The healing journey of a widowed, unschooling badass in Delaware.
My sons slept in.
I celebrated 32 coffee-free days with an affogato with my girlfriend.
The boys joined a friend’s birthday party for slip-and-slide fun.
We turned our brains off and enjoyed a sunny pre-fall day.
We generally have very busy Satudays. It was nice to take one off and rejuvenate ourselves.
God bless, I appreciate and thank you,
Jason
Nah, not that kid. He was beautiful in my arms this morning as I did my Wim Hof Breathing and listened to a 25-minute Louise Hay meditation.
Then something went sideways. I was fought on going to the grocery store, cleaning up, eating, you name it.
I was spent by afternoon, useless. It’s these days when I really don’t think I’m cut out to be a widower and or an unschooler.
We recovered the day and calmly discussed how we can work together to make our lives as full of the adventures we love much. We’ve had these days and these discussions before. I don’t know if tomorrow will be different, but I do know they weren’t impressed with what was available for dinner tonight.
Anything that is worth the outcome has to include struggle. After *nearly* saying some nasty things to my boys, they still wanted to hold me and tell me they loved me before bed. I trust that as long as we keep our relationships in a loving place, we’ll be okay.
God bless, I appreciate and thank you,
Jason
Your child’s failures are not your failures. Your child’s successes are not your successes. How your child defines success and failure is entirely up to him or her, and those definitions will differ from your own.
Follow the stem of this zinnia.
In my son’s crowded garden, it was pulled on by purple bean vine and weighed down by a plant heavy with ripening tomatoes.
It twisted, reached toward the sun, and grew stronger so that it could bloom.
Be this flower.
The headline was changed to reflect that the CDC Director was specifically referring to high school students and the need to reopen schools.
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/micaelaburrow/2020/07/28/redfield-says-more-abovebase-suicides-than-covid-deaths-n2573278?fbclid=IwAR1mMzEnl51HxAgk8s6d8XIuJIPyB5EDBsqN-LE4a9XUBOGOA0qlacftd74
The article is terribly written, obviously with one premise in mind, then sloppily editted to include the critical fact about students.
So what questions should we ask? Is the education system creating strong, healthy individuals who can overcome hardship? Or is it creating dependent addicts who can’t survive without it?
The hardest and most important job I see as a parent is to foster my children’s independence. I want to coexist with these humans who love me, yet nonetheless want to flee from my authority. School can’t do that. School says, “You must stay until 3:00.” “You must stay until June.” “You must stay until you are 18, 22…”
This is heartbreaking information. I pray for those who are ready to be awakened from a system designed to create compliant factory workers and soldiers.
Many libertarians identify as anarchist. Some of my favorite libertarian thinkers are anarcho-capitalists.
Anarchism is the idea that people can coexist without a central force to compel them. Lawlessness and voluntarism are tenants of anarchism. The contemporary bastardizing of the term is partially corrected by the recent documentary: The Monopoly on Violence.
https://youtu.be/XWAEKQjN-yM
Some libertarians are anarchists because anarchism might be fairly considered a mode, or form, of libertarianism.
Homeschooling brought me to voluntarism, the non-aggression principle (NAP), libertarianism, and anarchism. Howdyđź¤
I have a couple significant disagreements (“questions” may be a better term) with this article, but there is a strong argument that this year has not been a good one for homeschooling.
As an irrational optimist I look at the folks who were close to choosing home education before government forced the Lockdown. The families who were most likely to join the ranks of educational freedom and the learning lifestyle are the ones who may have benefited from the unexpected push. Those families were already questioning the wisdom of allowing the State to control most of their children’s waking hours.
Most families in the school system are all in. They must be. However automatic the decision to place their children in the education system was, it remains a critical one that must be defended. Bringing all the assumptions of the school structure into one’s home is jarring. Couple those assumptions with unemployment, a perceived public health crisis, and nonstop negativity from the media, and the opportunities for any type of success are slim.
