Shaming

Somehow in the terrible nightmare of the election aftermath, a post about “kid shaming” came across my facebook feed. I will not repost this article.  It is clearly a spin off of “dog shaming” posts with photos of dogs oblivious to the signs their owners wrote, declaring their misdeeds.  Like, “I like to eat out of the litter box.”  The dog shaming posts are mildly funny, in my mind, because the dogs are oblivious.  The dogs are not feeling shame, and that’s why it’s funny.

Kid-shaming is very different.  Mixed in with general expressions of parent angst (“I pooped one minute after mommy changed my diaper!” next to a smiling baby), there are posts of real shame.  Two little boys with a sign that says “we got toothpaste all over the bathroom.”   A child walking through a public place, his head hanging, wearing a sign that says “I stole money from my mom’s friend.”  A little boy looking miserable and holding a sign that says “I went outside by myself.”  Apparently it is a trendy punishment to force children to stand in traffic holding a sign to say what they have done wrong – there are quite a few of those images.

This is not funny.

This is not the same thing as dogs smiling about licking their own butts.

This is not ok.

I want to raise my children to have no concept of shame, so that shame has no power over them – not to use shame as a tool to make them more obedient, or to laugh at their expense.  I would never want my children, or any other child, to feel like this girl.

Even if you don’t agree with me that it is morally wrong to use shaming against children, it is also not an effective way to teach self-discipline.  Instead all it does is create powerful emotions that neither the adult doing the shaming or the child being shamed can control.

In many children, their feelings are magnified well beyond the proportions of us adults, who have perspective of more years. Shame, in particular, is felt keenly by any human, and so its magnification can be exponential in children and teens. The sheer weight of these feelings can be too heavy, too unrelenting. A child or a teen doesn’t understand that these feelings will get easier and even end at some point.

Shaming also runs the risk of being far out of proportion with the behavior you’re trying to stop, and that’s because embarrassment is largely defined by the individual. It’s impossible to externally control it.

Source

Children need to learn self-discipline.  They learn this through the opportunity to make choices, good role models, clear boundaries, reasonable supervision (especially for two year olds! They’re sneaky!), and consistent engagement from the adults around them.  Adults need more time to spend with their kids, and we all need help – no one person should have full responsibility for a child with no break.  The answer is not to be “permissive,” and let your child get away with being an asshole, but to engage with them as human beings and give them opportunities to learn how to make good choices.  Shaming a two year old for going outside without permission is not going to accomplish that.

Safety Pins

After the election, people started spreading the idea of wearing a safety pin as a symbol of allyship.  That you are not going to harass anyone because of their race, religion, sexual orientation, or gender identity, and that you will stand up for them if they are being harassed.  A few days later, and there are articles shaming people about wearing safety pins saying “your safety pins are embarrassing,” because they viewed it as meaningless and a way for people to pretend to be doing something without any effort.  And, also, there are reports that white supremacists have co-opted the safety pin, and so it is not a symbol you can trust.  I agree with this article, that wearing a safety pin is not enough.  But I don’t agree with shaming.  I’m not tone policing when I say that.  There is a difference between saying, “don’t be so angry” and “don’t use shame against people.”  I think a lot of people who decided to wear a safety pin, or to share images of it, were trying to make a statement that they disagreed with the hate they saw spewed all over our streets and all over facebook feeds.  We are all looking for something we can do right now, and those of us who live in relatively safe blue states feel powerless to stop the violence thousands of miles away, which we saw displayed in internet posts just one day after the election.

My mother saw the whole safety pin thing on facebook and decided to wear one, and she has been fighting racism for more than 40 years.   She has put herself in danger multiple times to use her straight passing whiteness to protect people of color and queer and trans people. That is true whether or not she wears a symbol. In a bad situation, people would know she is someone on their side – because she would be putting herself in the middle and turning into the mama bear that she is.

