One day about two years ago, my mind was running wild, planning out what to say to a person who has hurt me over and over. They would hurt me, and I'd spend hours and days thinking about how to explain my feelings just right. "Maybe if I say it this way they'll hear me this time," I'd think obsessively, awake in the dark, trying to make our relationship tolerable through the power of creative expression and empathy.
I'd been running this hamster wheel for years. Maybe my whole life.
With the help of non-violent communication, a friend who'd been in therapy a long time, another friend who taught me kindness and compassion, and another friend who modeled boundaries, I was finally able to snap out of it. I remember that moment. I realized: these words in my mind are valuable.
"Stop signs are for safety." It started there. And I stepped off the hamster wheel with the thought: I don't need to say this to the person who hurts me again and again. They can't hear me. I can't change them.
I need to say this to other people who are dealing with emotional and verbal abuse. I need to say this to people asking for help. I need to put my energy into people who are kind in return. So I started writing.
I am really lucky to have in my life a great artist and friend, Kerry Vineberg, who agreed to take this on. We've been working on it ever since and I've learned so much about the creative process in that time.
And I've learned a lot from working with Meg Lemke, the editor at Mutha Magazine who also volunteers to do this work. She knew exactly what to do to make this better. Mutha Magazine has showed me that mothering is a creative, intellectual work. I couldn't have written this comic if I hadn't spent years soaking in the work of other artists and writers on that site.
So here it is, my comic "What is Kindness." Trigger warnings for emotional abuse, verbal abuse, ableism, and CPTSD.
Toni Morrrison is everything. I've taught her books so many times. But more than that, her words sit with me, touchstones. When images from her books come to me, they give me solid ground to reach toward ethical, beautiful compassion.
Images and characters and moments from Beloved live in the back of my mind always. I read about teen girls locked up in Texas hieleras with their premie newborn and I can see Beloved's birth and death and haunting play out in my mind.
I read The Bluest Eye when I was still a child, so young I don't remember it well, but it's still there. It's the reason, the reason behind my big choices about who I let into my life, what I choose to do with my life.
I studied literature because she wrote literature.
A set of Toni Morrison's books: The Bluest Eye, Sula, Paradise, Playing in the Dark, Home, A Mercy[/caption]
If you do one thing, if you want to read something today or hear her voice, look up her Nobel prize acceptance speech. Let it steep in your mind and infuse your days.
After all, the death of someone who offered so much wisdom simply means, as she puts it, "it's in your hands." Her words will help you with the "narcotic narcissism" and violence of our current moment. Think what is in your hands, what guns real or metaphorical have been placed there, and when you last used those hands to offer warmth, to reach toward life.
Rather than judge the relative genius of Morrison, let her words in. So that you can work with her, together. So you can say with Morrison,""We know you can never do it properly – once and for all. Passion is never enough; neither is skill. But try. For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light."
I would love to write posts on this blog where I detail the deep conversations I've had with my kids after reading beautiful social justice books. I'd love to be that white cis-woman parent who has stacks of children's books with innovative art detailing the trail of tears, Japanese internment, civil rights--everything I think my kids need to know about what shapes our world.
I'm not. I let me kids pick their books. So we read about trucks and roaring animals with the toddler and we read books with puns that don't have too much facial expression with the now six-year-old.
I picked The Great Pasta Escape up from the library because I knew she'd like it. Something about the funny caricatured pasta plus puns plus adventure. Something about the comic book art style, frequent use of signs.
I picked up a stack of other books I found recommended from the Brain Pickings blog, and I like them, but she's not interested. They are totally insightful for me, as a grown up.
But what I actually read with my kids is a book about a bunch of different pastas in a factory who slowly realize that they are being lied to, that their dreams of "a super place" are actually going to land them in the super market. They suddenly need a plan. They organize, but end up with infighting. They remind themselves of their solidarity, and, spoiler alert, they escape.
Wait a second, that is a social justice book!
I don't think I know as much about activist organizing as these various shapes of pasta.
