I'd rather be drawing ...

... than visiting the spiders in the crawlspace, trying to find the leak in the hot water tank.

Well, first things first, then I can settle down to work on finishing the girl.

__________________________________________________________________________

I'm enjoying working on the blue dress more since Jodi sent me the link to this:

Tim Burton's Alice is coming!

Learning to Listen

Sometimes I wonder if everyone gets the wake-up call. Do some just chose not to answer? To sleep through the call or use addiction -- drugs/alcohol, food, sex, etc. -- to muffle the call to awareness?

I've written about my wake-up call to unschooling, but I've had numerous similar experiences, and sometimes, shifting my life to align with my new awareness is so. damn. hard.

When my pediatrician was advising me to nurse my daughter every four hours, even if she cried to nurse, so that I could Train her to be on a schedule, I ignored him and listened to my inner voice (and my wailing, hungry baby). But that was relatively easy compared to some of the other wake-up calls.

Going against mainstream parenting has been a struggle for me. When we've all heard "eat your vegetables, clean your plate, tidy your room, mind your manners, do your homework" and have been accustomed to the idea that a parent's job is to TRAIN a child to fit into The Real World, shifting to a focus on what fits the child and partnering him or her can be a little difficult to wrap your head around. Wrenching the giant ship's wheel of your life around to head for this perspective takes courage and can be tough work until the shift "clicks", and it's (mostly) smooth sailing. But first comes the wake-up call. Without it, there's no reason for a shift.

Deborah Donlinger writes about her wake-up call after listening to experts and following the mainstream without questioning:

"But, somewhere along the way, another birth happened. What started as a small whisper grew into a joyous and adamant shout, saying “LISTEN TO ME.” My inner guidance made her voice heard. I realized I had been giving away my power. I realized, with an absolute heart-dropping thud, that mainstream doesn’t know the answers, and worst of all, it doesn’t know that it doesn’t know.

Somewhere along the way, I started hearing my own inner voice and somewhere along the way, I learned to listen."

What wake-up calls have you experienced in your life? In what ways have you begun to learn to listen to your inner voice and stop relying on the so-called experts? How have you been Brave? It doesn't have to be about parenting. It could be about your job, your marriage, your shift to vegetarianism -- how did you get The Call, and how did you choose to respond?

Quickly, then back to work ...

Life lately:

Owen at Brandon's paintball party, Madison photo.

Jesse at Brandon's party, Madison photo.

Meredith wearing her lovely birthday crocheted halter, which I commissioned from Talented Abbi. Amazing, Abbi. :)

Back to the drawing board. Literally.

Not Our House

I feel all mopey.

I found a house in Hot Springs that I really liked and was ready to send Mark out to see, to grab before someone else bought it. I told him that, although this house was more than we had planned on spending, I would sell a kidney to help with the purchase.

Alas. The house was already sold. My house. Sigh.

So, I'm going to be mopey for a few more minutes, then I'll go put on a pot of coffee. and take the dog for a walk.

Things that have me overwhelmed: Need to load garbage cans in red truck and make a trip to the dump. Need to cut the grass. And get boys to help cut the grass. Need to take Jesse to get Learner's permit. Need to find time to drive with Jesse. Need to sign stack of papers and take to the post office to send to Mark. Need to finish portrait. Can't. Make. Myself. Do. It. Need to do laundry. (Always.) Need to make vet appointment for Hector. Need to find house that satisfies Mark's desire to be near the water, and my desire to find the right space for everyone. Need to let our house of 19 years go in my heart. Need to be centered and confident that Mer will be happy and safe here without us.

But, right now, I need a cup of coffee.

And I need a house to plunk my hopes and dreams down in. I can't pack up my emotions for this house, for our lives here, without having somewhere to put them down, to start unpacking them.

One more time -- it was perfect for us:

A Story About Seeing

This is the story of the boy who had better things to do than sit. His mind was always busy. He was quiet, very quiet, because when you take in as much as he does, that's a lot to process. He was a Seeing Being, as Polly Berien Berrends says.

