Being and Doing

Our culture is all about doing, accomplishing. Not so much about just being. People who are happy being, are often viewed less intelligent, lazy, lacking initiative, or...spiritual. I've been a little bit obsessed with doing and accomplishing. I never seem to be content unless I am clear about what I am DOING. And what I DO generally needs to be somehow making the world a better place or making art (which is also making the world a better place at the heart of it). But lately I haven't been able to do anything really. Or wanted to. Not doing a lot of parenting or homechooling, or practicing the bass like I am supposed to be, or painting that picture I want to paint, or writing that historical piece I have been thinking about for a year or so. I have 10 unfinished drafts to this blog (I think I will erase them).

I have no drive to do much of anything. Barely keeping the house together. Going to the gym (okay that is something). Thinking about my far-away love and how I will get him here (I guess that is something, too). Learning how real a long distance relationship can be (I am repenting at the moment).  Getting in a little gardening...Seeing my therapist. Looking for work. Oh. Maybe I do do stuff. And all this inner work. Now that is exhausting. And that is where the line between doing and being is washed away. And examined life is a lot of work.

Sheesh, this writing is reminding me of all the stuff I got to do!

Starting Again

I decided just now to start blogging again... just now. I decided to analyze my writing to see what famous writing I am like, from some app on Facebook. Of course I wanted to be sure, so I ran a lot of my writing through and I got a lot of different writers, but almost half of them were Cory Woderow or something like that. The time we find to waste on things these days. How many days have been wasted? Anyhow, it was that silly Facebook game that brought me back here. And I have decided once again to write from the heart and not worry about my ego and my public persona.

I've become tired of my life, so I am working on changing it. Without ruining my daughter's life. It actually a really big feat. Can one person give two people good lives and still be together as much as we want.

Ramona is happy. The trick is that both of us are. I am reaching out for change, grasping for it. I am looking for ways to engage in my career, find somewhere to grow. Ive been applying for jobs, which is just nerve-wracking and depressing... I have been contemplating starting training in a martial art... I went to an Aikido Dojo, but I am still contemplating until I know.

I've done this before. You put in the work, you put out your feelers, and eventually the right path opens up.

I have also invited Ramona's father here. I am not sure I could ever imagine it working out, but if I don't try I will regret it. If I do I might regret it too, but I am getting older, I want a rich life. I want to live big. It is so much better to regret something you've done than to regret something you haven't done. When you regret something you didn't do, it always haunts you. What if? If I regret something I have done, I just think...well at least I tried. And I am willing to put in the work. And I love Ramona's dad. And we want to be together, but we don't have the money. Believe it or not, it is really hard to visit here from anywhere in Latin America if you don't have a lot of money. So we are here, me without him...Ramona without him. Wondering...what if he forgets us. What if the time and the work it takes to be together again is just too much and we drift away before it is ever able to come to pass. I want to be a family unit. I want the father of my child with me. I've been alone so long.

Deschooling, Unschooling, Mentoring Self-Directed Learners

I came to "unschooling," because it seemed to fit this so-called anarchistic outlook on life I have... I did some research, joined some forums and was on my way. But, it didn't take long before I started having trouble joining the discussion. Partly because unschooling was not something I wanted to do, but just a piece of my life philosophy...

My journey into unschooling largely evolved from two of my favorite philosophers, Ivan Illich and Gustavo Esteva. Ivan Illich wrote "Deschooling Society," one of the best books ever. Deschooling Society is a critique of institutions and professionals – and the way in which they contribute to dehumanization. "[I]nstitutions create the needs and control their satisfaction, and, by so doing, turn the human being and her or his creativity into objects." Basically, some of us believe that the institutionalization of everything is degrading what it means to be human.

School is the first institution, the landscape on which the young mind is taught not to trust itself, its family, its community to know what is important, or  how to succeed or be productive or happy or acceptable. As an activist for social change and a fanatic for freedom and autonomy, of course unschooling was going to help define our approach to education.

But most folks seem to come to unschooling from the different direction. Exasperated people, fed up with the effect schools were having on their children or with the bending and molding and coercing of children into sturdy cogs in the machinery that keeps our socio-economy running like a fast train into god(ess)-knows-where. Unschooling is a model for raising children that turns many peoples perceptions up-side down...