In one of the last few episodes of Cheryl Strayed and Steve Almond's podcast "Dear Sugars" (which, like pasta dreaming of a super place, was bought out and then killed by the New York Times), Catrice M. Jackson talked about the white privilege of planning out perfectly worded conversations with your kids about race. This one hit me in the stomach, cause I'm all about planning out perfectly worded conversations and getting it all "right" when it comes to talking about race and other social justice issues. She said (rough summary), people of color have these conversations with anger, with fear, with sadness, in ways that are frightening and overwhelming to their kids, because they are forced to have them and they live them. Instead of focusing on the right thing to say, live as an ally. Question your own privileges. As Brené Brown puts it, "the question isn't so much 'Are you parenting the right way?' as it is 'Are you the adult that you want your child to grow up to be?'
My answer? Not yet, but I'm working on becoming that person. I think I need to learn more from the pasta.
Brené Brown's book, "Daring Greatly" at Powell's books: https://www.powells.com/book/-9781592408412(my quote above is from the summary of findings in "Rising Strong," pg 277)
"Nebraska" is a father and son bonding movie, but it's definitely not about a father unschooling his son. The father here, Woody Grant, is an alcoholic Korean war veteran from small-town Nebraska who tells his adult son that he never talked about wanting kids and just liked "screwing." A theme of the whole movie is the white family culture of not talking about much at all, let alone about relationships.
Instead of a father unschooling his son, it's the adult son of an aging father who practices unschooling principles. To me this felt like an unschooling movie through and through. Even though, and maybe because, the movie so vividly focuses on the terrifying white family culture of not talking about anything.
Woody's sister-in-law, for example, doesn't talk much about how her two sons were convicted of sexual assault, and just says it's great they're doing community service. All the other elderly white women just nod their heads, agreeing. At a different point, we learn that Woody had an affair with a Native woman "down on the reservation." These two points indirectly, and inadequately, link white family silence to sexual violence against Native women. I wish there had been more about this, considering the urgency of colonialist violence (head over to this database project to learn more). Even among the all-white characters of the movie, white silence leads to many lives being destroyed.
The adult son, David's, relationship to his father Woody stands in stark contrast to this culture of colonialist, soul destroying silence. They give us a deep, relational starting point for restructuring colonialist white family silence via kindness, listening, and self-reflection on power dynamics.
**Spoiler Alert: Total spoiler for the whole movie from here.**
First, you have to look at the power relationship between the father and son. The father starts the movie, walking doggedly down unsafe sections of rural highway, determined to walk from Billings MT to Lincoln NE (that's 800 miles) to claim his prize money, because a magazine subscription marketing company sent him a letter saying he may have a winning number. Throughout the movie, he's depicted as addled and childlike. His wife constantly belittles him in this way, but even David, the son trying to help his dad, wavers between seeing his dad as in early stages Alzheimer's or seeing him as someone who "has always believed what other people tell him." It's clear in the end the dad has always had a generous and kind spirit and has been exploited by many people along the way. He's determined, but nearly powerless at this point other than by rebelling with his feet, and being protected by white male privilege that allows him to walk down the highway and be greeted as "pal" by the police.
Facing his dad's rebellious devotion to a fantasy, the son David--who is trying to change his life by eating healthy and drinking less--decides to shift gears. He stops yelling at his dad that he's an idiot for believing the letter, and decides to take him to Lincoln. This is his first act of listening and kindness with his dad. He may not understand, but he'll help.
They stop along the way in Hawthorne NE, Woody's hometown, where David gets a peek into his father's history. Half the people in town exploit Woody's generosity. Half of them are kind, but step out of the way and don't get involved, letting the old man get nearly trampled by some cruel people. At one point, David's cousins--the same ones who've committed sexual assault--mug him and his dad to steal the letter, and then drop it in the street realizing it's a fake. David tries to convince his dad losing the letter is for the best, then gives in and goes out in the middle of the night to search the street for his dad's prized letter.
At that point I realized: this is what I do every day. All day. I participate in wild fantasy, I take emotional pain seriously even when it seems to me to be so tenuously linked to reality, because I have respect for my kids. Because I want to get to know them. Because I have power over them but I don't condescend to them. I don't pretend to know them better than they know themselves. Because I respect their emotions, and it's my job as an unschooling parent to support them on their journey. Because I want to learn more about them.