When he was in a playschool, at age four, his teachers told his mother that he didn't talk. Ever. When he was called on in circle time, he just smiled softly and looked down at his lap and waited for the teacher to go to the next child in the circle. Surprisingly, he had a lot of friends. Was he talking to them during outside time? Why was he so well-liked? He smiled a lot. He was happy.

At home, he liked to ride his toy car around and around the house on the wood floors. He liked to run. Once, when he rushed past his mother, she heard him saying, under his breath, "I-am-fast-I-am-fast-I-am-very-very-fast."

In kindergarten, his teacher told his mother that he had a difficult time "staying on task". Every morning, the teacher wrote a sentence on the board. The children were supposed to copy the sentence, form the letters they saw on the board. Some of the children couldn't read yet -- it was kindergarten -- but looking at the squiggly shapes on the board, and putting them down on the paper was an important task, whether you understood what the squiggles meant or not. When the boy was at his desk, making his morning Important Squiggles, his eyes would wander around the room, taking in the other children, the bright colors and shapes on the walls, sunshine outside the windows. Sometimes, he got up to sharpen his pencil, and grinned at his friend as he passed his desk. This is called socializing, and, curiously, while schools worry very much about socialization being a necessary part of a child's life, you don't want 'em to catch you socializing.

When the boy got back to his desk, he had to try to remember which squiggle he left off at, and he would sigh, and look hard at his paper and at the blackboard, comparing them.

It was in kindergarten that the labels were first mentioned.

In. Kindergarten.

Labels. Letters.

Also mentioned were: Doctors. Diagnoses. Drugs. Study carrels. Behavior modification. Bio-feedback.

In kindergarten.

There were five boys labeled in that year's kindergarten class. One girl, who sat at a table and wailed after her mother dropped her off and was afraid to enter the gym, because of the high ceilings, got her own label.

When the boy tumbled off the school bus, it was after 4:00 in the afternoon. He was tired and anxious and irritable. Sometimes he cried over nothing. He began to hit his brother and push at his mother. His mother took him to the doctor, because, well, something was wrong with her son. Why was he crying so much? Why was he angry all the time? The doctor could find nothing wrong.

In first grade, the class was divided into reading groups. The boy was put into a reading group named The Horses. It took the boy's mother some time to realize that this was the "lowest" reading group, but she knew that her son would learn to read, and she wasn't one of those pushy moms, who pitted their kids against the other kids in report card showdowns. She was older, and the boy was her second child. She had put her first child through the silly competitions, and she was done with that.

One Friday, the boy tumbled off the school bus with a note from his teacher and a stack of books. The note said that on Monday, the boy was moving up two reading groups to the Cheetahs, the "top" reading group. Could the mother please see that he had read the stack of books by Monday, to catch up with his group? The teacher hadn't known that the silent boy could read. Wait a minute, thought the mother. There are four children in The Horses, and you didn't know that he could read? The teacher had finally heard the boy, reading softly, under his breath. Very quietly, but still. Definitely a Cheetah.

Sheesh.

Another day, the boy came home with a homework assignment: Write a story in four sentences.

As the mother watched him at his little desk, twisting and bending in his red plastic chair, smiling goofy smiles and laughing and turning impossibly upside-down, still marginally in the chair, she despaired of ever getting the homework done. She was tired, the boy was tired. There was little time in the evenings for family time after crowding in dinner and bath and homework. Everything revolved around school and the school schedule.

With a sigh, the mother looked at the boy and said, "This story -- it can be about anything. What would you like to write about?" "I don't know", answered the boy, putting his legs on the desk and his head on the floor. "How about skating?" suggested the mother. "You like to skate!" "Okay", answered the boy absently, stretching his body out full length on his desk. After many reminders to sit up and sit still and find his pencil, the boy was ready to write his story about skating. He sat at his desk and looked at his mother.

