Look at my nostrils, world, and despair

I’ve been noticing how M, now 7, has become more and more social as time has gone on.  Socialization is, of course, one of the hot button issues when it comes to learning outside of school.  Why people think learning to be social with 30 other kids who are also learning to be social makes sense – especially when the main lessons are to sit down, be quiet and do what you’re told – is beyond me.  (If recess were 6 hours long, I could see school as a place to learn social skills, but not in a classroom.)

I wouldn’t have noticed his social skills much if it weren’t for other parents noting repeatedly that he is/was quiet, or adults who talked to him and tried to force the conversation along by noting how quiet he was.  Sometimes they were genuinely nice about making gentle jokes, but often it came across as a bit rude and judgmental.

To me, he was just himself.  I would know, since I was a quiet, shy kid with memories of being forced to be social.  I recalled feeling angry and embarrassed.  I was ok to let M be and not embarrass him needlessly.

It wasn’t always easy – sometimes people would say Hi to him and ask his name and he wouldn’t respond.  Or sometimes he would turn around and walk away.  I felt embarrassed on occasion and had to remind myself that it was about him, not me.  Once we had some privacy, I’d talk to him about politeness and why responding to questions about his name may be a nice thing to do.  He’d listen, and sometimes he’d respond to me, sometimes he wouldn’t.  That’s just him and how he felt at the time.

But from time to time, there would be glimpses of his growth and self-confidence.  When he was comfortable, he would often not stop talking.  He was like that at home, of course, and with family.  But one day he spent well over an hour talking to a neighbor’s relative visiting from Mexico.  An almost stranger, yet he was yabbering away.  We have no clue what they were talking about, but that doesn’t matter.  What matters is that he was confident and comfortable in that moment, with that person.

In the past year he’s finally started to make polite responses when strangers say Hi or ask his name.  Ever since we moved to the beach, he’s shown a much greater interest in meeting and playing with new kids at the beach.  We’ve given him suggestions on how to break the ice – smile, say Hola, offer a toy to play with.  He rarely takes the suggestion immediately, but he remembers (he’s always been like that – we can explain something and he’ll know it months later).

Yesterday he saw a kid on the beach, a younger kid with his parents.  The mother was familiar as she works in a store we’ve been in a few times.  He went over to where they were and the next thing we knew, he was yabbering away with the mom.  I realized then that he had the confidence in himself to just go and do it, and I felt happy for him – and a bit sad that the little boy isn’t so little anymore.

I should have seen it coming – he’s been more likely to ask strangers questions, like when looking for something in a store.  I wonder if it’s osmosis as I’ve found myself starting conversations with strangers everywhere I go – which was not common at all in the US.

I feel so privileged to witness this growth.  It’s a natural, wonderful progression – and it’s just him being himself.  We could have pushed him to be like this or that, but as we trusted, he grew at his own time and pace.  I believe the long-term benefits of self-confidence are well worth a couple of short years of not conforming to social expectations.

We’ve been a  bit uncomfortable, in little or bigger ways, since we arrived in Costa Rica. And while we still love many parts of this country, we think it just might be time to move on.

For me (Arp will have to tell his own story), much of it has to do with the kids. I’ve felt for quite some time that our move has unfortunately limited their experiences. It’s been kind of the opposite from what I expected. I had great plans for them learning a lot from travel. Unfortunately, I’m beginning to think that only rich people can really give their kids that experience in this country. Our money situation, which is on the limited side of things, means that we can’t just pick up and spend the weekend driving to explore a volcano at the drop of a hat. So we tend to stay close to home.  In New York, this situation wasn’t quite so limiting since the US has the infrastructure to support libraries, free trail systems, playgrounds, parks & museums (payed for by special cards through our library). Here in Costa Rica, the books cost money and are often not available in English. Or we have to pay a lot of money to ship them from the US. Museums are almost non-existent. Trail systems are very limited here. Most of them are part of National Parks, which means entrance fees. It’s true that the fees are greatly reduced now that we are residents of Costa Rica, but still, the trails are few and far between. And my kids really miss playgrounds. I’ve seen very few playgrounds here. The ones I’ve seen are either extremely small or very outdated and dangerous. Like, maybe one of those scary metal slides that heats up in the sun and burns your butt. In summary, I feel that with our more limited money situation, maybe the US has more to offer our children right now. I hate to come to the conclusion that world travel is only for the rich, but maybe in some ways it is.

