She’s really brought the best out of me and put me in touch with nature (I was a city boy). I don’t think we’d be on the precipice of realizing the dream of moving abroad if it weren’t for her. It was her intuition about birth and parenting that started our path of questioning the norm, learning as much as we can, and following our hearts. (though perhaps we followed our hearts to each other and everything else followed)

So here we, remembering the day we had to have, to tell the world that we wanted to be with each other forever. I remember how M being born was something that really cemented things, like it was the whole reason we were together. (I actually asked her that first night if she liked kids ) I can’t wait to see what happens next – moving to Costa Rica, realizing our dreams, having more kids and just enjoying life in general. True love rocks.

In the past month I built a social network site for unschoolers, which is now in the testing phase.  Sometimes you have to  run with an idea while the inspiration is there, and it had to be done.  I’ve had a couple of NYT articles on my mind, one on how discoveries & advancements occur thanks to incremental knowledge & improvements over time, and another article that posited that innovation was more important than perfection.  The first made me develop the site, allowing me to make something I cared about while increasing my knowledge, while the second convinced to make the site live as soon as possible as my anal retentive streak could keep it on ice for weeks while I tinkered.

There’s also the issue of selling the house that’s hanging over our heads.  Spring is coming and doing stuff with 2 active kids is near impossible.  We caught a nice break when a carpenter/contractor we requested an estimate from was open to bartering for a website.  Looks like he might be down with becoming a duck owner too – he was very interested in them and I’m waiting to hear what he thinks of the eggs we gave him.

This whole time Costa Rica has been in our minds.  Cold weather made it easy to think of the warm weather there.  The empty trees inspired visions of the greenest of green leaves.  We’ve made it to March after a milder than usual winter and will see about getting the house on the market next month.  After that, we cross our fingers & wait.

What are your plans for the rest of the summer?

My parents emigrated from India and until I was 10, I spent 6 months of each year in India. Summertime was too hot there so we went from fall to spring. My parents were rather blase about schooling to begin with and I started kindergarten in spring after a neighbor mentioned that I was probably old enough to go. Here’s how a typical ‘academic year’ went after that:

1. September: Yay! School starts!
2. 2 months later: Yay! We’re going to India!
3. 6 months later: Boohoo – back to the US. Just in time for allergy season.
4. 2 months later: Yay! Summer!

It was a good life, one that I recall very fondly. My sole exposure to formal schooling there involved trying not to distract my cousins when they did their homework. I do have a faint memory of getting a tutor briefly, but that lasted a couple of weeks at most. I have no clue as to what the tutelage was in, which indicates that it was probably utterly useless and unimportant in the grand scheme of things.

I always had this idea in my head that it was a nice, long vacation. Coming back to the US, to a routine that lacked any choice or individuality was a bit of a struggle, and I was definitely not trained to behave as well as my classmates, resulting in repeated admonishments to not talk in class, in line or pretty much any time when talking was frowned upon. Later in Catholic school, I was the only ‘good’ kid to get as many detentions as the ‘bad’ kids.

Once in India, I’d make a half-hearted effort to do some homework. This didn’t go on for more than 1-2 days, after which I ignored it until 1 week before going back to school. It almost always took me about 1 week to do all the busywork. This fact evolved into a reason why I was willing to consider and support homeschooling – if 6 months of schoolwork can be squeezed into 1 week, it’s bullshit. And knowing that standardized testing and busywork has increased since the 70s, sending my kids to school would probably be a worse option now than then.

Here is what unschooling in India looked like for me:

In India, as was customary, we lived in a 3 story house with our extended families, from myself and my cousins all the way up to my great-grandma and great-great-grandma. Each family unit had a room to themselves. That’s it – one room. That meant co-sleeping and a communal kitchen. I usually shared a bed with my uncle while my grandma slept on a couch. My grandma’s room was the only one with chairs and a sofa – everyone else just had beds which doubled as seating.