"Well", she said, "you like to skate. What if you wrote, 'I like skating.'" The boy yawned and gripped the pencil in his fingers and squinted his eyes at the paper, forming the letters. It took a while. "Come back!" the mother said, as he hopped up and ran off after stabbing the paper with a period. "You have three more sentences to write!" The boy turned and looked at her, disbelieving. The mother wasn't believing it herself, at this point.

"Why do you like skating?" she asked. "I don't know" answered the boy. "Do you like it because you go fast?" The boy shrugged and smiled and watched the cat patter through the room. "How about writing 'I am a fast skater.'?"

The boy got up to sharpen his pencil.

And it struck the tired mother like a ton of bricks. This was a waste of time and energy, and nights like this would slowly -- or not so slowly -- turn the boy's desire to learn and need-to-know into a weary, grudging, passionless plod through meaningless information and senseless homework exercises.

This could pit her and her son against each other for years, could kill his spirit, make him begin to lie about homework and hide notes home from the teacher. If he were successful at school, he might learn just enough to pass the test, get his "A-plus", then forget it, as she had learned to do in school. If he began to fail, he would suspect that he was stupid. Maybe for the rest of his life.

What did they do before school? When their days weren't bracketed by the bus pick up and drop off? When the boy was happy and the family could eat dinner without rushing, play together, have a long booktime, go outside and look at the stars?

"Do you want to go skating tomorrow?" the mother asked, gathering up papers that had drifted to the floor. "YES!" said the boy.

So they never did the homework. They went skating, and found the other kids who didn't go to school, the other families who went to the skating rink during school hours. The mother asked lots of questions of the other mothers. She saw her boy happy again, sleeping late when he needed rest, no more long, early morning bus rides to wake up for. No one mentioned the labels, because, at home, learning was geared to the boy. He'd been learning all of his life, after all. At his own pace, in his own way.

No longer in school, the boy made new friends. Sometimes he and his mom picked up his old friends at school for an after-school playdate. They picked up Greg during the summer, after his summer school classes were over. Greg came toward them with his head ducked, walking fast. He was only 6, but he was ashamed of being in summer school.

They picked up Alan. Alan was repeating kindergarten because he had not learned to read when his classmates did that year, but he was in second grade math class, because he was a math whiz who helped his father put together and take apart computers. He was having emotional problems and seeing a counselor. One friend had just started taking a new drug for one of the learning disorders with all of the letters that so many of the school kids had and came home with the boy and his mother to play, but instead lay down on their couch and fell asleep.

One day, they saw The Girl Who Wailed, sitting at a desk with her mother. They were waiting until after school when they would practice going into the gym together, because the girl was still afraid.

They met many homeschooled friends of all ages, who had stories similar to the boy's. They sat at a picnic table in the park on park days. They played Pokemon cards, reciting abilities and powers, which they read from the cards, adding and subtracting "health points", laughing and talking, the older kids helping the younger ones. There were lots of stories happening every day, but they weren't boxed into four sentences of painstaking letter-forming. When the boy and his friends wanted to get up from the picnic table and stop sitting, they ran to the playground swings and slide. There was no "recess", no stamps and stickers for "good behavior", no "silent lunch". The mother didn't need a report card to see that her son was learning, happy, thriving.

Every Thursday, they went to the Homeschool Skate, where the boy became The Boy in the Red Cap, and his brother, the Boy in the Blue Cap. They skated round and round together with their friends.

Life was good when the boy was in it, not shut away from it. Life is still good, almost 10 years later.

"I wonder whether there aren't hundreds of thousands of kids out there who may be done a disservice by having their uniqueness reduced to a disorder and by having their creative spirit controlled by a drug. " Thomas Armstrong, Ph.D, The Myth of the A.D.D. Child: 50 Ways To Improve Your Child’s Behavior and Attention Span Without Drugs, Labels or Coercion. **

**While this book sounds interesting, I've never read it. When your kids are out of school, school dx's tend to disappear. There's no need to "improve your child's" blahblahblah, we have found.