So for me, unschooling is just that. NOT schooling. And schooling, well that mostly consists of training. i am not interested in a well-trained people. So, I figure, everything in the world that is not schooling is unschooling. Done. I don't care if folks make their children brush their teeth or limit sugar and whether or not this or that is unschooling. I am not worried about it because I think unschooling is better as a part of a worldview than part of an identity. I became tired of discussing unschooling almost as quickly as I tired of discussing potty-training, children's media, vegetables and meltdowns earlier in my parenting career. I just wanted to connect freedom loving parents.

I recently was gifted a book called, "Project-Based Homeschooling: Mentoring Self-directed Learners." It would be more precise had it been titled the other way around, "Mentoring self-directed learners with project-based homeschooling." It is a simple book with a lot of good information. If your already comfortable with the concept of letting children direct their own education, you could probably scan over about 90% of the first chapters and 40% of the rest - all the parts designed to coax parents into letting go of control, handing over the power to the kids. The rest is well-written and easy to navigate...a super awesome reference book that you need not read from cover to cover. It is the first book in a very long time that fits seemlessly into my parenting and living style.  Mentoring self-directed learners. I highly recommend it.

They even have a website and forums to join. I just did. I am jotting down notes about my daughter's compulsions, passions, daily activities, pondering how to use the information to understand my role in her education. She hasn't yet delved fully into any sort of project, but I am taking it slow. Working from the ground up, not pushing, practicing mindfulness, observing, and trusting that when I stop suggesting and stop bringing home activities and curricula for her to do, and start giving her my time and support with no strings attached, in whatever she does, it will come. I am sure it will.  And I will write about it.

I once studied in a school in Oaxaca that was largely set up the same way. It was called Universidad de la Tierra, co-founded by Gustavo Esteva, a friend of Ivan Illich....

And I have already noticed myself change my approach.  A friend of Ramona's came over to bake cookies. They made a couple mistakes that I saw coming from a miles away.  But I didn't interrupt and I let them make their mistakes and they will probably never make those same mistakes again...because learning doesn't just happen in schools, it happens in life, the whole of society. We as a culture keep learning, or trying to learn finally, that really there often isn't a static right and wrong way to go about things.  And I close with the opening paragraph of Illich's "Deschooling Society:"

Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby "schooled" to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is "schooled" to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavor are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question. 

Authenticity.

It’s lunchtime and I’m drinking the last half of the Racer 5 that I started last night. I haven't had beer in the house for weeks...because I feel better. After months of turmoil, I finally found some balance and grace. I crack open another beer; is this a sign? Is that a twinge of anxiety I feel? Am I self-medicating again?

I haven't blogged in months...again. Been thinking…again…of retrofitting the blog. I write about life as a single-parent, a homeschooler, an anarchist, a rebel, a writer?…none of it works because what I really want to write is authenticity.  I affix labels to my philosophy and ways of being to try to share and define who I am, but find the label quickly begins to bend words; the adjectives start to coerce. I want to get to the bottom of things, find truth. Because so much writing is tainted with strategy; get readers clicks, go viral, create the image you project of yourself.

So, this blog just is today. Label less. If I must decide on a descriptive adjective, I will aim to make that adjective “authenticity.”

Its hard to blog when you are changing so rapidly; as the insights pass through, and chapters come to a close and begin again, and end and begin, I scarcely have time to write before my writing looses relevancy, before I finish one post, I realize I am living another.  But now, I hope, I have reached a point in which my life is entering a new manageability… but prior to right now…

Months of anxiety, depression, confusion. I smoked a bit of (state-sanctioned) cannabis and I drank beer, though not like a drunk.  I’m too old to drink like a drunk and get away with it. A couple beers in the day, to stave off the anxiety and fits emotionally induced paralysis.  I am a single-mother. I don’t have the luxury of letting my demons knaw my toes, of hiding, of sleeping it off.  I am the Earth and she is the moon. Though I am tempted to feed and taunt my psychosis; feel around in the darkness in the deepest parts of my soul and then exorcize it all.  I self-medicate to mute, just a little, that incessant scratching and to soften the pointy shards of glass that cut me just a little too deep.  I self-medicate because I know myself better than any doctor…anti-depressants are a last resort for me... I don’t like them.  Where am I going with this...well, I am drinking a beer and I haven't drank a beer in my house since I stepped out of the hazy cloud of confusion and anxiety a few weeks back.  Am I self-medicating or just having a beer? 