Eventually, through learning and participating in his dad's journey, however misguided it may be, David learns a lot. He may not have a close, loving relationship with his dad, but he gets to know his dad, and is able to be kind and bring joy into the man's life. He learns his dad has been cheated again and again by people in his hometown. And he learns that all his dad wants in life is a new truck and an air compressor. Woody can't drive, and he doesn't do work anymore that involves an air compressor. But he's wanted these things his whole life. So when the number on his letter doesn't turn out to be the winning number, and the woman in the marketing office sends them off with just a free hat, David goes out and buys his dad a new truck and an air compressor.
That is unschooling. David has a lot of power over his dad throughout the movie, and his dad is rebellious, defiant, fantastical, and inexplicable. But David listens, "indulges," is kind, and joins his dad on the journey. Literally. When his dad triumphantly drives the new truck with an air compressor in the back through his old hometown, with David ducked down hiding in the passenger seat, you can see the smiles on the two men's faces. I think it's the first time either of them smiles.
After the movie was done, I was trying to get my toddler to get in bed to snuggle and wind down for the night. He has been bringing more and more things to bed, I think to have a sense of control over the process. He's two and a half. So this time, we brought five empty snack bowls. I didn't want to carry all those messy bowls in bed, but I did. Not because I didn't have energy to fight him, but because it didn't hurt anything, and it was important to him. And I can join him in that feeling of importance, listen, recognize his needs, and learn about him, becoming closer along the way.
More and more major league athletes have been following Colin Kaepernick's lead and kneeling at the national anthem. An action that seems powerful enough to get thousands of people talking and our would-be-dictator upset. An action that is purely symbolic: a symbolic movement in response to symbolic words and music. To act in this case is simply to move the body in a different way, in a context that wields not the money that these players have but their cultural power.
In fact this action seems to be more powerful, to resonate across our communities, more than all the foundations and volunteering that so many major league players have done and do. While those things make a substantial difference in people's lives, we are dealing with a promise of equality and democracy that has been ripped to shreds, taking along with it our safety on this planet. Sports players kneeling has gotten people's attention across the typical red/blue lines that divide political votes.
Major league sports players are wielding a kind of symbolic cultural power not just because they are good at sports, but because they are leaders in a vibrant thriving sports culture.
Unschooling is revolutionary not just for rejecting the school system and school thinking, but because by following our passions and our curiosity, I believe all of us can find the cultural power that these players are wielding. And not only the cultural influence and status, but the "reason to change."
We’re going to Mars because whatever is wrong with us will not get right with us so we journey forth carrying the same baggage but every now and then leaving one little bitty thing behind: maybe drop torturing hunchbacks here; maybe drop lynching Billy Budd there; maybe not whipping Uncle Tom to death; maybe resisting global war. One day looking for prejudice to slip … one day looking for hatred to tumble by the wayside … one day maybe the whole community will no longer be vested in who sleeps with whom … maybe one day the Jewish community will be at rest … the Christian community will be content … the Muslim community will be at peace … and all the rest of us will get great meals at holy days and learn new songs and sing in harmony
I am to a fault a very practical and serious person. Too utilitarian. So my first reaction to this poem, was space? What a wacky idea. Why bother when there are so many problems at home to deal with. I want to tackle racial injustice head on and fight it. Why waste the money and time on going to space?
I am like this about sports too. I have gotten into serious conflict asking people why they care about who wins a sports game when all the players are only on that team because that's who gave them a scholarship, that's who drafted them and paid them. What's the point? And despite my present-day arguments on this blog, I'm also someone who used to despise video games as the biggest waste of time possible.
We can't always make passion utilitarian though, and we shouldn't. Human passion and curiosity, the drive to win a game, the drive to play and get better: these things matter. And they build communities. I got to be judgmental and utilitarian because my chosen interest in literature had more cultural cache, seemed more valuable than other peoples' interests in video games. It got me into college and graduate school.
But our passions, our curiosity, our culture, is valuable not because it can be used but because it gives us our humanity, our community, our reason to change.