My partner shared a safety pin image and found out that someone he thought was a friend for more than 10 years was more racist than he would have guessed, and he stood up to him, explained in plain language why his friend was wrong and out of line, and then sent that friend out of his life. I know he has been shocked at how many people in his life said things recently that meant he had to stand up to their racism, misogyny, and homo/transphobia – but he has been standing up over and over, and it is bringing him face to face with a reality he didn’t know was there, under the surface.

No, wearing a safety pin is not enough, and if white supremacists are wearing them to victimize people, we should probably all stop doing that right now…but I know that for some people it wasn’t that it was a low cost activity and they could put it on their shirt and they’re done.  It was more that they could do it immediately, they could remind themselves that they would help if they found themselves in a situation of harassment (and hold themselves accountable to that), and they could be visible about it in their communities and online where we all spend way too much of our time.  For my mother and my partner, it certainly is not all they are doing.

I think the truest thing I’ve seen about the hate breaking out after the election is that people of color have been trying to tell us how bad it is, and now white people are really starting to see it. The veil is being pulled back.  I thought I was aware of the racism in this country.  Clearly, I was aware of it at an institutional level, but in denial about how many individual racists there really are.  I shouldn’t be, but I’m shocked to be hearing about children being beaten up and people being told to sit in the back of the bus and being told to “go home.”  I’m embarrassed that I’m shocked, because it means I wasn’t listening close enough to the people of color telling me what was happening.  But that doesn’t change the fact that I’m also shocked, and angry, and scared.

I want to be part of the solution. I reached out to a local SURJ chapter, and intend to bring my kids with me. I am figuring out where to donate my time and my money so I can use my privilege to good effect. I want to be a person who people know will stand up with them and I believe the best way to make sure people know that is to stand up when something bad happens.

I don’t want to see shame used against people, and I want to see us actually address the intergenerational trauma that is at the heart of perpetuating systems of racism, sexism, colonialism, and capitalism. I don’t want to see the left spend so much time fighting each other that the right just laughs – and, yes, I know not everyone who is wearing a safety pin is on “the left” but my family certainly is.  And I don’t want anyone to be mean to my mom because she put a safety pin on her shirt because she is terrified the trans people and people of color she loves are going to get killed.  And since she can’t run out and protect every single one of them right now, she put on a bit of armor to help her quiet her mind so she can figure out what her next step should be.  When we let ourselves feel powerless and like nothing we do is good enough, then we can’t do the work.

Children and Activism

Why children should be included in activist organizations:

10) Not taking steps to include children also excludes people who are not able to get child care, which will disproportionately impact single parents and people with low incomes. Including children will make our activism more diverse.

9) The primary love language for all children is Quality Time. When activism is something that adults do without their children, it is another thing pulling grown ups away from them – first you have to go to work, and then you have to go to meetings, etc. When we bring them along, activism becomes part of who we are as a family and a way to be together and show our love for each other.

8) Children make great signs and write great slogans! Seriously.

7) Children see all our flaws and analyze everything. If we include them in activist organizations now, they will create even better ones when they are old enough to be the leaders.

6) Children feel passionately about the world around them, just like adults do. Like adults, they need opportunities to express their feelings and act on their passion in order to not feel stifled and despair.

5) Children are our teachers about what the future should be. When space is made for their voices to be heard, they often will come out with insights that blow our minds.

4) Children remind us why we give a shit about trying to make the world a better place.

3) Children know how to play, and sometimes grown ups forget how. When we allow ourselves the space to engage with our playful energy we often find solutions to problems that seemed insurmountable before.

2) When children experience the ability to use their voice and agency within activist organizations, they are more likely to use it elsewhere, both in their life choices and in improving their schools and other places where they spend time. We need insight from children if we are to improve our education system, and children who have practice using their voice are more likely to be able give that insight.

1) Children are People. This should be enough of a reason to include children.

Framing Gender in History

This is the result of me looking through ancient history books in preparation for first grade.  I started thinking…how will I explain this stuff to my kids??  There is a page about “Women and the Family” in each chapter of one of the books I have.  No doubt they thought they were being progressive by including this at all!  I read one of the pages, and it was really about wives more than about women, also mentioning ancient Greek courtesans.