It is three days later, and I realize, I like beer. If I have it in the house I will drink it daily.  So I won’t keep beer in the house, and save my drinks for times when I have someone to share them with. 

This summer was to be one of creativity and space; my self-help retreat from the ocean of brilliant all-encompassing energy of my beautiful daughter. She had 5 weeks of summer camp. I had thought that motherhood had taken from me a piece of myself that, now that Ramona is old enough to be more independent, I would be allowed to begin to regain.  Or maybe I just read that somewhere? I lost touch with myself, I thought. I have been walking a path that is decided divergent from my own, cause babies do that to mothers, especially the creative ones. All I needed were lots of “free”  hours to impose some sort of art therapy on myself, returning as a more complete, creative and whole human being, ready to take on the struggle of motherhood and the world with evermore grace, and surety in who I am.

It turned out that in those days when I sent my child away 5 days a week to summer camp, I wouldn't actually get in touch with any of that spiritual, creative mojo that motherhood must have robbed from me.  Actually, I sat around, in a panic, with no idea why. Incapacitated, depressed, lonely, anxious, useless, drowning in the mess of a house I had no energy to maintain. Wow, is this who I am inside? When I picked up my daughter from camp I would feel like I still hadn't had enough time to myself, cause if I had had enough time to myself I would magically be reunited with me, my true identity, who I really am.  But none of that happened.  The real me, the supremely authentic me, was sad depressed and anxious, immobilized and even a little it mean. Huh, maybe it isn’t the act motherhood that steals away a woman’s identity.  Maybe the devaluation of mothering was part of stripping women and children of their place in society.  It seems as much, have you noticed: men have begun to take on parenting more, and parenting is becoming more revered. But still, the stay at home mom is still looked at as sacrificing her life and her identity. 

Showing her around,

When I was a child, I moved a lot. I was also different and not an actor...I had no desire to try to act like the kids around me in order to win friends. I had a sister, but she was super mean so I avoided her. The result was that I spent a lot of time alone for a good chunk of my elementary school life. When we first moved to Boulder, Colorado I remember imaging the kind folks from my past coming to visit me. One of the most common visitors was my half-brother.  I would ride around on my bike talking (to the air next to me where I imagined my brother riding) all about my hood and the things that went on there.

Now that I am a parent, I almost wonder if I subconsciously had a kid just to continue this game of showing around.  My whole approach to parenting seems based on me showing this little human, who I invited to live here on this earth, all around. So she can get her bearings and master the tools she needs to get by in my hood.

Unschooling as a Social Movement

I read an interesting article in the Guardian recently, explaining how children are raised ass-backwards in Europe and the US. I shared it with the local unschooler listserv, creating quite a discussion.  Though it wasn’t about unschooling, the views and concepts expressed in the article made fundamental connections to the heart of unschooling theory and practice.

The article begins by illuminating the paradox of mainstream parenting and its forte for “crying it out” as babies.  That “logic” preaches the virtues of separateness and stringent personal boundaries in order to keep the child from imposing its will on the parent (rather than vise-versa) and to foster independence. In short: control tactics. Conversely, nearly every other culture we know of, including our own (not so) distant past, keeps its children close for the first years of life, letting them bloom into their own self-assured and (hopefully) competent independence.  At a very young age, children around the world are cooking meals for the family, wielding machetes, and spending all hours of the day roaming free of adults' compulsion to structure and plan their entire day. The “developed” world favors leaving babies alone when they need us the most and planning their every hour when they probably need space to experience life on their terms.  The article basically berates “modern” child rearing practices for being so darn controlling, arguing that relative freedom is the historic norm - what humans have evolved with - and that lack of freedom is at least in part responsible for the high level of unhappiness in children today.

No one likes to feel powerless, and children tend to thrive when given freedom of choice in a safe environment.  On a personal level I agree with the article and actively practice what I hope is a better why of initiating a soul into this world. I know I need to make sure my daughter is safe, and when it is important, yes, my choices thwart hers, but I also treat her with the same respect I treat all humans.  I respect her as I want her to respect me.  And sometimes her choice thwarts mine, but it isn’t about her “winning” some kind of battle for control. It is about two people who live together and are dedicated to being as happy a family as we can be.  When I am with adults, I don't try to make everything to go my way all the time either. 