We’re going to Mars because Peary couldn’t go to the North Pole without Matthew Henson because Chicago couldn’t be a city without Jean Baptiste DuSable because George Washington Carver and his peanut was the right partner for Booker T. It’s a life seeking thing
"It's a life seeking thing"
Sports players kneeling makes a difference because their passion has led them to excel, and made them leaders of fans and teams. Going to Mars, Giovanni argues, gives us a reason to change our worlds and relationships to each other and leave cruelty behind.
For many unschoolers, their passion for video games not only has "utilitarian" benefits in teaching problem solving etc, but more importantly creates and strengthens a vibrant human community. A community that has somewhere to go--the next game, the next level, the next challenge--and a reason to change.
Gamer gate, when female speakers were harrassed and threatened to the point of not attending a conference, brought up everything that is wrong with gamer culture. But it also is merely a microcosm of the problems in our culture at large. And the passion for games keeps girls playing, and gives them a reason to find each other and strengthen their communities and change gamer culture. Like the players kneeling,
One thing that pushed me to unschooling was the 2007 housing crisis and subsequent recession. That recession turned to dust two of the promises my middle class whiteness had made me: first, that if you work hard in school you will be able to go to college; second, that you could get government job and have a moderate income but security and safety. The recession led to my husband being laid off and to fees and my university rising 30%, then more and more and more. I tried protesting to stop the fee increases, but it did nothing and instead revealed more corruption and false promises at the heart of my university. These promises of safety shattered.
My experience of safety and security shattering is nothing compared to what every Black person in this country experiences. When the entire police force has it in their power to hurt or kill you with impunity there is no safety.
Nikki Giovanni's poem is not just about the drive for adventure leading you to mars, and leading you to change your culture along the way. It's about the history of Black humanity and cultural genius, the ability to stay human when--on a rocket ship for a year or smashed deep into a ship on the middle passage--you "won't know which way to look."
When the rocket red glares the astronauts will be able to see themselves pull away from Earth … as the ship goes deeper they will see a sparkle of blue … and then one day not only will they not see Earth … they won’t know which way to look … and that is why NASA needs to call Black America
They need to ask us: How did you calm your fears … How were you able to decide you were human even when everything said you were not … How did you find the comfort in the face of the improbable to make the world you came to your world …
BIPOC sometimes critique unschooling as a white appropriation of ancient indigenous practices, but this critique also extends to what Giovanni expresses in this poem. When I come to unschooling, which is my journey to Mars, I "need to ask. . How." I need to not just set my children "free" within the context of white privilege, but ask how BIPOC under white supremacist colonialism have managed to thrive and to continuously shed imposed and damaging white supremacist values. Ask how passion can be the driver to make our communities more inclusive, just, and healthy for all.
Yesterday I had several people decide to tell me to spend less time with my kids, squash out meltdowns by ignoring them and refusing to be manipulated, and cut out tv and video games.
Today I'm not answering the phone.
Today we ran races in the front yard and were awarded handmade trophies. We learned about numbers, about gold, silver, and bronze. About bronze being "third best" which is different from "worst." We learned about looking both ways before getting a ball from the street.
Today baby decided he likes one of my daughter's favorite shows, and they enjoyed it together on the couch except he kept kicking her pillows and squishing her with hugs and trying to steal her food. Today we learned about patience. Today he learned a little about physical boundaries and consent.
Today we researched how to unlock Scrapbook Theater songs in Yoshi's Woolly world. We learned about search terms and fan wikis and reading.
Today we threw different kinds of balls--beach balls, bouncy balls, sky bouncers. We learned about how they blow in the wind and roll down hills and bounce erratically. Today the baby learned to throw farther and say "guh guh" for gorilla.
Today the kids played together with duplo legos for 45 minutes, making pretend animals and driving toy cars around the house. I learned how much a clean house (so rare here) inspires movement and play.
Today we made our own postcards for friends, sounding out words and drawing pictures of friends together, learning about what makes a postcard and how to mail it. Baby made animal sounds to ask me to draw animals and drew some himself.