The explanation I have here is obviously simplified (and perhaps a little De Beauvoir-esque), but I think it’s a good start.  I would love input!

One of the most valuable resources in the world – I would say the most valuable – is children. Nothing adults build can last unless the children they raise grow up to care for what they have built, and to improve it. Children are important to keep cities going, to keep farms growing, and to remember and create new art, music, and literature.

Today, people have the ability to chose when to be have a child and when not to have a child. A man and a woman can have a child who came from their sperm and egg, but other people can have children too – two women, two men, a man and a woman who are not able to conceive a baby, and so on. A person can choose to have a child alone. People can also use birth control to prevent getting pregnant, so they can choose to not have a child too.

Without birth control, however, a woman can get pregnant pretty much any month when she isn’t already pregnant if she has sex. This meant that for a long time, if someone wanted to control the important resource of children, they also had to control the important resource of women, the only people who can grow those children inside of their bodies.

When you look at history, you see a lot of stories about women who became wives, and were kept from doing pretty much anything else. When someone is expected to do something because of their gender, it is called a gender norm.   Sometimes wives were forced to stay inside their house, especially if they were from a wealthy family. Sometimes they were forced to only do certain kinds of work, like making clothing or cooking food, that would not interfere with taking care of babies and small children. These women who lived their lives as wives were controlled in this way so that their husbands and fathers could control when they had children and so that they could control the important work the women did. Making clothing and preparing food are pretty important! In these cultures, girls were taught that they should always be well-behaved and obey men, which made it easier to make them follow the gender norms when they grew up.

This isn’t true everywhere in the world, and there were some ancient cultures where men and women were equal and both had freedom to be more than one thing (like being only a wife). It is interesting to look for those cultures because sometimes they get left out of the story of history. Because they didn’t leave behind as many clues, it is hard to know about ancient cultures that did not build large cities and instead were hunters and gatherers or nomads. We do know, however, that groups of people descended from hunter-gatherers and nomads often have equality between men and women, and so their ancient ancestors may have too. Sometimes, even when everyone is equal, there are gender norms where men and women are expected to do different but equally important and interesting things. In other cultures, people do pretty much the same things, except not everyone can get pregnant and breastfeed a baby.

When you are studying history, it’s also interesting to look at people who did not become a wife, and only a wife – even if that is what they were expected to do. Some women were courtesans, which have different names in different cultures. They learned about things like politics so that they could engage in conversation with powerful people, and they also learned things like music and dance to be performers and entertainers. Some women became priestesses or nuns, and spent their time doing things like studying their religion, giving advice, taking care of people, teaching others, and healing. Some women in royal families were very powerful, doing things many people didn’t think woman could do. There were also women who did live their lives as wives, but also secretly did things they discouraged from doing, like making art and writing books. Some women around the world chose to hide the gender they were born with, dressing the way men were expected to dress and doing things that only men were supposed to do. As they say, well-behaved women rarely make history.

Socialization

I’ve been reading Homeschoolers Anonymous, and trying to learn from what these young adults have to say. I want to homeschool in such a way that it is what’s best for my kids, I believe this requires that I listen with an open mind to people who were homeschooled about what did and did not work for them.

One of the things that comes up over and over on Homeschool Anonymous is socialization. Homeschool parents tend to say that this is a false issue, but young people who were homeschooled, especially in fundamentalist, conservative homeschools, seem to feel it is a very big issue.

My kids are at an age where socialization outside of a preschool/kindergarten is a challenge. A lot of activities I have found are for 8 and up. There are some 5-7 activities, but very little for four year olds. We tried a homeschool co-op last year it was not a good match for us – but I’m not opposed to participating in one again when the kids are a little older. Both of my children went to five weeks of summer day camp at Woodstock Day School last year (and had been in preschool/day care before that), so it’s not like I’ve been keeping them locked in a tower. My daughter also did two weeks of camp at the Children’s Museum of Science and Technology, which was a very good experience (and kind of a long story – a good but challenging experience!). However, this fall I realized that we just didn’t get them involved in enough regular, ongoing stuff with other kids for them to get their needs met around playing with other children.