Unfortunately, most of us are born into one of the most hierarchical structures on the face of the earth: the typical American Family…and children are smack dab at the bottom of the totem pole. I feel for them. Hierarchy: where orders and violence flow down and respect and riches flow up, UGH!  

Ultimately, our society has created a very specific (controlled) track for children’s lives with the advent of compulsory school and competitive child rearing leaving children with very little agency over their own lives. It’s very challenging, lonely and sometimes alienating for individuals and families to take another path. The perceived danger of the world keeps our children locked up when they are young, and as they get older they become the perceived danger themselves.  There is little room for a child to develop his own ideas or for children to create children’s spaces and culture.

A question that emerged from the email exchange was whether the free-range and unschooling movements are part of a potential push in another direction for children in our culture. 

Free-ranging is nothing new; it’s quite similar to how most of today’s adults were raised, free to roam after school and on weekends, save a family event here and there.

Unschoolers take the same philosophy of autonomy into the realm of education. Children are hard-wired to learn and “unschooling philosophy argues that confining children in a school is an inefficient use of the children's time because it requires each child to learn a specific subject matter in a particular manner, at a particular pace, and at a specific time regardless of that individual's present or future needs, interests, goals, or any pre-existing knowledge he or she might have about the topic.” Children are learning everywhere, all the time and very important multi-disciplinary, living, hands-on, community-based, spontaneous, and real-world experiences are missed when education is confined to today’s schools, after-school programs and home-work, with little respect for a child's passions and talents.

These movements have the potential to bring children more and more into community. Children who are granted autonomy and freedom to roam find themselves an anomaly and with no one to hang out with. As people begin to turn away from segregation and the fast track to the rat race for their kids, children will begin to re-emerge and hopefully we, as a society, will once again learn how to interact with children as important members of the community.

Maybe we ARE part of a push in another direction for society as a whole…because the truth is that children are the future manifest.  Social change is a fundamental change in the people, the grassroots. What is a better way to change the people than changing their childhood, their foundation in life? Reconnect children with community, life, freedom.  In many indigenous and traditional cultures children are seamlessly incorporated into community and life, free to learn and participate at a much more meaningful level that we are comfortable with in this country. 

The people at the top of this societies totem pole are pushing the other way. As schools fail to meet governmental guidelines for a properly educated child, our leaders, i.e. Obama and Arne Duncan, think that the answer is eight hour school days.  Of course students object (even Obama’s own two daughters), but their opinions and ideas on the matter of their education are completely disregarded. 

Our leaders try to solve every problem of youth through the school system, and that system fails. The school system fails mostly because children don’t like school. People don’t thrive and learn well in settings that make them unhappy.  Studies show that children are the less happy when they are at school than any other situation that they find themselves in regularly. And schools themselves, regardless, of how they perform, remove children from the public, effectively creating separate adult and children’s spaces. We loose our knack for community and tolerance, and children are rarely taken seriously or  accepted in the “real world” with their “emotional outbursts,” their limbs hanging from trees, their basketballs accidently bouncing off of hoods of cars and their messy habits.

Education in the western sense has become more and more synonymous with conditioning, programming, brainwashing.  Children are removed from everyday life, and taught about the world that they want us to believe in, tested on it, and then released to perpetuate it. I hope we can let our children experience the world on their own terms and come to some new, more useful conclusions.

Social Change is a process, and a slow moving process at that. As we begin to remove children from the conditioning of the past, we prepare them for a better tomorrow; the one every loving parent hopes to live to see their children find.  I don’t want to see children becoming the victims of our backwards culture, but rather as the change-makers they are capable of being.  Children are the most able to change.  They are the real, long-term revolution.

Trust

I was talking to my sis last night, and our conversation turned to be about being young and "how does society support and value adolescent people." (My hypothesis being that society didn't really do a very good job at honoring young people, especially adolescents.) In conversation, we came to realize that we are both have been going through a sort of remembering.  After all this searching for who we are and what we want in life, we came to realize that when we were 11, 13, 15, we knew more about who we were and what we wanted than we did for the following 20 years.  We are both experiencing a sort of returning to our selves, our loves and preferences. Our young selves knew...before societal and cultural pressures pushed us around and made us doubt that we knew who we were or made us believe that we needed to be more or different or like someone else.  The message that we were "too young to know what we wanted in life" was played over and over and how were we to know any better?

 So here I am with the same dream I had as a child.  Now, my job is to trust myself.  Because that person is the person who wants to trust my daughter.