On my side of things, I’ve had a lot of trouble meeting people that I can really let down my guard with. Let’s face it – I’m pretty darn radical and I live my life very differently than most people. That can be very isolating. It’s a fact of life that I have to walk on verbal eggshells with most people I encounter. Most people I meet have very little experience with EC, tandem nursing, extended nursing, gentle parenting, non-coercive parenting, etc. Now, if you throw the entire concept of radical unschooling into the mix, I become very mind-boggling to most people. Believe me, I understand all this. So it turns out that I tend to have conversations with most people that involve constantly self-editing. I’ve tried just  being myself, but that doesn’t really work so well, and I end up endlessly explaining myself. I’m not sure what is more exhausting – walking on eggshells, or explaining how I really feel.

Back in the US, it was possible to actually find people (albeit a few) who I could be myself around. These are the people that I seem to actually approach friendship with. Here in Costa Rica, this is almost impossible to do. It comes down to the numbers. It’s generally not going to happen with native Costa Ricans due to language issues (I’m still working on my Spanish) and the fact that very few (if any?) Costa Ricans parent the way I do. Expats are generally few, and the majority of them are traditional parents also. So I end up with very few parents who I can actually talk to.  After 10 months here, I’m pretty sick of being isolated. Back in the US, we could always seek out members of our local unschooling group, but unschoolers are very very few in Costa Rica. The few families that we have really enjoyed spending time with live in places we don’t want to live.

It’s looking like our next move might be Florida. It’s warm or warmish, it has lots of beaches, and it has some areas where the cost of living is fairly cheap (cheaper than NY, at least). Our family is itching to move on. Arp and I are bored here. But we will be back again – at least to visit. Someday maybe we’ll want to stay again in Costa Rica. When we come back again, I’m sure we’ll be more able to enjoy the things we love about Costa Rica. We’re ready now for a new place and new people. And I’m ready to have libraries and a dishwasher again.

You see, I think I’d be homesick for New York if we had moved pretty much anywhere far away, even in the U.S. Also, even if I am homesick for my familiar life in my home culture, that doesn’t change the rightness of our decision to move here.  Overall, our move still makes sense for our family.  This move gives us more flexibility with time, money, and career issues.  And it gives us year-round good weather.  It’s so easy to miss New York when I know it’s summer there.  After all, I love summer in new york.  But I pretty much hate it there for at least 6 months out of the year (winter and the cold parts of spring and fall). I’m pretty sure I’m going to feel very happy here once my relatives start calling and complaining about the snow, ice, and heating bills again.

There’s probably another cause of my homesickness – the new baby.  Right now, my life is pretty isolating, as it usually is when you have a new baby.  I sit around nursing the baby for most of the day.  Sometimes I don’t leave the house and yard for a week or two.  Having a baby can be hard, especially when you don’t have your family around to bring you an occasional frozen meal. I think my baby-induced isolation is intensifying my homesick feelings. Baby B doesn’t help things any because she has not been very happy in new surroundings lately.  When I took her to the video store the other day, she cried for most of the time and was upset by the sounds of loud trucks moving through the streets in town. Hopefully she’ll outgrow this!

What I’ve been recently thinking about is my ideal: 8 months in Costa Rica and 4 months in New York.  But financially, that ideal is not currently possible for us.  How many people can live part of the year in one country & part in another? But maybe that ideal could be possible someday. Maybe we can make it possible. Maybe we could someday buy an RV and live that part of the year in the RV traveling in the US. That would be awesome.  Then we could see all those other wonderful parts of the US that I haven’t had the chance to see yet.  And then the rest of the year I think I’d be very happy living in Costa Rica. I’ll have to do some more thinking to see if this might be a workable plan.

In the meantime, we are working on our plan to move to the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica.  Somewhere around Puerto Viejo.  This is the area of Costa Rica that we fell in love with when we first came here: jungle, monkeys, and the warm blue ocean. Atenas isn’t bad, but we are not in love with it.  We really only moved to the Central Valley initially because it was near midwifery services. Last night Arp asked me what we would want to remember about our time in Costa Rica if someday we were looking back on our time here.  I think I’d much rather look back on living in the Caribbean.

Not that we’re planning on leaving Costa Rica anytime soon. We are just not sure where we will be 5 or 10 years from now.  There are so many places in the world that we want to see – India, the Mediterranean, & other places.  I want to climb Kilimanjaro someday, when the kids are older. I don’t like making terribly long-term plans. But I doubt I’ll want to spend the next 20 years all in the same place. However, I’d like to keep our permanent resident status in Costa Rica and maybe build us a place here that we can always come back to. That’s another part of my ideal.

A while back I alluded to a paper I wrote in high school that I was particularly proud of.  It was THE big high school assignment, an American studies paper counting for grades in both History and English.  For me, it was a no-brainer – I wrote about comic books.

I’d always liked them as a kid and had rediscovered them 2 years earlier.  Things had really changed.  Serious stories and brilliant artwork meant that I blew a lot of cash on comic books every week.  I’d always liked science-fiction (Journey to the Centre of the Earth has been a lifelong favorite) and the modern comic, with it’s realism and mature stories, was an absolute hit with me.