The Long Reply or Laura Thinks Too Much ...

(I was writing a reply to The Other Laura's comment on the preceding post, and it spilled over into a blog post.)

I think I've tried to express this before, and I have a difficult time saying what I mean: It's not so much the fact of school or not school or unschool or homeschool. It's about connecting with your child and doing what you both (all, parents and child) need to do to keep him or her whole and centered.

Our family's experiences were that this is difficult to do in school, where reward and punishment -- in the form of grades, handstamps, awards and stickers for "good behavior", "Silent Lunch", sitting out the playground time, notes home to parents for 'bad behavior" -- lead a child to look outside of himself and to seek validation from others, from Authority and to measure him or her Self against others.

I was going to cut and paste a bit from one of Haven Kimmel's books about her school experience, but I can't find it right now. Zippy comes home with a terrible report card and her teacher's comment on the report is something about how much she talks or colors outside the lines or both, and her parents' reaction is "Way to go, Zip!" They are proud of her, basically high-five The Zip. :)

Oh -- Meredith found it:

... Mrs. Dockerty didn't like either one of us. On my end-of-the-year report card all she wrote was "Is disruptive in class. Colors outside the lines. Talks out of turn." When I showed it to my parents, they read it out loud to me, and my mom said, "Good for you, sweetheart." And my dad gave me a little pat on the back. A Girl Named Zippy, Haven Kimmel

That is one of the only examples I can think of in which a parent doesn't encourage a child to see himself/herself through the lens of school. Good. Bad. In this case, Zippy's parents supported Who She Was over who school tries to mold a kid into through reward and punishment. I think that it can be done -- keeping a child's sense of themselves as whole and perfect Just As They Are intact, but -- in my experience -- it's more difficult when your child is in school.

Here, Eloise Ristad is talking about weekly music lessons, but she says what I mean about school and Pleasing the Teacher better than I can:

"Lessons – in anything – can be dangerous to us, for the weekly guilt can become addictive. We can come to believe that we deserve scorn, and that we really can profit from being told repeatedly how to do it... Gradually we lose our child-like enthusiasm... and substitute instead an intense yearning to do it "right" for the teacher." (Eloise Ristad)

I think that it takes a kid with a strong sense of self and with very supportive parents to escape this aspect of schooling. Yeah, I think it can be done, and a parent paying attention can see when their child is having trouble with their sense of self, guide them back to their center. We've tried it both ways, and we have found living without school to work for our family and our kids. I think I'm too lazy to combat the ideas and structure of schooling, to focus on the joy of new experiences (whether you choose those experiences or they're chosen for you?). I think that some parents can do it. Kind of like I thought breastfeeding was the easier choice for me, but I see bottlefed kids who have survived and thrived!

Time to walk the Fox-Red Lab. It's a beautiful morning here, but getting hot and humid. I'm going to practice embracing the heat and humidity. Complaining about it hasn't worked so far. ;/

Under My Skin: "Preparing Kids for Life"

I hadn't been to The Women's Colony in a while, although Meredith often visits there and reads me the good stuff out loud. I love Mrs. G., but I would never last a day in a true Women's Colony. The post on parents who "put their kids on pedestals" written by someone-I-forget-who and all of the "Amen, Sister!" comments that followed made me curl my lip. It's not a good look for me. So I took a break from visiting.

I did check in the other day -- I love Mrs. G. -- and came across a couple of posts by Mary Alice. She writes about being raised in a "large bohemian family" and being unschooled (after a fashion) and how that made life harder for her in The Real World. I found her post really irritating, mostly because, well, I disagreed with her. Heh. But Meredith just smiled, which makes me admire her and understand how she can put up with so much in the schooly world of traditional parents and labeled-and-drugged kids, and just focus on her love for the kids she works with and not JUDGE as her mother, the crotchety old FIFTY year old is wont to do.

