This is not a mommy blog

One of the most stressful things about being a parent in this time period is the proliferation of standards, often binary, often unachievable. At least for me. Though blogging is a fantastic, inexpensive, fast way to share ideas and resources, I have decided that I am afraid of the mommy blog.

For those of you who may not be familiar, my take on the mommy blog is that it is a blog that sort of demonstrates the “best days” of parenting, takes a philosophy, runs with it, takes authority over it, and removes all opportunities for failure. Standards can be arbitrary and come with picture perfect humble brags of the day to day executions of perfect imperfection. My judgment is that mommy bloggists take advantage of and are often victims of what I am calling “parent terror,” the fear of getting it wrong when the stakes of the decisions made in raising a child feel so high. I feel like in conjunction with marketing efforts, news stories not based in sound academic research, and a parent’s love-based striving for a non-existent (but it doesn’t feel non-existent) idea of perfection, mommy blogs make us all feel like crap.

This is not a mommy blog, because I am not perfect. I have met a kaleidoscope of parents and facilitators whose skills and parenting intentions are so admirable and from whom I learn from. I have also found that I sometimes have something to share that is hopefully helpful to someone else. What I am learning for sure is that stress and guilt are often unnecessary and unwarranted methods of beating ourselves up. I have seen well-meaning parents make every kind of blunder and still end up with having raised beautiful human people.

Fear of not being enough, fear of them not being enough, fear of life not being enough, is what will scuttle your joy. It is what will keep you in the controlling driver seat and out of the patient observer seat holding space for your child. Fear messages we tell ourselves, or that we allow into our hearts and minds may be the biggest thief of family joy, and actually the practical impediment of progress as we will explore. The most difficult times I have had parenting Jackson have ultimately boiled down to my fear, and possibly one of the most important parenting skills I am trying to develop is discipline to be aware of those fears, seek other perspectives for the things I am afraid of, then grow in my journey without being yucky to myself through shame and self doubt.

So, in the spirit of full disclosure. Here is an incomplete list of parent failures I have committed, some of which you will deem to be sarcastic because they are, and the point is to judge me or not, but see that I am an in-progress person just like you, and that I am still learning not to care what you or anyone else thinks about it anyway:

 

• I have let my child open and eat sugar packets at restaurants while we waited for food.
• I have fallen asleep before my child fell asleep even when my husband wasn’t home.
• I have sent my child the same lunch every day for weeks. And it was Ramen.
• I have let my child eat that Ramen dry with the sodium seasoning packet sprinkled on top of it.
• I have made my child eat that flavor Ramen brick outside so the dog would lick up the crumbs and I wouldn’t have to clean it up.
• While enrolled in a self directed education Agile Learning Center, I have surreptitiously taught my child math.
• I have caused my child to attend piano lessons and practice piano even when he did not want to.
• I have identified my own worth too closely with my child’s performance as judged by others.
• I have put the pressure that I felt from others directly on to my child’s shoulders.
• I have not had the perfect thing to say in tough situations.
• I have said, “not right now I’m tired,” so often that my child now says it to me when he doesn’t want to do something.
• I have been unskilled when I needed skill.
• I have been undisciplined when I needed discipline.
• I let him get and eat two candy bars.
• I have had fights with my husband in front of our child.
• I have lied to my child about why I was crying when he asked, because I didn’t want him to know how hard it is to be an adult sometimes.
• I’ve let my husband be the bad guy too often because I couldn’t stand to do it myself.
• I have fed my child preservatives even after the Dr. told me not to.
• I have not kept my child constantly on a top of the market vitamin regimen throughout his life.
• I have allowed dessert first and milkshakes for breakfast.
• I worked outside the home and once chose a HORRIBLE babysitter for him that didn’t change his diaper enough.
• Another babysitter didn’t feed him enough when he was a baby while I was at work.
• I’ve made my husband drop him at childcare because it made me too sad.
• I made my child deal with therapies and evaluations that, to put it bluntly, were a waste of time. And he knew it before I did.
• I bottle fed. And had a C-section. (ok, I’m putting these in sarcastically. They are true, but most people in our birth situation have had limited options on feeding and the actual childbirth because of the nature of things.) But you know people get shit for this stuff!

So, when I’m writing these articles or preparing for podcast episodes, I shake my head wondering if I’m acting like too much of an “expert,” or if I’m contributing to what I don’t like, or hell, there are so many people in the digital world, why do we need my voice? But, maybe this is less about what I know and don’t know, and more about being with you in the journey. Giving and taking and participating here on planet earth.

Our Road to Self Directed Education

“He will be like she and me as free as a dove” – Kenny Loggins “Danny’s Song”

My tiny universe. Matt, Jackson, and myself (Cristy)

I officially became a mom in 2009 on January 15th when my son Jackson was born. But as one of my sisters maintains, I began advocating for Jackson well before his birth.

I suppose our story is going to end up being Jackson’s intention to be self directed since birth, his will to live his own life, and to live it his way. It’s probably going to be the story of me thinking I was who was advocating for him, yet it being that it was he who allowed me along for the ride all along. I suppose it will end up being that this is the story of every parenthood, and if we are lucky, we can enjoy the journey and the destination and chuckle at our own presumptions we’ve had along the way.