I don’t think that school is the perfect way to socialize either. Being in a group of children who are all the same age all day, and interacting with other children in an environment centered around grades, is not in my opinion the best way for kids to learn pro-social behavior or how to make and keep friends. The Afterschool programs I work with are important because, among other things, they give children the opportunity to interact with each other, and with a diverse group of adults, without the authoritative overtones of Grades and the Permanent Record. Children need other children, but the socialization I would like to provide for my children is one based more on *building community* than recreating what they would get in school.

I’ve been working on getting a good schedule of activities going for the spring to help give structure for our week and meet the needs of my children for socialization. A few things have stood out in my mind while planning this, in terms of criteria I have for choosing activities.

1. I want activities to be broadly consistent with our values. I think everyone considers this when choosing where to spend their time and where to encourage their children to spend their time. This means, for example, that I am not encouraging competitive sports at this time and that I would not like them to be in an environment that is steeped in racism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia.

2. I want to encourage self-expression and confidence in my children. The activities that attract me have an emphasis on developing skills like story-telling, body confidence, musical expression, etc. They are not competitive, but cooperative and collaborative.

3. My first choice activities and my children’s first choice activities are not always the same. My children and I both think martial arts is a good idea, but I want them to take Aikido and my daughter would like to take Tae Kwon Do (don’t ask me where she even saw Tae Kwon Do to be able to tell the two apart…). I am not opposed to Tae Kwon Do, but I have a preference for Aikido. We worked this out by agreeing that they would try one class of Aikido, so they can have a real, solid understanding of what it is, and that then we would re-evaluate.

4. When you ask a child greatly influences whether they will say that they want to do something. We were all sick for about a week between Christmas and New Years, and it was time to decide whether or not to re-enroll in an acting workshop my daughter had just completed. In my opinion, that is her choice – so I asked her. She said no, but it sounded more like “I’m cranky.” We held off registering as long as possible to give her the chance to make a real choice, and when she was feeling better she did decide to re-enroll. Children need to make their own choices about how they invest their own time, but they are children, not little adults – as a parent, it is my job to make sure that my daughter is able to make the best choices for herself, and is not unfairly punished for the fickleness of childhood. I think my mother was great at this with me…when I signed up for piano lessons at 7, for example, she had to pay for three months of lessons in advance. She told me I would have to take the full three months of lessons before I could decide to stop, which gave me enough time to really make an informed choice. I am trying to follow my mother’s example in both letting my children choose for themselves and learn how to make good choices.

5. I am searching for places where my children will interact with a diverse group of children and adults. This, in my opinion, is one of the strengths of public school. And when I say “diversity,” I don’t just mean different color skin. In addition to children who do and do not look like them, I mean children with different cultural experiences, different values, different class experiences, different gender expressions, different faiths, different political beliefs, different countries of origin, different physical and mental abilities. I want my children to understand that we are all different, and that this is a good thing – something to be celebrated, not tolerated. This is a real challenge…

6. I am not sure where the balance is of over-scheduled and under-scheduled. We are working on finding this balance!

Coming soon – Part 2 – activities planned for Spring 2015.

In the Light

Today, I ran an errand with my three year old son in Poughkeepsie that involved more than two hours of waiting quietly in a stark room with no toys and loud music.

I know it was more than two hours because I got a parking ticket.

Then, I took my son to Poughkidsie, where we closed the place down. He had a blast, and ran himself ragged, leading to one of the great parenting dilemmas.

He fell asleep before dinner.

What do I do? Let him sleep and expect him to wake up because he is hungry? Wake him up, with the knowledge he may not go back to sleep until 10pm? Either way a full nights sleep is unlikely. I knew he needed more to eat, so I woke him up and took him to the health food store cafe for dinner.

