They come though us. They are not extensions of us.
Los Angeles circa 1997. I am sitting down with my friend Maya in her high rise apartment on her red velvet tall back couch. She’s eating hard boiled eggs and drinking a tall glass of red wine. Her hair is a silvery white, like angel hair you decorate with at Christmas. She’s my elder by 30 years, an eccentric artist from Isreal, a tarot card creator and reader, a prima ballerina, a wild child, a gypsy soul who spent most of her life on Kubbutzes in Israel, dancing throughout Europe and painting in Los Angeles. She’s also a communicator with the stars of Pleides, she spoke to the powers that be up there and they spoke back. She’s a blast and this day her and I were just shooting the shit about having kids, me not having any at the time.
My daughter. HHMMMPH! She’s a briefcase carrying bank executive! Where did I do wrong? She was raised on communes and with artists and dancers and free thinkers. And what does she go and do? A BANKER? Then she looks at me and says But I trust her. I trust her. Only she knows her path. She’s not me. She just used me as her spaceship to Earth. When you have your daughter, MaryBeth, you need to know this. She’s a leader. Teach her how to be one by letting her go, she needs you to trust her. Don’t control her with your own belief system.
Four years later shortly after I gave birth to my daughter, my mother in law watched me dressing her in a little hemp Buddha t-shirt and yoga pants and sinking sanskrit chants to her and she looked at me said, Wouldn’t it be something if she just went and ticked you both off and was a conservative rule following mainstream down the middle kind of girl?
Absolutely not! She is who she is and she will always be.
She is who she is. She will always be. She came from my insides, lived there for as long as I was in my own mother’s womb. But she’s not me. Not even close. And my Practice is to Trust. To trust Life. Birth. Death. Her pull to school.
This morning I watch her get ready for her first day of first grade: she arranges her backpack items neatly and in order, she not only doesn’t need to be told to wear socks, she happily pulls them up instead of wearing them rolled down and half hanging off her feet, she brushes her hair and seperates it into two little piggy tails. She brushes her teeth for as long her sand timer runs out. She takes her raincoat and pulls it on over her cardigan. She looks through the lunch I lovingly made, making sure it contains enough protein, veggies and a little sweet treat (she doesn’t see the love note I tucked away under her napkin). She gets ready all by herself from beginning to end with a smile on her face. She’s more excited than I have ever seen her. Seriously.
I want to scream NOOOOOOOO. Tantrum. Run. Hide. Pull her close and never let her go, keep her safe from institutions and agenda’s of the State. This moment, sitting on my antique and falling apart blue chair with orange pleather ottoman, cold coffee in my hand, tears swallowed, tongue bit so hard I can taste blood. It was like the moment of birth, that place in space where I can just fall off the deep end and become a victim to the visions that fly through me– in birth: transfer, baby stuck, bleeding, hours more, baby dead, me dead, more pain, lost in laborland. And now: I’ll loose her, she’ll loose herself, she won’t be validated, she be asked to conform, she’ll be tested, she’ll loose her intuition, worse, she’ll ask to listen to HANNAH MONTANA!!!!! And it can go on and on until I surrender to the pull of The Zone and then soften to the place they call Mystery. There is no control there and nothing to be controlled. Only Trust (and an endless supply of energy and life force and humor and hot broth) I try and land on my feet or my ass or flat on my back or balancing on my forearms, whatever, but I have to find a spot there, because there is where i know that Nothing means Anything and Everything is Nothing and Right is Wrong and Wrong is Right and neither matter and there is only one thing in the world and it’s a very special field blooming with lavender and calendula and orange poppies where we all belong together despite our .01% of DNA difference.