Jackson was born at 25 weeks gestation, which means I was only 6 and a half months pregnant when the pregnancy went well off the rails. Our theme was resolve and resilience from the beginning, and our path was unique to fewer than 1% of pregnancies.

It’s funny how much this process revealed that my confidence in my own parenting relied on conformity. I can’t speak for other parents, but I am pretty sure I am not alone in this need to have the assurance and affirmation of being like the others, of being able to notice our children reaching the markers at roughly the same time. Now I know, though it takes more guts, standing out from the crowd brings its own rewards, and comparison is the thief of joy.

When I was pregnant I remember joining one of those pregnancy tracking websites that told you everything that was going on with your developing baby during every week of development. You were even informed of the size of your baby in relation to pieces of fruit. Then, what is supposed to follow is all the markers of predictable development following birth. I was really into knowing that stuff. So it was a shock to my expectation when that track was truncated at 6 and a half months, and really didn’t end up being part of our reality at all.

In light of that drastic diversion from typical, we as parents were denied the perceived comfort of comparison from the beginning. I think it was a defining theme for many of our family decisions to come because we were almost forced to treat our child like an individual and not one of a group. For one thing, he was our only, for the other, because of Jackson’s gestational age, our calendars didn’t sync up with pretty much anyone else’s. So, outside of maybe three other children with whom we spent our three months in the NICU, we could not have the comfort of comparing, and initially our milestones were such foreign milestones for new parents to have. You know, like, when he came home from the hospital at 3.5 months old, he slept in the living room. Because that’s where the 5 foot tall oxygen tank was.

If this sounds like complaining, it absolutely is not. It was stressful, but definitely set our family up to choose a self directed path, because we were always blazing our own trails.

At any rate, I learned early in the process that sometimes when I have chosen to be completely stressed about developmental milestones, that time and time again Jackson proved to me that I could trust him to develop his skills when he needed them. At one point, I remember making a note of this feeling of tormenting myself and working and working to bring about outcomes in my timing, only to have Jackson himself effortlessly solving problems when he was ready for them with little or no effort on my part. What he did need from me was trust and trustworthiness so he could have space to make his path. He’s nearly 10 now and little has changed in what he has needed from me.

He just needed me to hold space, to hold the world off of him so he could take it piece by piece, look it over a little at a time, and for me to trust him to decide what he would do with it.  

 

Traditional School – Our Entry and Exit

I do enjoy a good resource, don’t you? I love to dig and find work that others have done or are doing to help me and my family connect to life a little bit better, a little easier, and a little richer. From Jackson’s first weeks of birth I was following threads through resources, mostly thanks to people who had walked the path before me. I had phone meetings with a “mentor mom” who had had a child similarly early, I accessed a state program which paid for a child development specialist to visit us in home every week, and because of Jackson’s unique birth situation he qualified to start pre-school at 3 and a ½ years of age in the well-regarded public school system where we live.

I was a mom who worked outside of the home until Jackson was seven years old. I feel like as a mom I have a great deal of resolve and strength, but even thinking about leaving Jackson makes me feel sick. It has all worked out though, and to be honest I feel worse about it now than I did then. We had such cool people on the journey to invest in Jackson. We seemed to just barely make our way into programs that were just right for him with teachers who were superstars, who fell in love with Jackson. They knew how to give him windows to the world that we did not have as parents. What we learned in those early days was how to share our child with others, and I suppose that is the beginning of building community.

We wound our way through the best resources the public school system had to offer until I didn’t want to anymore. In short, it seemed like I was working so hard to work the system and realizing it was going to take a sustained energy like that for the rest of his school career. It was all about manipulation. I didn’t want to spend my parenting years understanding and besting a bureaucracy that was stronger than I was. I didn’t want to spend it at war with the systems and people that I wanted to have a cooperative relationship with. On top of that, at the end of the day, I felt ludicrous fighting this hard to be successful in a system that I did not even want my child to be in at all.

That’s when I began searching for alternative options for education, and encountering other people on that search as well. When I searched for options I found a gorgeous arts based private school near us. It was darling. We attended that school for one school year during which time we learned about the option of self-directed education which was even more of a step further from traditional schooling than the arts based school we attended at the time. Two teachers, one being Jackson’s teacher from the school we attended were so captivated with the self-directed education methodology that they were inspired to open their own school, an Agile Learning Center the very summer following that school year. We became one of their founding families and we attend this Agile Learning Center (ALC) today.

It has been a whole.new.world.

Many of the families in this community also refer to themselves as “unschoolers” as well as self-directed. We have loved meeting other parents who are willing to push the boundaries in order to build a new reality in their families and communities. These attributes really do make an interesting community dynamic.

I’m not sure how to explain this, but I’ve had an interesting self-realization. In most communities I have been involved in throughout my life, I have easily occupied the role of one who is “different.” It’s actually at times made me feel like my perspective was unique, and it was in those groups. Maybe at times I have felt a little isolated. But now, for the first time I find myself with people who are willing to think as progressively about the opportunities of education as I am, and most who have ideas that help me to grow and learn! These are the types of groups where change is often born, improved upon, and later scaled to larger populations. It’s like being in an incubator group for an idea that is going to change education in my part of the world.