Seedling Song

 I've started a podcast! If you like listening to people tell their stories, look for "Untangling Ourselves" on your favorite podcast app. Keep up with new episodes on mastadon or bluesky . Or listen here:   I love one-on-one conversations where we dig into the choices people have made, and expore how they got to be who they are today. Each episode feels like a gift. So far I've talked to Delia about cult deprogramming and non-coercion, Sue about unschooling and suburban mom culture, and Rob about finding music gems.  Unschooling parents are often told to deschool themselves. Once you've embraced letting your kids "just" play, and see your kids learning everyday, it can feel unfair if you aren't doing the same thing for yourself. But most people in our capitalist, ableist society were taught that play is never enough. Most people grew up with pressure to perform and set aside their joys and interests. And in our increasingly fascist political system...

 It's up! Trigger warnings for emotional abuse, verbal abuse, ableism, CPTSD. http://www.muthamagazine.com/2019/08/what-is-kindness/ 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...

 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 ...

 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. Like: The Great Pasta Escape    I picked The Great Pasta Escape up from the library because I knew they'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 they're not interested. They are tot...

 "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...

 We’re going to Mars because it gives us a reason to change -- Nikki Giovanni, " Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea (We’re Going to Mars) " 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 th...

 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 they like one of my kid's favorite shows, and they enjoyed it together on the couch except they kept kicking their sibling's pillows and squishing them with hugs and trying to steal their food. Today we learned about patience. Today they 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 differ...

 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 kid. "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 reali...

 My child's autism diagnosis process involved piles of paperwork, doctor visits, and a visit to a central observation office where we did more paperwork and hours of observation. The day before that visit I was nervous. I had spent a year wondering and waffling, and I felt extremely anxious about labeling them, about how that would impact them for the long term, about whether everyone would just say I'm crazy and making it all up. So that day, and really the whole year, I dealt with this stress by searching the internet for information so that I could diagnose myself, so I could walk into these offices fully confident. And I always doubted and wondered, until that day I found a video of a child with autism laughing. https://youtu.be/O-0kk4ujHFc I think it was this one, but I'm not sure. It doesn't matter. What matters is that I watched it over and over and I was very sure that my kid was on the spectrum. Because this was their same explosion of silliness, their delight ...

 Or at least feel assaulted. When it seems like there is no reason and you will never be able to move on your own, or do any movement other than holding and bouncing. Sometimes I lay on the floor and just set the baby on my stomach, because my arms can't do anymore. Or just rock in the rocking chair because rocking is more what I need than even what baby needs. I hold them and the screaming is ringing in my ears afterward for hours. Of course there are reasons--spit up, vomit, just tired again. And I remember from my first eventually patterns set in, you get better at guessing and their own bodies just get more comfortable. This week has been hard because I thought that those patterns were settling a bit, and now they are all off again and I keep thinking I might do something, then the baby screams. Yet, despite the past few days, we still manage. Yesterday my arms were writhing from holding the baby all day. Soon as dad got home I handed them off and was ready to take off on a wal...

 My kid and husband are out in the forest, going on a "hike" which these days means talking with them about all the cool sticks and rocks and leaves they find for about a half mile. I just received a text that they were pretending to be Beaver Boy (from Peep and the Big Wide World) and chop down all the trees, saying "nyah nyah nyah nyah," which they find hilarious. This warms my heart for multiple reasons, number one because I'm continually enchanted by their ability to create imaginary worlds and act in them. Number two because they attach themself to a particular character type in many of their shows: goofy masculine sidekicks (Beaver Boy, T-bone in Clifford , Tiger in Kipper ), something that I find intriguing and I wonder where it will lead. But of course, this is the opposite of the kind of zen, tree-sitting, nature appreciation that I envision for myself and for them. I've been seeking out nature-education activities, but in these moments I have to wo...