I gave him a muffin to eat around the same time I ordered my sandwich and bless their hearts they are slow at this little cafe. We even had two of my favorite cafe people, who I’m pretty sure are *not* high while they are at work, but by the time my sandwich was ready, he was done. Not just done with his muffin and the milk I had to search all over the store to find. He was done done.

“Actually, on second thought, could you put my sandwich in a box?” (I like to think I said please…But I’m pretty sure I didn’t…)

I picked up my son. He was crying, and angry, and looking like he wanted to throw himself on the floor. I’m not a fan of when my kids throw themselves on the floor in a public place.

I told him, I’m sorry you are so upset. We are leaving to go home now. You have been a very good boy all day, and we had to wait for a very long time. I didn’t really like that either. He looked at me, through tears, and said, “Mommy, can I put my coat on and put my hoody on?”

You don’t say no to a request like that, and you can bet your ass I got that coat on my tantruming kid as fast as I could.

That was when he blew me away. He took deep breaths, and calmed himself down. I asked him if he wanted to carry the omega 3 thingies we were buying. Often, giving him an opportunity to help is the best way to help him calm down. He wanted to carry them but dropped them, and I could see the tears welling up as he looked at the bottle slowly rolling away. But, he took another deep breath, and picked it up. He walked out of that store under his own steam, smiling at the girl who checked us out up front. (Can someone tell me why I can’t pay for my omega 3 candy-vitamin-things when I pay for my cafe meal? Hmm??).

What my son did was praying to the imminent god. Just like someone might ask the transcendent god-somewhere-out-there for strength, guidance, or patience, he asked within himself – he asked the part of him that would know the answer. Quakers call this the Light, that of god with in, the divine spark, etc. He gave himself the magic power of putting on his hood and calming his over-tired, over-stimulated brain.

Growing up as a Quaker I learned that when you meet a new person, you should let the Light in you connect with the Light in the other person. When you are able to do this, you can see the other person clearly for who they are, and feel the connection between you. You connect as equals, all of us human and sacred.

My son reminded me that learning how to do that requires being able to feel the Light within yourself also. You could call this self-awareness. He chose to listen to the part of him that said, “a few deep breaths and your hood over your head might work,” not the part that said, “maybe screaming at the top of your lungs and throwing yourself on the floor would make you feel better.” He listened to the Light inside him, and I felt so proud. I told him so too.

Black Lives Matter

I took my children to a protest two days after the decision not to indict the police officers who killed Eric Garner in Staten Island, using a technique that was banned by their police department and continuing to choke him after he repeatedly said “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe.”

It is imperative that we contribute to the drops that will eventually overturn the bucket of racism in law enforcement. I am teaching my children that racism is wrong, and we had to stand up with the other people who were saying together, “Enough is enough.” As Quakers, it is a religious imperative to Speak Truth to Power.

Participating in civil actions such as this protest is an integral part of my children’s education. My children need to understand that you do not just let bad things happen. We are teaching them to question everything – authority, the status quo, norms, attitudes. The rest of this post explains how I approached including my children in this protest. I was happy to see that there were several other children there – it gives me hope for a generation that will simply have no patience for racism.

I explained what was happening and asked them if they wanted to go with me.

I did this in what I felt was an age-appropriate way, which included focusing on one individual rather than the systemic issue. I have not allowed my children to watch images such as Eric Garner dying in a YouTube video. At three and five, I don’t feel they are old enough to process that information. But I told them that a police officer in Staten Island used violence against someone, and that he killed him. I told them that this isn’t fair because the police are more likely to be violent with some people than with others, because of the color of their skin and where their ancestors came from. The man they killed was a father. They chose to come with me.

At the protest, they heard someone shouting “Every 28 hours, a black man is killed by a police officer or vigilantly.” They are coming to understand that this is a systemic issue, but to start, we explained what happened to one individual.

I explained civil disobedience, and told them that we would be breaking the law.

