘Too bad I never took my kids out to Dry Tortugas National Park when I had the chance’?”

2. Take away his internet. Nothing like a remote location with no cell phone service and no internet to make a man look up from his computer and notice the natural world and play with his kids.

3. Clean water and cool sea creatures. Since being spoiled by Bahamian gin-clear water, the man cannot enjoy the water. Swimming pools? Yuck. Keys beaches? No way. But take him out where the water is clean and turquoise and filled with fish, and he’ll grab his fins and mask and new Go Pro and away he goes. I can’t keep up with him, and that’s saying something.

4. Make a commitment. Jay is a man of his word; if he makes a promise, he keeps it. In fact, if I make a promise, he keeps it. I invited our friends Ken and Amy and their three kids to go cruising with us to the Dry Tortugas, fully expecting them to find some reason they couldn’t do it, and to my surprise, they accepted! Do the math: that would be our family of 7 + their family of 5 on a boat with 4 cabins for 7 days 70 miles from civilization. As it turned out, we took their oldest two kids, Max and Mia, on the overnight passage to Garden Key, and Amy and Kai met us on day four by ferry. Ken missed out on the trip entirely because the ferry was full and he had to get back to work. We returned on day seven with four extra passengers—tired, but happy. Everyone got along and we were able to share a cool experience with good friends who might not otherwise have experienced the park in that way.

5. Remind him what the boat is for. We did not buy Take Two to sit at a dock. We recognize that it takes a lot of work to keep her in good condition, and a lot of money. With only one of us bringing home the bacon, it’s hard to break away. But occasionally, we have to stop what we’re doing and get the boat out so we can enjoy all the things for which we work so hard. All work and no play makes Jay a very dull boy.

We’re bad about digital media, which should be evident by the lack of it in this space. Pictures aren’t often taken, and then they rarely get offloaded and organized. Videos are even worse.

It’s a tedious process and I don’t have the patience for it. Every once in a while Tanya will stay up late and wade through our backlog, usually when she’s looking for something specific, but she’s years behind and not keeping up.

I know the lack of pictures reduces the interest level for the average reader, but that isn’t what motivates me. I worry that someday we’ll want to relive our memories, but can’t because they didn’t get recorded.

My hope is to get the kids to take some ownership in the saving of these memories, and we have cameras that they are specifically invited to use. So far all I’ve gotten back are a couple hundred blurry close-ups of the cat.

So I was extremely pleased that they thought to take the GoPro with them this week when they went to shoot the culverts. These are concrete tunnels under a road where the tide rushes back and forth in pursuit of the moon and adventurous types allow themselves to be sucked in one side and flushed out the other. It’s great fun and not very safe, which makes it exactly the right kind of activity for a GoPro.

I stitched the clips together, but the footage is all theirs.

We live on the water, but we don’t really live in it. Sure, we go swimming and snorkeling. We go to the beach. The older kids surf, Tanya kayaks, and Sam likes to fish. We sail from place to place.

But we rarely take the boat out just for fun. We rarely go fishing. The kids don’t really like to surf. Snorkeling and swimming trips are usually brief, and then only when you can see the bottom in 20 feet. Tanya and I are certified to dive, but haven’t done a recreational dive in 20 years.

It isn’t because we don’t have the gear. Oh, we have the gear. Six fishing poles, three spears, hand lines, and tackle out the wazoo. A hookah with five hoses. Two air tanks. Fins, and masks, and snorkels to outfit a platoon. Two dinghies, two kayaks, two surf boards, and two body boards.

The only reasonable conclusion is that we don’t like the water. Which isn’t true. I’m not really sure what the problem is. We like the water, but we lack a passion for it.

We’ve seen the passion in others. Roy, Pierre, and Camden are boat kids we’ve met (three different boats) with fishing in their blood. With them, it was all-fishing all-the-time. Sam has that gene too, but it needs to be cultivated. Eli doesn’t care about fish, but he’s a natural hunter and could probably feed the whole family. I want that for both of them, but I don’t know how to give it to them.

Ken and Amy live here in Marathon with their three kids. The whole family is absolutely crazy about the water. Okay, Ken is the crazy one and everyone else is happy to go along. He is constantly fishing, spearfishing, crabbing, or lobstering. He spends far more time on the water than I do, and I live there. He has the passion I need.

So while we’re in Marathon for the next couple months, we’re making a concerted effort to become water lovers. And Ken is my mentor. Seven-hour spearfishing marathon? I’m in. All-night bullynetting for lobster? You bet. Offshore trip for Mahi? I’ll buy the fuel. Eli and Sam are my companions in this quest.

There is hope for us yet. Eli and Aaron are getting certified to dive. They’ve done three days of pool work, but then came down with head colds, so have yet to complete the open water part.

Sam is fishing almost constantly here. We have a little aquarium right off the back of our boat with snappers, grunts, parrot fish, lobster, and even a resident moray eel. Sam will sit out there for hours. Tanya buys him bait at the grocery store.

We’ve had the boat out twice in the three weeks that we’ve been here, which is probably a record, especially since it means turning off the air conditioning and backing out a narrow channel. We even braved the craziness and took the boat out on the 4th of July, a first for us.