Since I always had horrible jetlag, I would often wake at 2am with nothing to do but read. However, this early rising allowed me to experience the rhythm of the morning. We lived in a city (Kolkata) and at the time, refrigeration was quite limited so everything came to markets from outside the city. At 2am the streets were dark & quiet. By first light the streets would be coming to life, with a trickle of people going to work, goatherds bringing their herd to market and men pushing huge two wheeled bamboo carts with giant blocks of ice. Next came a wave of schoolchildren, employees going to work and deliveries (including fresh unpasteurized milk daily and laundry once a week). Things finally slowed down after people had left for school & work and I had to find ways to entertain myself. I spent a lot of time wondering about the people that I saw and imagining what their lives may be. Our suburban equivalent in the US, seeing increasing numbers of cars, is so sterile and impersonal in comparison.

In the house, I either read, drew or spent time with a relative. I’ve always loved mythology and folk tales and I would get plenty from my grandma, great-grandma and great-great-grandma. We had a small temple to Shiva in the house and I would sometimes watch the priest and my great-grandma perform rites and rituals. At other times I would play games with relatives – usually Snakes & Ladders or Ludo. (‘Ludo’ is Parcheesi, and I have never heard any Indian EVER call it Parcheesi. It’s also kinda neat that the word ‘ludo’ is Latin for ‘game.’)

I would occasionally go to work with relatives, which revealed to me why things get done so slowly in India: people didn’t seem to really work. Any relative I was with would ‘work’ for about 20 minutes, usually while someone else from the office was not working and chatting with me. Then my relative would finish ‘working’ and we’d go someplace for lunch or go visit more friends & relatives. This attitude seems to have embedded itself in me too

The one relative who is quite interesting in retrospect was the family artist. He cultivated an air of craziness (supposedly having never recovered from heartbreak) and was (and still is, afaik) a truly excellent artist. I would often go draw with him. He was friends with intellectual-types who would often come over to debate politics (they were all Marxist – Kolkata is a hotbed of intellectualism with a lot of very left-wing support). He once gave me a book by Maxim Gorky when others were buying me comic books.

All in all, I spent as much or more time with adults than I did with kids my own age. There are so many specific things I remember from those times, a lot of it from just observing life. Going out with an uncle for a cigarette run meant seeing people making cowpats, avoiding cow poo and avoiding getting trampled by a cow. Going to the market meant watching people haggle or picking out the goat we’d be eating later (a live goat, that is – you’d pick the goat and pick up the meat later).

There were no supermarkets or large stores, and buying anything meant meeting & dealing with people. The ones we met frequently we tended to be quite friendly with. The laundry man was perpetually invited to stay for a cup of tea and a chat, which he always did unless he was running late. My grandma was very friendly with a municipal worker with the strangest job ever: cleaning telephones. The phones were property of the state-owned phone company and once a month she would come around to clean our telephone (while chatting with a cup of tea, of course).

I definitely think that some of the goals of attachment parenting and homeschooling/unschooling were accomplished. I simply experienced and learned from life. I had a very strong attachment to my family and especially my parents. I never had any teenage rebellion in high school because I got along with my parents. I was able to converse as well with adults as I did with children. I met different people from different walks of life.

The memories are so vivid that I wonder what the hell I’m doing sitting in a cubicle in front of a computer. I suppose that having had the experience is much better than not having had it at all, and the seeds for my future life as an attachment parent & unschooler were obviously planted. But I feel a sense of loss about it, even if it’s an inspiration to think and do things to eventually turn this cubicle into a memory.

