The healing journey of a widowed, unschooling badass in Delaware.
To the person I just met:
I don’t want to talk about my dead wife today, or at least not right now. We’re talking about RVs, archery, home education, cookie dough, and all these interesting places and things that you know and I don’t. I’m enjoying this moment and don’t want to hijack another conversation with my story.
I’m sorry if I’m not being as truthful as I want to be. I told it all over lunch yesterday and I’m not up for it again.
God bless and thank you for reading,
Jason
“My son would be much better in that role.”
I had that thought watching a professional actor in a leading comedic role. Yep, I’m a stage dad.
This is the kind of trouble that unschooling and curiosity can get you into. My wife and I had no theatrical history except for being casual fans. By the time they could walk and talk, my sons were putting on sketch comedy and air guitar rock shows at family gatherings. They could not be kept off anything resembling a stage.
My elder son was one of the chattering Bandar-log in The Jungle Book when he was six years old and took on a small role in Macbeth at age eight. Two years later, both sons have completed multiple performances of Julius Caesar and Much Ado About Nothing, read Shakespearean lines in all three of Delaware’s counties, improvised in the galleries of Delaware Art Museum, and appeared on stage with Delaware Shakespeare (DelShakes).
There was never a plan nor a theater curriculum. A rainy day put us in a library watching Gnomeo and Juliet. A sunny day put us in a city park to meet Delshakes actors as they performed community outreach. Story times at museums put us in front of paintings representing The Tempest, Treasure Island, and innumerable tales. Everywhere we go there are stories. We read them, tell them, and act them out.
I had no idea this would lead to a couple of actors in my midst. That’s the wonder (and terror) of an unschooling approach. The work comes in not only observing their curiosity, but emulating it and employing all reasonable (and some unreasonable) resources to feed the hunger for knowledge and experience. I have to be creative, broaden my community, and learn a lot about myself.
That’s why I call it a Learning Lifestyle. We are each learning different things at varying paces, but the focus remains on the discovery of new ideas, places, and people.
God bless and thank you for reading,
Jason
I haven’t had guests to my house in months. That’s probably what this post should be about, but it’s not. When my late wife’s parents wanted to stop by for an evening, I was grateful, but also concerned about the disorderliness and the heat. This is the first time I have lived with central air and I’m not very comfortable with it. I feel isolated in the house with all the windows closed, the outdoor sounds replaced by a droning from the basement. I run the heat in the winter (still missing the warmth of radiators), but I’m not missing out on too much birdsong in January.
So I fired up the ancient air conditioning unit and it didn’t work. No surprise really, I knew there was a leak in the system and it had been at least a year since I had tried it.
No bother, the evening cooled off and we were all comfortable. But it did get me thinking about why I don’t use our A/C.
There’s something to be said for the little adversities. If you take on the little pains, you find out they were smaller than you thought. It’s watching your son getting choked on the mat and then smiling and fist bumping his partner. Then he’s in a competition against a much larger opponent getting smashed into the ground. Then he’s facing tragedy that many adults can’t manage. You watched and sat back and let him deal with the little adversities, now he’s stronger than you could imagine a ten-year-old could be.
Turn off the A/C and find out how strong you could be, because you ARE stronger.
God bless and thank you for reading,
Jason
Each grief calls out to echo off other griefs.
They know one another by their partial professions of love.
Increasingly unintelligible as memories of our lost loves rely heavier on photos and aging dreams.
An intimate moment remembered as an epoch.
A catalog of wrongs righted off the ledger.
A cruel word as easily tattooed as forgotten.
A needle’s eye of lacking tenderness become a chasm.
Everything distorted for what purpose? To proceed? Proceed where? Through the “process”? To what end?
I know no person who wants to be rid of grief, but only to lighten it and find freedom out from under it.
To this end, perhaps, we are carried along by malleable memories and faulty minds.
-Jason Zerbey
Little deaths are chasing me around, from the above section in A Beginner’s Guide to the End to a Jordan Peterson quote from 12 Rules for Life, “Every bit of learning is a little death.”