Fast -forward some 15 years and I don’t have the time or money for comic books.  But I do need to unwind and acquired some cartoon series of Batman and the Justice League for my own downtime.  Not surprisingly, the kids dig watching the shows, especially M who is amazingly engaged by the whole thing.

So I got to thinking more about it.  Years back I had read Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment: the Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, which argued that they support and liberate children’s feelings.  In a nutshell (or rather, what I can remember ), kids need to have their inner feelings validated.  He explains how even very young children are capable of having angry, violent feelings, and that they need to be validated.  When we only give them watered-down versions of fairy tales we do not speak to their needs  Abridged, Disneyfied versions of Grimm’s tales don’t let this happen at all.

I also thought how until the modern age, mythology and tall tales were so popular.  Paul Bunyan was the original Superman, a force who was truly larger than life.  Mythology had stories of good and evil, with the foibles of mankind intertwined.  What kid doesn’t like that stuff?

But like the comic books of the 80s, cartoons have changed too.  I recently got ahold of the Aquaman cartoons from the 60s and they SUCK.  Every story is the same – there’s trouble, the bad guy has a moustache, Aquaman asks his sea animal friends for help, good triumphs over evil.  They were pathetic, but they held my attention as a kid.

Even the Super Friends and Spider-Man shows I loved as kid were very lame in comparison with the modern options.  Unexpectedly, the modern Batman & Justice League have been fodder for a lot of discussion with M on a very wide range of topics:

• psychology & split-personality
• moons & why they orbit planets
• global warming & the why the icecaps are important
• the pathology & use of fear
• vigilantism & the law
• politics & dogma
• archaeology
• mythology
• trials and legal procedures
• radiation
• genetic engineering
• good & evil (no duh, right?)
• deception and fighting for survival
• finding common ground with different people
• how groups come together for a common purpose
• and on and on

It’s been very surprising.  These shows are entertaining, but are not made for kids per se.  There’s no Wonder Twins (the Cousin Oliver’s of the superhero world), no pure slapstick, no cookie cutter storylines.

Now I will say that they are more violent than I remember the old shows being.  We talk about that too, and I’m trusting that our examples of how people should communicate in real-life will supercede seeing people being thrown through walls.  But I’m not being overbearing and preachy about it because M knows.  Sometimes it’s exciting and sometimes he says they should have talked about it.  I’ll have to give him the benefit of the doubt as we’ve had a lot of fun watching the shows and talking about all the issues that get raised.

I guess the point is that the opportunities for learning are legion.  It happens in unexpected places and sometimes, it’s just damn fun too.

This picture has nothing to do with work.

I really hope that my kids don’t struggle with employment like I did.  As in doing something fulfilling for an income.  When I look back at my best and worst jobs, it’s obvious now that the fulfillment was directly related to my personality and interests.  Like lots of people, I’ve taken jobs primarily due to the need for income.  Or rather, I wanted to spend money and I didn’t have any.  Most of the jobs I’ve taken fit this category, until I got older and the wanting to spend got replaced by got bills to pay and want health insurance.

On the plus side, I’ve been fired or quit cold from 3 out of every 4 jobs I’ve ever had.  I’ve often been proud of this fact since it seems to say that I don’t give a crap about most crappy jobs.  Or my spirit can’t easily be subverted.  Or I had better things to do than needlessly pad a resume with actual work.

On the minus side, I’ve had plenty of pointless, mindless jobs.  The absolute worst of the lot was a 1 1/2 year stint working at a financial services company.  It combined the worst of the job words: 1. financial = being surrounded by people who worship the dollar and think they all need to be Republicans (strange but true) and 2. services – service-oriented jobs are hard to tolerate unless you REALLY give a crap about what you’re doing.

I took the job for one single reason: health insurance.  Then spent 1 1/2 yrs looking for another job (something I managed to screw up in the hottest job market NYC had ever seen).  My duties took 20 minutes a day to complete and I would have died without internet access.  I had nothing in common with the people around me and still have the performance review noting that I ‘needed to be more social with the group.’

I definitely took some positives away from that job though.  I saw the people who had worked there for 30 years, who looked completely beaten down by life, and I did not want to be them.  I interacted with people who seemed to care about how much a stock price was only because someone told them they should care, and I didn’t want to be them.  And I taught myself how to code webpages, which has made an incredible difference in my life.

Or rather, following my own interests has made the difference in my life.  In any case, I hope my kids don’t go through a job like that unless they want to.  I can’t imagine what the appeal would be when there’s so much more interesting things to do in life.  Next week: my best jobs.