One of the hardest things I have had to deal with in homeschooling my son is the lack of homeschooling groups in our rural area. We do belong to one, but not only does my son not fit in, I don't either, and it is very lonely.
When my son was in half-day Kindergarten, I volunteered at the school. I could talk to other parents and teachers who seemed to have more in common with me. I could go shopping or clean house for a few hours by myself. It was great. That was the last time I really had time for myself. I have just had to get used to it.
As a homeschool mom I don't fit in with our homeschool group because I am older than most of the other moms who got married right after high school and started having lots of kids, and I have only one nine year old son at home. They get together for skate days and my son can't skate. We had one boy my son's age spend the night with us once about a year ago and the only common interest they had was Pokemon and that was not enough to keep a conversation going for very long. This child was not interested in reading or science or history or current events or anything else that my son wanted to talk about. This boy did not "get" some of the jokes my son made because he didn't understand some of the words my son used and he also didn't seem to have the general knowledge needed to get the jokes. My son's gifted friends get his jokes. He doesn't have to worry about this around them.
The only friends that my son has are other gifted kids in his musical theater group who are in public school and one gifted boy from church who he can't go to Sunday School classes with because the other boy is several years older. These are the only kids that he feels that he can really be himself around and they won't think he is too "geeky." They have common interests. His pediatrician told us a few years ago that we needed to have him around "average" kids some of the time but my son says he has trouble finding things to talk to them about other than video games. He is still in cub scouts with kids his age, but because of sensory issues and what I think might be motor dyspraxia, he can't do some of the physical things as well as they do, so he has absolutely nothing in common with them--physically or mentally. He points out that I don't socialize with people that I have nothing in common with and asks me why I expect him to do something I can't even do very well.
He does have four very good friends who he talks to all the time. They have sleepovers, go to each other's birthday parties, have discussions about Runescape or books they are reading or tell jokes and have a really good time together, but they are all gifted. I haven't seen any other gifted kids and certainly not 2E in our homeschooling group, except for a little girl who is a couple of years younger, so it is hard for him to find friends in this group.
I have worried for the last several years that if my husband and I went somewhere together without our son and something happened to us, that life for my son would be really hard as a 2E kid in our state since there is no requirement for an appropriate education for 2E. So we don't go out without him and I don't take breaks and sometimes I get a little tired and cranky, but I do what I have to do.
