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For mom, to have her little boy back in her arms is like a kind of medicine.

But when the supply runs out, the crash will only be that much more awful for these few months of relief.

But at some point, even if I never find

the courage to insist, won't someone else make me go back anyway? Because I am only now 10,

and though only our own narrow experience of homeschooling, I still believe the answer must be yes.

Mom, I ask, are you sad all the time that I'm growing up? She faces away, scrunches up her nose as if pricked. I love the big kid version of you, Steph, so much. But I won't lie. I do miss my baby boy. It's a parent's curse, you know. Every mother in the world wishes her kid wouldn't grow up so fast. She holds my head against her chest as she laughs.

But I guess I'm the only one who's actually doing something about it, right?

That's Stefan Merrill Block, novelist, and author of the recent memoir, homeschooled.

Stephens is a story of a maternal bond grown profoundly awry,

and his son's conflicted heart heart as he's forced over the years

to choose between his mother and himself.

I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets, the secrets that are kept from us,

the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.

Tell me about the landscape of your childhood.

You have this move between third and fourth grade,

where you move from Indianapolis to Plano, Texas, and that's kind of the beginning of where a lot of

things changed. My memories of Indianapolis are very impressionistic. I remember

being a part of a very small and loving school community

in an older, leafy neighborhood, a middle-class neighborhood somewhere north of the city,

...