At no point did I coerce or require any of this. At no point did I extinguish a meltdown with discipline. At no point did I even suggest most of this, I just joined in the play of both kids and helped gather resources and provided safety and a playmate and supervision.
That's unschooling. And it means I know my baby's favorite animals and preference for animal cartoon videos over anything else. I know my kids' preferences and challenges and how they learn and how they have fun. I know where they are at in terms of communicating with each other and setting boundaries, and what we need to work on next. I know their rhythms and their grins and their joys and their sadness. That's unschooling.
I'm not going to answer the phone as much anymore.
It's not that I didn't expect the criticism. Unschooling is radical for most people I know, trusting kids is radical for our whole culture, staying home doesn't fit into white liberal capitalist feminism.
It's just that the criticism is continuously more and more important than seeing my kids. Really seeing who they are. For them, "seeing" my kids means visiting, which immediately turns into passive aggressive pressure to do and be something other than they are.
And as I try to explain autism, and share these fun moments, share how much they're learning, try to explain their joys and challenges, explain what is hard and how they've progressed, it's like throwing pebbles in the ocean. All my careful words disappear, and I get back the exact same waves of criticism as last year and the year before and the year before.
There are exceptions of course, a couple people who are listening and learning and seeing past their surprise at our lifestyle. But as I realize that most people do not see my kids for who they are, I realize that neither do they see me. Their narrative of what kids should do and be--the pressure to be "successful," to not show emotion, to beat out difference and disability--is stronger than anything I can say.
Then I realize that I've wanted to be seen my whole life--seen for who I am, not just pressured to fit what I should be and do. And then I answer the phone less and less. I stop trying to put energy into words for people who don't listen.
Instead, I might as well put myself out there, writing, connecting, looking elsewhere for the people who see me and see my kids.
There are three core values that I thought I'd impose as a parent, which I've found I have no interest in "imposing"--if that can be done successfully with values.
First, I imagined we'd be a screen-free family, or only watch Sesame Street. Ha.Sesame Street scares the crap out of my daughter. "Mario's Nightmare" on youtube does not. My only explanation of this is that it has something to do with being overwhelmed by eye contact and emotional expression in more typical movies. In the meantime, I scare away wonderful, well-meaning parents when I say my four-year-old has mastered multiple Mario video games.
Second, I imagined my kid would have a thorough and intensive social justice education before kindergarten. That I'd check out books by racially diverse authors that dealt with struggles like slavery, Jim Crow, the Trail of Tears, housing discrimination, and immigration as well as diverse religions, arts, histories, geography. Instead, I've realized I can't force her to read things and neither she nor I have time to read things that some blog listed as the most educational book about diversity.
I still try to get diverse books in, but they look more like Chris Raschka's goofy series of jokes, Moosey Moose and Crabby Crab. This then brings us to his Yo, Yes and The Hello Goodbye Window, both of which use subtle social interactions tinged with grace to discuss with Black/white American relations. Yo, Yes for example deals with shyness, which is how my daughter understands her difficulty with social interaction. It promotes interracial friendship but not in the facebook meme, stunted reading of "I Have a Dream" kind of way where two cute babies with different skin tones hold hands. Instead, it so gracefully grapples with the difficulty of interracial friendship via differences in language (Yo and Yes), demeanor, and style. All of which contribute to miscommunications but can be overcome and can enrich the friendship. The book is so rich because my daughter identifies with shyness and understands a bit about whiteness, but when she's happy and confident her style of communication resembles so much the brash "Yo!" that starts the book, the sudden and simple way boys make friends:
I also thought that we would protest together for women's rights, for Black Lives Matter, for Native land rights, to end war. I brought her to protests as a baby but, even as a baby, she'd be overwhelmed by the people. Then it got too hard, and by the time she was three I realized I needed to respect her sensory needs, that a protest was too much.
But lately that's begun to shift again. I don't lecture her about politics, but I did tell her I was sad about Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, that they were hurt by police because the police thought they were scary because of their skin color. I told her I was sad about war in Syria and we watched a video of kids painting a bus in Aleppo. And since my husband and I fought and cried after the US election, and I could barely function for days, I found obvious need to tell her about the "mean" president who doesn't like people because they are different than him. And how people think women can't be president even though women can do all the things men can do.