1. Non-stressful, non-regimented buffet bbqs: Some of our family have bbqs that are pretty much outdoor equivalents of proper, full-course dinners. This involves several people for various food prep jobs, stress-oriented cooking on a grill, place settings and all that. We’ve avoided this one very well, including a couple of large friends & family bbqs. People eat when they’re hungry, what they want and spend the time enjoying company instead.
2. More than 3 cookies per serving: Trish’s mom had a rule that you could have only 3 cookies at a time with no exceptions whatsoever. If you had 3 cookies that were only 1/2″ in size you were totally SOL. She should prolly add the other Random Yet Mean Food rule from her youth: no chocolate at breakfast. Again, no exceptions and yes – that meant that Cocoa Pebbles were out. Same with Cocoa Puffs. I’ll have to ask my MIL to clarify if having 4 pieces of Cookie Crisp was enough to break both rules and ensure a week of hell.
3. Bedtime suspended during parties: This is one of the worst rules my parents had – sending me to bed at the Right Time regardless of what was going on – including having a houseful of people. This also meant they wouldn’t let me stay up late one night a week to watch ‘The Incredible Hulk.’
4. No TVs in the bedroom: The kids’ rooms, that is. We staunchly againt tvs in living rooms, and while we lived in a one-bedroom apartment, we had a 12″ tv in the bedroom. This remained and was useful for midnight nursing when M & J were babies, but once we got rid of the cable, our one working tv is in a small room we call the sun room.
5. Interaction with bugs & snakes encouraged: Neither of our parents really promoted checking out bugs, snakes and whatever else nature has on display. I saw a praying mantis once in my life and thought it was really cool. We point out every single bug & the one snake we found to the kids. This must be ingrained behavior since the first time J ever said ‘That cool!’ was while looking at a picture of a red tarantula.
6. Yummier sandwiches: I was a quiet kid. So quiet that I never actually told my mom that I don’t like munster or her sandwiches. I figured that coming home with an uneaten sandwich would get the message across. It did, but WAY longer than it should have. I don’t recall what the improved lunch item was tho. I just remember that the sandwiches sucked.
7. No scissor threats: This was, according to my mom, a long-running joke. In reality, it’s not funny in the least. Occasionally when I misbehaved, she’d make a scissor motion for a possible consequence involving, my, um, boyhood. (it was definitely not manhood at that time, not with the tighty whities with the single blue & yellow pinstripes on the waist) I have a faint memory of an occasion where I had clearly pissed her off and she made a big deal of searching for an actual pair of scissors. As you might imagine, I still don’t like it.
8. No asking ‘who do you like the most’ and other variants: I wonder if this is an Indian thing, or just common to our friends and family there but it was a question that happened all the time. Someone would ask me who I liked more, sometimes picking between 2 uncles and invariably ending with Mom & Dad. It was an incredibly childish, black & white question with a black & white answer (not very different from ‘if you’re not with us you’re against us’). Now add a room full of hooting friends & family and it becomes a bit of a pressure-cooker. I haven’t seen most of my relatives in years so the next trip to India should be interesting. Otoh, having Trish around – aka the second whitey to ever set foot in our house – might keep them on their best behavior.
9. No clothing in gender-defined colors: This one’s been easy, for the clothes we’ve bought. We don’t have control over hand-me-downs, but we always picked bright & happy non-blue colors for M that now look great on J.
10. No prohibition for ‘getting dirty’: Another easy one, as we believe in the twin superpowers of Baths & Laundry. And after reading how farm children tend to have fewer allergies, getting dirty has its benefits.
11. Let kids wade in streams: This was a really harsh one for Trish as she loved wading in streams, looking for crayfish and the like. What really sucked was that she lived across the street from a stream, so she’d have to pick her spots & hope not to get caught. I think her neighbor was nice and occasionally dried her pants before she went home.
12. No ‘Because I said so’: We try to reason with them and teach all the time, tho Trish did say this in jest last week as M asked the same question for the 20th time in an hour.

So there we are – we’ve become the parents we wanted to be. Who knew that would just be the tip of the iceberg? We’re way more radical than we ever thought we’d be and it stems from how we wanted to parent, how we wanted to birth and everything we’ve searched for & learned since then. I’m curious if the seeds of this change were planted the day we made this list and defined how we wanted to raise our children differently.