I have also come to learn about the little death that is divorce. Everyone is smiling in their wedding photos, everyone is in love on that day, and everyone thinks it will last forever. No one predicts that they’ll share a few good years, have children they love dearly, then collapse out of love and into misery.
Out of that misery, new and stronger fulfillment can be found. It is a path that must be chosen. All deaths can be made little if you choose to find freedom and adventure in the circumstances of the day that God has given you. If you’re awake, if you’re alive, then every death is little, you have already survived them all.
Iggy Pop is releasing a new album about freedom. It’s not about the misery of being old and losing all his friends, it’s about being free.
Iggy Pop is alive and creating, you have no excuse not to do the same.
God bless and thank you for reading,
Jason
Mary put up reminders to return us to the present when we strayed from the moment.
With a fuzzy-Monday-morning-aching-bruised head I couldn’t decide which darn coffee mug to use. I started reading the notes and considering the images she left inside and outside our kitchen cabinet doors.
An empty bench looking out over wildflowers at Winterthur. I wonder how much she knew in her soul about our future.
A prayer to notice the beauty of God’s Creation from an Aldersgate United Methodist Church service paired with an image of Amy Steven’s exhibition at Delaware Contemporary.
Mary was my dynamo and I was hers. We each found new events and places and piled our calendar high with possibility.
Time is precious, but chaotic. With a little planning and teamwork, we brought just enough order to uncover much of the beauty in life.
A thank you card from Delaware Art Museum. #Gratitude starts each day for me and I remain grateful for all of the gifts that Mary shared with me.
Change. Forgiveness. Humility. This prayer is most important to me today.
Schoonover at Biggs Museum, Wyeth at Brandywine River Museum, Jersey cows from our honeymoon, and a reminder that THIS IS IT. In this new phase of life I am proud of how we lived our life together. Some is still here as legacy and some is gone.
I put up the last note. I don’t know who scripted it or why, but this will always be Mary’s kitchen. Notes will be added or changed and I’ll never take the care she did in preparing a big Saturday breakfast, but her spirit will always fill this space.
God bless and thank you for reading,
Jason
I fear days like today. In our two-parent life, we would have juggled a full summer Sunday from morning church to evening fireflies. In my single-parent life, my sons slept through church and got kicked out of a bookstore, then a concussion had them in bed early and me wondering how long I should stay awake. Not sure if I’ll get around to the poetry, but I know I can’t stare at this screen for too long.
This is when I question my capability to be a single parent. I still haven’t found a way to think of it as natural. Children are made in union together, shouldn’t they be raised that way? I never spent time thinking about any other way when I was married, we were going to raise our children together, it was assumed. Even at our rockiest times, we were committed to the union and to supporting each other. There was no reason to imagine one of us would be doing this alone.
Perhaps the worst part of the fear is that I have had a taste of co-parenting since my wife’s death. To see a woman care for my sons in a nurturing and loving way was bliss. But we made no promises and there was no union to work on, no commitment to each other’s children.
It was enough to lend heavy credence to my assumptions of the superiority of the two-parent life. It wasn’t enough to maintain them.
It’s certainly not just to have a motherly figure for my boys, I crave companionship as well. Especially when I’m sitting here with a likely concussion and no one to talk with.
So I’ll turn to my journal and see if I can’t crank out some Concussion Poetry.
God bless and thank you for reading,
Jason
I’m moving in a clear miasma, so clear that the white of a lady’s dress aches my head. So clear that I can feel the pain of everyone who walks by.
I’m in a bookstore for hours at a fundraising event. It takes all my strength to be present or hold a conversation. I walk back and forth, avoiding too much interaction. All I hear, see, or feel is pain and fear.
I can only frame it in my understanding of the Highly Sensitive Person, or HSP. Generally, I run headlong into stimulating situations, our learning lifestyle is raucous and alive with boyish energy. Then there are times when I am overwhelmed by adjacent conversations or the sound of my son crunching an empty water bottle.
Today was like that from sun up to sun down. I ended up in bed on a beautiful Saturday afternoon, storing energy and isolating myself. I don’t know how else to cope right now. Fortunately, it worked well enough to prepare me for another late evening with my sons appearing in outdoor Shakespeare.
