During a visit to Bok Tower Gardens in Lake Wales, Florida, we spent time creating art and music at their children’s garden.
I found instant tranquility in the watercolors placed on the pint-sized work table. Similarly, my sons dove into their projects.
Another child, maybe three or four years old, sat with me to create shapes no more complex than my own.
After his mom coaxed him back to his group, I noticed what he had painted. It was a padlock that had a heart in the space between the shank and the body (learning lifestyle bonus point: I had to look up the names of those parts). Children are clued into a deeper level of existence. Heart imagery has been trailing me for days and I know this is God’s way of refocusing me on love.
Meanwhile, the Zerbey creations were a bit more wild.
There are moments when things feel almost right. Moments when we’re with the right people at the right place. Even then, in picture perfect scenes, the shadows of a twisted reality creep across our path.
Yesterday, we met a home educating family at Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library for fun and exploring in the snow. Snowball fights, storytelling, nature appreciation, and my sons’ love of getting away from the grown ups ruled the children’s day.
We’ve been friends for years and probably share more common interests with them than any other family I know. The kids love each other, I’ve played innumerable hours of soccer with the dad, and the mom has been one of my best spiritual and emotional supports in widowhood.
The mom and I walked and talked at a healthy distance from our rabblerousers and couldn’t seem to stay off of sad topics. My recent breakup, wrestling with depression, the aggravations of Zoom school (they are educationally diverse), and the unreality we are experiencing.
We only saw another dozen or so people during hours in the thousand-acre expanse, but they were mostly masked. Couples, hundreds of yards from other humans, walking along with their faces covered. There was no breeze and the sun was brilliantly warming, although the air was chill. It’s troubling and scary that this behaviour is being normalized. This particular oddity of covering our skin from the vitamin D-producing sunlight our bodies so desperately need to stay healthy is worrisome. We’ve known for months that vitmin D deficiency is rampant in hospitalizations. It is difficult to get the necessary exposure to sun in the winter, why are we covering our faces?
I take heart in the example we’re setting for our children. We teach them that health and freedom are not mutually exclusive. We teach them that health is an individual responsibility. We teach them that you must first care for yourself before you can be able to care for others. More importantly, we model these principles in our own words and actions.
In March of this year, just as the world was turning to fear and I watched fellow Christians recede from one another, I had the opportunity to help a homeless family. The mom wasn’t feeling well and needed to be seen by a doctor. Her children and mine piled into my minivan and we headed to an urgent care in heavy morning rain. It wasn’t open yet, so she asked to go to the bus stop to get to a hospital. She wasn’t in need of emergency care, but that was her only option. I almost dropped them off at the bus stop, but thought better of it. I insisted on driving her to the hospital and she begrudgingly acquiesced, her pride was worn from little sleep and respiratory distress.
I didn’t think about being in danger. I didn’t think I was putting my children in harm’s way. It felt much more dangerous to walk away, or leave them at a bus stop.
Later, I Iearned that she had a strep infection. My wife and sons had suffered strep infections two years previous and she didn’t survive. Maybe we survived in order to help that mom. I don’t know.
I don’t know why we’re hiding from each other now. Maybe people need the illusion of safety and security to go about their lives. I don’t ever remember being blinded by that lie, but going through tragedy has stripped away the delusion that existence isn’t integrally bounded by suffering.
Today, I’m going to do my best to accept neccessary suffering and work to relieve unnecessary suffering in myself and others.
There is a lot of talk among homeschoolers this time of year about what kind of “break” to take. As much as I agree with the concept of taking a break from formal homeschooling, it’s not a “break.”
It’s a shift of priorities. In the wake of losing the mother of my two young sons, I shifted all my focus to our emotional, psychological, and spiritual wellbeing. There’s a lot of work in that. I’ve come to believe that learning the skills to cope with tragedy is more important than any book-based lesson.
An emotionally balanced, psycholgically self-aware, and spiritually grounded individual is unstoppable in whatever learning they desire. That individual can never be “behind.”
That work isn’t just for those in the throes of trauma, it is for everyone. Our society is sick with worry over where each of us exists in the rat race. The only real race is the one against ourselves. Finding deeper peace in each day will bring us ever greater riches until our last day.
We got a wonderful surprise when one of our local Little Libraries started holding wrapped books.
My younger son found a Christmas book during his explorations and we drove my older over to find something.
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We met with a new group of home educating families today. The children learned about their bodies and had a lot of fun. It was a simple exercise and we followed it up with a hike through some interesting woods at Killens Pond State Park.
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We’ve been hosting unschoolers for a weekly Lego club called Time to Build and I’m going to start documenting their creations and our experiences.
This challenge was equal parts fun and dangerous and produced a laser canon that my son was happy with.
I got in on the building when one of our younger guests requested a giraffe. I grabbed The Lego Ideas Book and copied this design as closely as I could.
I love this time with friends. The home education community is incredibly diverse and I love getting to know other parents and how they go about facilitating their children’s education.
Deschool yourself, unteach yourself about what education is. It’s not an easy process to let go of the assumptions we have absorbed. “Preschool” wasn’t a thing 40 years ago. Kindergarten was voluntary in many places at that time too. The mandatory “school” mentality is shockingly new in human history, this isn’t how we have learned for millenia.
I don’t “teach.” I learn out loud, ask questions, model curiosity, model good behavior, model self care and self improvement, model good eating habits and physical fitness, and, most importantly, I listen. Listen to the child’s desires and needs, try to fulfill those and you will be on the right path. The hard part will be when his/her desires don’t match your expectations.
So that’s at the root of deschooling: releasing expectations and assumptions about what education looks like. I was public schooled for 13 years and deschooling is an ongoing process. We have been filled up with so many assumptions about the way things aught to be, when our hearts and minds know they can be better. That is the path to freedom.
I sat at my dining room table with three new friends today. These were home educating moms who had brought their children over to build in our Lego workshop.
We didn’t talk politics, Covid, nor any of the mainstream narratives. We discussed unschooling and our greatly varying paths to a similar mindset.
I don’t know if I would have met these amazing women if not for the Lockdown and happy coincidence. In the chaos of the new social divisions, I have sought out those who would think for themselves and be willing to meet and connect in honest exchange.
That has meant forming new groups and opening my home when so many doors are closed.
I am grateful for these opportunities to connect. I am more a social creature than most. These connections are lifeblood.
I’ll start with a small self-gratitude for my intentional and disciplined approach to media consumption. On Election Day and the day after, I didn’t see, nor hear, any news. I was focused on our lives as a family and we had a great couple of days without distraction.
My big gratitude is for the little bugger who wrecked my plans. My older son, Westen, got curious about who won the election late on Wednesday. I told him I didn’t want to know and I didn’t want him searching for the answer.
Luckily, he’s a Zerbey and would never listen to an incurious authority figure. While I played soccer, he looked up the results. Of course, he couldn’t find anything satisfying and told me after the game. I’m not the best dad I can be at night after a workout, so I chided him for disobeying my request. It took me a few minutes to apologize and tell him that he had done the right thing, that if you have a desire for knowledge, you should let no one stand in the way. I told him I would have done the same thing.
I’m blessed by my rebels. They humble me and teach me everyday.