As for us, an “unstructured” (ugh, that is one problem I have in the piece) home-educating family, we are in a marginally advantageous position. Our learning lifestyle is built on flexibility, but relies on community. Museums, libraries, parks, gardens, art studios, concert and lecture halls, and private educational providers are not only the places we go to for learning, but, more importantly, the places full of the people we learn from. Security guards, docents, educational leaders, volunteers, other homeschoolers, and those who are living the lives my children might envision for themselves populate our learning lifestyle.
My sons regularly interact with people doing their jobs and sharing their experiences. The Lockdown cut off our most valuable learning resource: humans. The relationships we’ve established over six or seven years of home education continue to be the shining stars on our learning journey. I don’t know what it will do to my children’s brains to not be able to see the smiles of their museum and library friends when they walk in, to miss that surprised look when they shake someone’s presumption about the abilities of homeschoolers, or to struggle to understand an accent through a face mask. As I struggle to maintain relationships under rapidly-changing societal rules, I wonder how much damage is being done to our children.
This all came out a bit more dire than I had intended. We have had significant victories in our personal lives and the few relationships that we’ve been able to put work into. We’ve improved our physical health through diet and activity. I’ve deepened my spiritual practice and discovered the friends who will be steady in tough times.
We have made the best of our situation, but it remains that our freedoms have been limited and our world has gotten smaller. I continue to wrestle with those facts.
God bless and thank you for reading,
Jason
The Zerbey Boys, six years ago.
Delaware Nature Society has been hosting our adventures for a long time.
I started with a wagon, wheeling the boys around the marsh pond at DuPont Environmental Education Center (DEEC). I learned about their dip-netting program and almost as soon as my younger could walk, he was knee deep in muck.
Today Isaac wraps up a week of camp at DEEC.
We’re blessed to have places that go deep into our memory. Places where the seeds of unschooling were planted.
God bless you and thank you for reading, I appreciate you,
Jason
This moment was the highlight of a wonderous day at Winterthur. After a week of grumbly adulthood, I needed to let the little boy inside me run about some.
And there he was. Toad sitting outside his house. I was back in a rocking chair, reading Adventures of Frog and Toad to my baby sons. Then further back, to my mother reading The Wind in the Willows to me. That was the first glimpse of my motherland, England. The hovels and houses and riverside adventures of those stories filled me with a love for that country.
Winterthur brings me back there, a wild, natural, cared for land full of color and life.
This was the first time we had seen Enchanted Woods in months. The Lockdown kept us from so many important places. The disappointment of seeing the Faerie Cottage blocked off was dissipated by the wonderful attention that went into decorating it to once again fill our imaginations.
The magic of the place carried with us as we explored further. We were startled and amazed when we interrupted a snake that had brought its riparian lunch onto the rocks. A catbird demanded that I appreciate it for a moment. We spotted a green frog that was much more camoflaged than the photo reveals. We found turtles sunbathing and snappers lurking in muddy water like sea monsters.
And we smiled.
Three or four hours were lost to the quiet and constant parade of deer, chipmunks, fish, song birds, geese, and groundhogs.
I had asked God for a reset. I didn’t know how to come down from the flight-or-fight fever of the previous week, so I got humble and just asked.
He provided.
God bless and thank you for reading, I appreciate you,
Jason
“I’m just curious what percentage of dead children works for you.”
Just curious? That’s lovely, I’m a big fan of curiosity. Curiosity is the best start towards truth.
Life is tragic and people die and none of it is fair. I choose to act in the world, as broken and dangerous as it is, and want to use accurate data to assess the risk I’m willing to accept for myself and my sons.
I believe we would have healthier children without State-run education. The State wants complicit, sedentary children on mind-numbing psychotropics and fattening Government meals. That’s what’s killing our children’s bodies, minds, and souls.
I’m curious how doped up and obese our society wants children.
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