School has never been part of our plan, at least not a school like this, traditional public. But it’s not my plan. It’s hers. It’s always been her plan, from the moment she became one of my little eggs, from the moment she chose her sperm-mate, from the moment she chose to LIVE as an ovum, lacking almost everything she needed in the beginning but made the choice of LIFE and grew with her bloody lake of a placenta and continued on blind to the outside world and then chose her own birth, down to the moment of Venus and the gasping of air while her strong little body laid momentary limp against my chest and I could see she had a very hairy back. I have been her portal, her worn in sidewalk, her fluffy cloud, her rickety old Volkswagon, her wooden bridge, her fast jet plane. And like Maya said, her spaceship to Earth and beyond. I just take her to where she points. Her gut makes the signs, and I have to shut up my own brain to listen. All I can do it pull up my dress and squat, let go and let it flow…. with great amounts of Love and Trust.
I remember when I first became pregnant and gave birth at home and it was like HOMEBIRTH. THAT’S IT! BIRTH JUNKIE! BLAH BLAH BLAH. Then it was BREAST FEED!!!! CLOTHE DIAPERS! ATTACHMENT PARENTING! NO PLASTIC! NO MEAT! NO MEDIA! NO TINKERBELL OR HELLO KITTY!!!! BLAH BLAH BLAH. Then there was NO SCHOOL! SCHOOL IS FOR SUCKERS! SCHOOL SUCKS! BLAH BLAH BLAH. There were a lot of No’s going on. A lot of keeping things hidden away. A lot of opinions and ideas. It’s all dogma. It all sucks. Until it doesn’t, but you know what I mean. Even good meaning can create an empty soul when we refuse to understand it’s all the same anyway, really. It’s one big story we tell ourselves.
I know for some people I must sound insane. It’s just fucking school! But I have been her teacher and she mine all day every day for good stint now. Sure I have entrusted others to care for her, she has a community, a tribe of people she learns from, but other than Waldorf, which is completely different from public school, this is her first time in a Big World. A Big World I will admit I have been keeping from her. I’ver wanted to her to know only what I felt was necessary or good or right or appropriate or healthy. And I think a lot of her desire for going is purely curiosity about the world she knows that we, her parents, are leery of through our experience. Not hers. She knows there is something out there calling her, something she longs to find, in her own way, her own road. And all I can do is loosen that cord and let her dance toward her dreams and vision. She is a wise intuitive being. She is my daughter and I claimed to trust her in her birth and when to potty train herself and when she wanted to wean. I have to trust her now. I am her mother. My wish for her as we all walked her to school this morning was this: Keep your voice Mia. And enjoy every moment of this adventure. It’s all yours. Teach us what you learn.
My heart believes in Unschooling. And right now I truly feel more invested in Unschooling than ever before. To me Unschooling means complete trust in the child and releasing any hold on any dogma. I have no investment in public education or her academic achievements. I have investments in her happiness, in her finding herself, in her knowing that we TRUST her and believe in who she is. I believe in Unschooling, of allowing life to unfold and unravel and spontaneously connect and get spicy want I want cool and to freeze when I crave heat. Unschooling is this: listening to Mia while all summer long she begged to go to The Lowell School at the top of the hill even after I offered to enroll her in a witches school under the sea, she looked at me and said: Mama, I think Lowell will be really good. I want to go, okay, Mama? I really want to go. Public School? I was planning on using it as a threat when she wouldn’t clean her room. Now this is where she wants to go? To be? Mama, I think I want to sit at a desk all day and learn math. It’ll be okay, mama!
{and after weeks of kicking and screaming (me) and her talking about how fun it will be and me trying to gently talk about what public school could be like and her nodding her head and saying YES! We had one choice. And it was to honor her}
Okay, Mia. You go, girl. Go and go and go and go. I’ll catch if you need to stop fast. I’ll watch you (and help) pick yourself up in case you fall. I’ll listen to you with my gut. No matter what kind of desk, what kind of teacher, what kind of institution….you are a MAGICAL being, a Fairy from the Land of Roses, a Fierce Angel from the Apple Valley, You are an Empress from the vortex of where it All Began. And you are my knobby kneed little girl with missing teeth and tiger shark tooth necklace around your neck. Go and be a school girl now and a teacher and a friend. And never forget I love you love you love you love you love you love you love you.
And so she walks the threshold. And we are very, very present and aware of what it all is, what it can be and we hold her close, very close as she moves farther away.