In the week after the election, we were walking through our neighborhood and saw a peace flag with a hand-written note on it, saying "My name is ___ ___ and I did not vote for Trump." For whatever reason this warmed my heart. To begin to speak and protest, to say no publicly and begin to say no together. And since I stopped and gazed at the sign, I told my daughter why, that the sign was a kind of protest against the mean president.
Ever since seeing that sign, she has wanted to protest. We even made it, baby and all, to the electoral college protest. Amazingly, she was motivated and not afraid, enough that she was able to march herself for a few minutes and sit for a few minutes among all the people. Those ten minutes of involvement mean so much to me, and to her, much more than the hours I would have put in had I taken her to protests where she was overwhelmed and wanted to hide.
Finally, I thought we would be healthy. My husband and I eat a ridiculously healthy diet with loads of vegetables. My daughter eats bread and cheese and a few vegetable fragments. Yet while I'm trying to use whatever playful, therapeutic resources I have to help her feel comfortable with new foods, I also know that I don't want to make food a point of stress or guilt or dejection.
My husband and I also hike and want to be out in nature as much as possible. This has been a surprising roller coaster as parents. Camping and being in nature are in many ways the best thing we can do for our daughter. The world becomes her playground, social rules don't apply in the same way. The ground is not a blank surface to be cleaned but a treasure trove of materials (sticks, dirt) for her imagination. There are no walls, and in some ways she needs to create a safe nook (the picnic table and tent provide security and stability) but in other ways this is comforting.
Still, our romantic tradition of hiking every other weekend has radically changed since she got too big to carry all the way. I thought I would be like a friend of mine and just keep hiking, forcing the kid to tag along. I thought I would insist on physical effort in exchange for treats and vistas and the value of nature. Instead, we've found that we have no desire to force her to hike, and the result is that it's rare if we go a mile out. We can still pick her up but not for long. For the past couple years not forcing her to hike has meant very little hiking. The constant change in environment makes her shut down rather than be motivated to continue.
Until now, because now there is Mario. Suddenly she is hiking and it's because of screen time. When we start walking anywhere--around the neighborhood or in a forest--she wants to play Mario (identified by a specific game, because the titles "New Super Mario Bros. U" or "Super Mario 3D World" are hugely important). Once we have our assigned roles--Bowser, Mario, Princess Peach, Baby Luigi--she runs down the trail or sidewalk for miles. Because we're throwing electricity at her, because she's got a one-up, because the whole world becomes her playground.
If last year was about embracing her autism and not imposing expectations, this year is about learning what she is capable of, beyond and completely separate from the things I imagined before I had kids. I had boxes to check off before I had kids--literacy education, social justice, health--and I thought I knew what that would look like: PBS, protests, hiking, and nature education.
Now, I still have the same values but I respect that her learning--rather than me teaching--those values means they are put through the kaleidoscope that is her self: her autism, her desire to be "girly" combined with her so often brash demeanor, her coming of age in this political climate, her digital world where she watches us on our smartphones and knows that messages from grandma come via screens.
There is no way I could have predicted or anticipated or imposed what the values in her world should be. Instead, she's teaching me, and she's challenging herself not because I check out the right books from the library and force them on her. Not because I drag her out for a 5 mile hike at 7am. Not because I turn off the screen and make her go outside. But because the world is fun and challenging. Because she enjoys a battle between Mario characters and the different shapes of an oak leaf. Because she wants to read goofy books and is upset that war and racism hurt people. Because she loves signs of all kinds, about water drains or traffic or politics. Because she loves to draw in the dirt and have her tablet charged for the whole camping trip.
I sometimes wince at reconnecting with old friends who've had babies. I'm pretty sure that when I was a new parent, if I'd met someone like me now I would have thought they were nuts. Video games, a diet of cheese sandwiches, so much less diversity education than I imagined and wanted, autism: these are things I was afraid of. These are now things that have shattered my white upper middle class snobbery and made my life beautiful.