Summer in Marathon is the right time and place for this kind of transformation. The weather is calm, the water is warm, and the local culture is all about the salt life. It’s not just a bumper sticker down here.

Why is leaving so hard? We have asked this question countless times over the years, and the blog archives are probably littered with posts about departure angst. We like traveling, we don’t mind island hopping, or even making long passages, but for some reason picking a time for departure and actually untying the lines is very stressful. It could be that every time we try to leave, something goes wrong.

Once, one of our kids swallowed a sprite-can pop-top right before a Bahamas trip, delaying us for a few days while we waited to see if we were going to have to spend some time at Miami Children’s Hospital (we didn’t). Another time, we anchored out ahead of a Thanksgiving buddy-boat trip with Jay’s folks and we lost half a battery bank, and a generator breaker switch got turned off accidentally and the remaining batteries weren’t charging. After Rachel was born, we tried to leave the dock ahead of a tropical storm and missed the window to head south, so we pulled into a mangrove-lined bay we knew of and weathered five days of 30-40 knot winds before we could actually leave. One year, we left for the Bahamas, got out the inlet and the water was so rough that we decided to turn around and wait another week at anchor until we felt up to trying again.

And here we are, tied to the dock in Ft. Pierce, with other places and other people beckoning, and we just can’t seem to untie the boat. We’ve had at least three farewell dinners and someone sent us a good-bye key lime pie. At the beginning of last week, we had all but decided to hop over the Gulf Stream when we checked the kids’ passports and realized that four of them had expired in April. Oops! Guess we won’t be traveling internationally for 4-6 weeks!

Some people make it seem so effortless—they circle a date on the calendar, fuel and provision the boat, rise before the sun and untie the lines, sailing away without fanfare or failure. For us, all the stars must be exactly aligned: no sick kids, no storms, no emergencies with Jay’s work, no unfinished boat projects, and no extended-family crises. We want wind from the right direction, calm seas, and a traveling moon. I guess it’s a miracle we ever leave the dock at all.

But then it happens: one morning, after months of discussion and planning, after we’ve all but given up trying to leave, we wake up, feel the freshening breeze, have our coffee while we take a look at the charts, grab a few last-minute items at the store, and start the engines. Without a soul to wave to, we pull in our power cord and dock lines and motor slowly away. Somehow we know when the right moment comes, but rarely do we know beforehand. If you ask me when we are leaving, or where we are going, I respond, “Who knows?” I am not merely being mysterious—I really have no idea. There is a Plan, but it isn’t ours and we’re not informed until we’re well on our way. This kind of spontaneity makes scheduling a bit tricky, but it keeps us humble and provides us with many pleasant surprises.

We’ve owned Take Two for seven years now. She’s been our home for nearly six. That’s longer than I’ve ever lived in any house, anywhere. It’s long enough for the initial romance to have worn off, but not so long that I am tired of living aboard. Living on a boat seems to possess the perfect balance of familiar and foreign. Sometimes, our life is exciting—we meet new people, we go to new places, have adventures. And sometimes it’s humdrum, especially if we’re tied to a dock because of boat projects or Jay’s work. Somehow, over the course of several years, both the extraordinary and the mundane have woven themselves into some kind of “normal” for us.

One reason I think we have been successful living aboard is that we try to balance working on the boat with enjoying the boat. The to-do list for a boat is not linear, but circular. As soon as you’ve fixed one thing, another needs fixing, and if, by some miracle, everything has been fixed once, then it’ll be time to go back and fix it all again. If you accept that you’ll never be finished, it frees you up to just pick a stopping spot and leave for a while. This would not be possible if the boat represented a sabbatical from our normal lives, but since it is our normal life, we’ve found a way to compromise. We use the boat, bring it back to a dock to work on it, and then make some more money so we can use the boat again.

People frequently ask our kids “what is it like to live on a boat?” They think they’ll receive some amazing response about adventure and fun and an unconventional life, but our kids either look at them blankly or, worse, tell them how they always get seasick. For children, “normal” is defined by the adults in their lives. Rachel, who has never lived in a house, thinks a bathtub is exotic, and looks forward to going to her Mimi’s house because she can take a bubble bath there. For boat kids, taking the dinghy to get groceries is normal, using laundromats is normal, going to the beach for recess is normal, seeing dolphins and manatees in the “yard” is normal. Without the perspective of time and experience, they won’t be able to appreciate their upbringing on the water.

For Jay and me, leaving suburbia was anything but normal—some people said we were “crazy” and by that, a few even meant “foolish.” But the way our culture defines “normal” was not attractive to us: we didn’t like the norms of indebtedness, rush-hour traffic, school schedules, mowing the lawn, and saving for retirement. If that’s your cup of tea, have at it, but we longed for something else. I am always being asked, “How do you do it?” It’s a question that has many possible answers, but the most boring one is that I get up in the morning and put my pants on one leg at a time just like everyone else. It’s normal for me to homeschool five children on a boat. I appreciate that it’s an interesting way to live, and that we’re different even from a lot of the families we meet cruising, but, honestly, the excitement has worn off and we’ve settled into the business of raising our family, working, fixing our boat, and going exploring. That said, I love our life and love being able to change the scenery without packing any boxes and renting a U-Haul.