I explained that civil disobedience is when you break a law in a civil way because of an important reason (the best I could come up with!). The law we broke was blocking traffic. I explained to my children that we were doing this because it would make people pay attention. We would not be violent, and we would not destroy anything – doing that would not be civil. The key, I told them, is to be very polite but to not go away, to not hide, to not be quiet, and to not let people ignore you. We would keep shouting until people heard us, and we would stand in their way so they could not ignore this life or death issue. I also told them that the number one rule of protests is “Stay close to mommy,” and that if I told them to get on the sidewalk, they do it immediately. It is an aspect of White Privilege that I was not particularly worried about getting arrested at a protest with two small children. My daughter wanted to tell the police officers, “We are doing civil disobedience,” but she got nervous and I didn’t force her to. Instead, she chose to hold her sign up nice and high while we walked past the police officers. It said “I thought the police were supposed to protect and serve.”

I did not white wash the issue, or minimize it.

It is always more pleasant to be for something than against something, but let’s be real. The protests happening right now are against racism in law enforcement. I didn’t try to hide this. I didn’t write signs that said “All lives matter.” Yes, of course, all lives matter. But the issue at hand is that some police officers seem to think it is inconvenient to remember that Black Lives Matter. I also didn’t abstract away from the role of the police in this crisis.

Often people say things like, “Racism is important, but this isn’t the right time to talk about it,” and then try to hide the role of race and racism in the problem. The result is we never talk about it. With it feeling like open season on black men, when is it the time to talk about racism if not now? I hope I didn’t say anything stupid, but we talked about race and racism and will continue to talk about it.

We participated to the best of our ability, which was limited by the youngest one

My son is three. We participated in a march for about an hour in the cold, and I made my son ride in the sling even though he complained, rightfully, “But I’m big!” We didn’t make it to the end of the march, but we did make it past the police station and the courthouse. When we got back in the car, I praised my children and told them how proud I was that they toughed it out – because this is important. I thanked them for showing that they care about other people. Marching in one protest is not a big deal, but it kind of is to a three year old and a five year old. I acknowledged this for my children. I still remember, years later, a graduate school colleague, a white woman from South Africa, saying “If you benefit from an unjust system, you are obligated to work to change it.” I hope my children are getting that message. It probably helps that I have repeated her statement to them explicitly.

I don’t feel our involvement in the movement to address racism in law enforcement is over. Joining a protest is more of a beginning than an end – it helped my children to see what was going on, and it helped all of us to not feel alone in our outrage about the people who have died.

Patience

It’s been a rough month and I sat down and “did homeschool” with both kids last night for the first time in longer than I should admit. As we pulled out the handwriting book, the Bob Books, a Visual Math book I bought for them, and the “The Way We Work” book we have been reading veeerrryyyy slowly, I was a little nervous. Would I feel ashamed, that I was cheating my children by not being as consistent as I should?

Instead, they blew me away. We read a bit in The Way We Work and they let me know clearly when they were done (at a reasonable stopping place). My daughters handwriting is exponentially better than it was in September, and my son did mazes with great speed – confidently using his left hand, more erratic with his right. We did two and three dimensional shapes with the visual math book. It was beyond me to take the Cuisenaire rods out at that moment. My son wanted to show us his imaginary worm egg (?) while my daughter was reading – really reading – a Bob Book, and I explained that if he wanted to get to do homeschool with us, he had to let his sister read. This is her work, and he needs to let her do her work. He quieted, and as soon as she was done, she said to him “now we can talk about that worm egg.” She has reached fluency with consonant-vowel-consonant words….and the next lesson in the reading book moves on to a new concept.

After, we rounded it out with the Hera section in the Greek Mythology book, and reinforcing the concept of “nets” for three dimensional shapes with magformers. I never learned that term, but I believe it is in Common Core, and I am doing my best to make sure my kids won’t be surprised by concepts like that if they end up choosing to go to school at some point.