As I become more in touch with my empathy I find myself in increasingly intense states of mind. I struggle to discover a rhythm in which to dance with these heightened emotions. The waves crash before I can master them, yet I will again wade out into the surf and be called to the dance by enticing drums.
God bless and thank you for reading,
Jason
“I’d be a proud father if my son serves in the armed forces.”
That’s where I was ten years ago when my first boy was born. Then I turned off the news. I didn’t want my baby to be exposed to all the negativity, violence, and intensity of the world. I still listened to Rush Limbaugh and read Drudge Report every day, I was an adult after all, I could handle all the negativity, violence, and intensity of the world. I relished in what I thought were intellectual battles around camp fires, on Twitter, and in blog comments. I thought that was how one tested his knowledge and sharpened his mind.
When I was alone with my son I was different. I listened to him and watched my speech for tone and content. I only wanted to share truth with him. I wanted it all to make sense, to be clear, and to help him become the best possible kind of man. I discovered contradictions in my arguments. How had they not been exposed in all those verbal battles? My wit was quicker than my brain. That’s plenty of fun when you’re at a bar and care more about in a social setting than actually getting things right.
Now I had two sons and it was well past time to get things right. War was my first stumbling block. I had supported a lot of violence through my writing and speech, I honored friends who served and died in combat, and one of my best friends was a Marine sniper. How could I now teach the Golden Rule to my sons and justify military interventions overseas?
A lot happened when I left my job as a proofreader to care for my sons full time. In a moment of curiosity about homeschooling I started listening to Tom Woods. He’s a homeschooling parent, Libertarian, and Catholic. I didn’t know this type of person existed. He introduced me to the Non-Aggression Principle (NAP). From FEE.org: “One version of the NAP states that while it is legitimate to use physical violence in defense of one’s rights, initiating violence against another person is wrong and can be met with proportional violence in self-defense.”
I try to apply this principle to my politics, parenting, and approach to the world.
Through Woods I found other homeschool voices and my wife, Mary, and I started the conversation to begin our own home education journey. We slowly looked at our own pasts and realized how the school system had been, and remained, unsuited to us. I linked my years in school to my years watching cable news and began to uncover assumptions I had adsorbed over that time. It was this process of deschooling that would fundamentally change my life and save our family. “Deschooling” is exactly that, the process of analyzing internalized assumptions and separating what is useful and what is holding you back from learning. It was the birth of my self-improvement journey and taught me how to face circumstances that I had never imagined.
I reconnected with the inquisitive learner inside that had been neglected. Initially, this was simply to model an energetic learning environment for my children, but I soon found myself experiencing personal enrichment.
It was about this time that Mary questioned me about faith (I said a lot was happening). I had long been acting out and defending Christian ideals from a practical perspective. I saw them as a good set of rules to live by, a recipe for success. But I had not seriously considered what God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit meant to me. Mary embodied an easy faith and I was a hard nut to crack. She was patient as I began to study the Bible, listen to commentaries, and spend hours talking and thinking about Jordan Peterson’s Biblical lectures. I put assumptions aside and took a clean look at the Word. There was a quiet moment during a men’s Bible study meeting when I accepted Christ into my heart. I’m still working on what that means for me, but I began to find peace in that moment. I began to find that love trumps rules and that I didn’t need a prescriptive regimen, but a path towards loving more fully.
It was less than a year from that moment that my wife suddenly died. I had yet to learn how much self-love I was lacking. I had yet to become the man that Mary deserved. I was on my first steps toward realizing my potential. Seventeen months later, assumptions continue to be burned like deadwood, the smoke chokes and blinds me with tears. I feel God with me on this journey. I feel that He has called me for this, even if “this” remains obscured from me.
It has been quite the decade.
God bless and thank you for reading,
Jason
Our magnolia had a spectacular blooming season, but, as July wore on, I thought it was over. Then, during another summer deluge, I noticed a lone bud appearing with no direct sunlight. It took longer than usual, but the flower began to open and even attracted pollinators in the rain.
This evergreen has continued to speak to me. Now, when my sunniest days have their showers and thunderstorms rush in to disrupt plans and sleep, it reminds me that one can bloom under unlikely conditions.
God bless and thank you for reading,
Jason