Anyway, here is my reply to Mary Alice's post. It's, like, at least week late, but hey, apparently school didn't prepare me for getting things done in a timely manner:

I stumbled upon your post the other day, Mary Alice, and it sparked some interesting discussions in our (Radical Unschooling) family. My daughter, unschooled since age 12, is a 22yo K-through-8 art teacher, and therefor, has seen school from the perspectives of a student, an unschooler, and a teacher. She smiled when I read her parts of your posts here. She said that you seemed to feel that school and a traditional path made life easier, and if that was so, then why are most people who struggle in life products of school? It reminded us of the quote "It's no measure of good health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society." Krishnamurti

What Dharmamama says in her comment is true for us, and for the unschooling families we know: It's about connecting with your children, and partnering with them to get what they want. To our family, unschooling is like stoking and tending a fire. Not walking off and letting the fire burn or not, whatever. :)

This is from Joyce Fetterol's (Radical Unschooling mom) site:

"Standard thought is that school prepares kids for life. But how many kids is that true for? We want to believe it's true. We focus on the kids who appear to be models of success. We find ways of explaining the failures of school -- and point to causes other than school like unmotivated kids and uncaring parents and bad environment that school can't compensate for.

But in general -- not in every case, but in general -- people find success to be an elusive goal and the happiness that was promised with it never quite there.

If pursuing the American Dream led to happiness, then everyone who set out on the path to pursue it would be happy. But they aren't. And some people who reject the American Dream are happy.

Since pursuing the American Dream isn't a guarantee and some people find happiness without pursuing the American Dream, there's some other factor involved.

That other factor is what unschooling is about. It dispenses with the false hopes dangled by the American Dream and focuses on joy being the goal."

Anyway, Mary Alice, the focus on joy works for us! Come visit at CenterDownHome and see how unschooling works for our family, if you want to. :)

Oh, and hey -- I don't get the social security number problem. You're younger than I am -- I'm FIFTY -- but it's only in the last 25 or 30 years that kids are routinely issued social security numbers. I had to apply for mine when I was 18. It was no big deal! Other than that, I was handed all of those traditional parenting and schooling "keys" you write about, and at the end of the school assembly line, found myself lost in a life I hadn't consciously chosen as a working mom, graphic artist, unhappy with my job, unhappy with my life, wondering how I'd gotten to this place. After all, I'd done everything "right", followed the rules, been handed all those keys and all. :/

Anyway, thanks again for a topic that led to lively discussion here at our house!-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

So, you know, focusing on the joy is what works for us here. Today, Meredith and her crowd are going to a Renaissance Faire. She and Charity were tweaking each other's costumes yesterday. Their gang has been looking forward to this for weeks.

I'm heading off with Owen to a Yu-Gi-Oh Tournament. He's looking forward to some real tournament play, and I can have a latte and stroll through the bookstore where the tournament is held. Jesse elected to stay home and play guitar. We went to the Guitar Center yesterday, and he picked up a book and a Paul Gilbert instructional DVD that made the cashier raise his eyebrows. "You got some serious stuff here." Jesse grinned his quiet grin.

Mark called yesterday from Hot Springs. He was standing on a pier on Lake Catherine looking at this:

It's right on the water, facing the setting sun. Mark loves it. It's new construction, and I've always wanted an older house, but this is so pretty, and the lake and location are great. We'll see. We still have to sell this house, but Mark was so happy, so enthusiastic, standing on that pier, describing the sun on this house. It was nice to hear him so excited and happy.

So, life is good. Reading posts from people who don't "get" unschooling, who don't understand this life of trusting and respecting and partnering your kids, can get under my skin. My brain hurts from trying to explain. Then, I realize that I don't have to explain! I'll just let my life speak for itself.

Oh, I love mornings! Coffee and a walk on the trail and all of the fun stuff today holds! I hope everyone has a great weekend!