The point of this is that it wasn’t our brilliant homeschool techniques that led to my daughter’s handwriting becoming legible, as much as I might like to claim credit. It wasn’t expert behavior management that made my son able to quiet himself so his sister could read. It was, I believe, the passage of time. They are three months older than when we started.

The goal for us this year in homeschooling the kids is to learn how to homeschool. I’ve learned there is an important balance between pushing them to try things that are challenging, and waiting for them to develop so that they can overcome those challenges with grace.

Boys will be boys

I’m not actually saying that, obviously.

Well, I sort of am.

I will never say “boys will be boys” to justify violence, entitlement, selfishness, learned helplessness, resource-hogging, condescension, or violation of another person. I will never say “boys will be boys” to indicate that my son is fundamentally different than my daughter.

The reality is that sometimes my son does things that I and other adult women have internalized as bad or naughty, but he’s just being a little kid. In his case, a boy. These are things – usually leaping around, being very physical, roaring – that my daughter does too, but they aren’t as important to her. She isn’t as persistent at doing them, and when told not to by adults, she stops without a fight. Sometimes my son just needs to turn into a lion. My goal is to help him channel this I to being a lion that protects those around him, and who takes care of baby lions, not one who eats or scratches his sister. When I guide him in this way, he responds with all the loving kindness in his heart and becomes a *nice* animal. When the response is to shut down his primal urges, he fights back.

So I don’t really mean “boys will be boys.” I mean “let my child be himself”.

I don’t want him put into the boxes that my socialization as a girl has put around me. I don’t want my daughter put into those boxes either. Although she is more willing to listen when we say “you might hurt yourself,” I would rather that she learn the body confidence that my son is willing to fight for.

As I have often said, I want my children to have their own neuroses, not mine!

I hesitate to even talk about this, because I don’t believe in gender essentialism. I don’t believe that my son is a certain way *because* he is a boy. But I am trying to see him for who he is. I value both femininity and masculinity, and I want my children to be balanced. In raising children who have gender, and who are surrounded by gender, I think it’s important to be open to the masculine and feminine energy so we can identify what we want to carry forward as our culture around gender changes (hopefully for the better and more open!).

When I see the divine inside my son, sometimes it looks like a lion. Maybe Aslan.

Meditation

image from colormehappy.files.wordpress.com

I read in a random online article recently that long-lasting relationships require a practice of meditation. The author described meditation as when you continually divert your attention back to the meditation. Distractions happen, and your attention wanders, but you bring it back to your breath, to your life partner, to your children, to providing high quality homeschooling.

I have been thinking about this a lot in reference to homeschooling because for the past few weeks *life has happened.* We have had vacations and changes in routines and out of town visitors and a death in the family and then the aftermath with lots of catching up on work and household chores. And homeschool.

At lunch yesterday, my five year old informed my mother and myself that she knew there were twelve lights because there were two rows of six. This reasoning was the product of her own brain – we are using Cuisenaire rods for foundational math, not focusing on “math facts,” and certainly not explicitly teaching her multiplication yet!  She continually asks about what things say and how words are spelled. She makes attempts, often successful, to read words in her environment. My three year old identified in a flash whether there were one, two, or three items in a group, and counted up to ten fluently. Also the product of his own mind. We talk about everything, about their environment, about death, about family, about love, about how people behave, and about how things work.

The power of their minds and their hearts is drawing me back to the meditation of homeschool. My husband is teaching them chess lessons, starting with “pawn chess” and occasionally playing our daughter on the chess app on his phone. We are using Kiwi crates with them (because I feel paralyzed when it comes to creating “activities”) and encouraging free art. My daughter is learning how to read and getting a foundation in mathematical concepts, and she is not behind. My son is being three. He is getting to play and get dirty and think and explore the way a three year old should.

We are not perfect, but as a family we are working through the meditation of raising children, educating them, and supporting them in being themselves. Life happens, and there is always ebb and flow – the same would be true in a kindergarten classroom.

In. Out. In. Out.