I’m going to be honest with you. Unschooling has been an awesome experience for our family. But not every minute. Sometimes things go south. Sometimes they go even further downhill than that. And yes, there are moments that truly suck.
Now, I’m not telling you this to bring you down – really! I’m telling you so that when you have suck-y moments of your own (and you will), you don’t think that you’re alone, or that you’re totally failing at unschooling, or that unschooling just doesn’t work.
It’s great to focus on the positive, to set our intentions, to serenely hold the center in spite of whatever storms may be swirling around us. I strive for that. It happens more often that not. But I can’t just gloss over the fact that sometimes I get downright negative, fail to set positive intentions, and completely lose my cool and my perspective. Because that happens, too. And it’s okay.
The longer I have walked this path, the easier things have gotten. They really have. But it’s still not perfect. It’s not even close. And you know what? It’s never going to be. And that’s okay, too.
And as it turns out, there’s all kinds of opportunity in the midst of the suck-y-ness. It sure is a great contrast! It helps me to appreciate the times that life is sailing along. And it keeps me real, and humble, and honest.
There’s a saying I hear a lot in my unschooling circles, and it is this: “It’s all good!” It’s not true, not literally. Not every single moment is good. Lots of moments are hard. Lots of them are filled with mistakes. The trick is to realize that those less-than-great moments are part of the journey, too. They’re instructive. They’re meaningful. They’re necessary, even.
And when you look at it that way, the unschooling journey truly is “all good”.
Even when it sucks.
I like Dickon’s mother’s (from The Secret Garden) philosophy. Paraphrased, it goes like this: “The two worst things for a child are to never have their way and to always have their way. I’m never rightly sure which is worse.” She also thinks that if you get that one right; you can’t go that far wrong.
That means having at least one issue you’ll always budge on and at least one issue that you will never budge on. A simple issue of freedom, not license can do which fits perfectly into the unschooling philosophy, I think. All that means is that it might be as simple as not allowing your children to beat one another up and going “You can’t do that but everything else is fair game, guys.”