Hard Lessons

The past month has been such a challenge for me. Many realizations, many hard truths to swallow but one huge renewal. I feel beautiful and peaceful now, but for awhile there I felt like the biggest failure in the world. (This isn’t exactly easy to share but I’m determined to do so anyway.)

I was looking for solutions to why things “weren’t working” when I found them. And the cold hard truth broke my heart. I just didn’t see it before. But ask and ye shall receive. I did and I got my solutions in two forms. The first was a CD of unschooling mother, Diana Jenner, speaking at the Life Is Good unschooling conference. If anyone had the right to wake me up, it was certainly her. The second was a book, “Unconditional Parenting” by Alfie Kohn. Both were Divine Inspiration and opened my eyes to several points that I had heard, had even spoken of, but had never really seen like I now do.

• I was the All-Powerful Mom. Nothing happens or doesn’t happen because of anyone but Mom. This was my issue and my fault and now it was my job to find the solution.
• My affection, my understanding, my patience had become wavering. My reactions to Z’s actions simply showed him that my compassion was conditional on a certain behavior. How destructive…how stupid!
• I realized my motives to unschooling were to still produce the kid I wanted to produce. I was following this path so that he trusted me enough to eventually follow my path. This kinda hit me like a ton of bricks. I wanted him to be himself and be happy but I still held tight to my ideas of what that looked like.
• And lastly, at some mysterious point in my life, I had given away my free-thinking tendencies and compromised to care what another person thought of my actions. My inward focus had done a 180. I was doing things not based on whether they were good for us or good for Z but whether other people would think negatively of it. This is the most infuriating thing for me. Other people have no clue!! Other people don’t truly know us!! Other people can kiss my toe!!

It was not unlike years (and thousand’s of dollars) worth of therapy compressed into a matter of 3 hours. If that’s not G-d, what is? Oh yeah, a few tests of my new-found purposes:

Z came and sat beside me on the couch. As he’s chatting about Ben 10 and Pokemon, I notice he’s hiding under the blanket with occasional glances at the uncovered windows. In the two and a half years we’ve lived in this house, Z has been nervous about our lack of window treatments. Why didn’t I do anything about it? I don’t know. Here I was, fully aware of Z’s insecurities and in the position to make my son feel comfortable and safe in his own home and I didn’t. Lack of money coupled with lack of desire to hang Scooby-Doo sheets, I guess.

“Z if you’ll help me find some sheets, I’ll cover all these windows for you.”

“Okay, but can I wait upstairs while you finish it?” Abso-freakin-lutely.

Half an hour later, we were enjoying our newly privatized living/dining room with a bowl of late night mac-n-cheese. How simple; how silly that I never did it before. And how delighted Z seemed not only with the room but with his mom. Then was test number 2:

“Mom, sometimes I think I just want to kill myself.”

I went to him, knelt beside him and asked him why he feels that way. “Because I want to go to heaven , so then I’ll know if I’ll still be able to see.” He explained that he was afraid that when he dies he won’t be able to see anything anymore [without his body/eyes], and that he won’t ever [physically] see me or anyone else ever again. So, he said, if he died now he would know for sure what it’s like. I wrapped my arms around him and told him that I think heaven and hell are not a place you go when you die but how you feel about where you are, and that if he chose to leave I would spend the rest of my life in hell.

That’s when he broke down crying and said “It’s just not fair, Mom. It’s not fair we have to die at all. What if we never see each other again?”

I held him on my lap as he sobbed, my heart breaking over the fear he had never trusted me to accept before. I cried not knowing how long he harbored this fear. I answered him as best I could, explaining what I thought of true transcending love and the G-d I know today. I promised our souls to always be together. I apologized for not being able to change death. We sat on the floor and I held him and rocked him and cried with him as he fell asleep, whispering over and over “It’s just not fair we have to die.”

It’s not fair. It’s not fair that my little boy carried that burden alone, without the help and love from his mom. It’s not fair to him that I couldn’t fully wake up or let go, that I held onto my ideals without ever once realizing I was passive-aggressively controlling him. My inconsistency, my fear of judgement, my control pushed us away from truly loving and enjoying each other. All this time as I thought I was actively engaging in radical unschooling, I refused to see it wasn’t working because of me. I projected my end goals on him and it “wasn’t working working because he wasn’t working with me”. But in that one night, G-d showed me what I didn’t want to see – it really is “all about mom”. Whether I choose to see it or not, all our joy and all our problems have been wrapped around me the whole time.

But as I sat rocking my little boy on the dining room floor, I realized something that shakes me to the core. Life is just not fair; so much so that my little 8 year old hurts over it already. But from this moment on, although life will at times be unfair to him, although there will be times of fear or disappointment, never again will those things come from his mom. I’m the only safe place he has and wrapping him in that love is the only thing that really matters.