Heavy Limbs and Crowing

When you find that special personality disorder that fits your personality, you may literally sit around all day thinking up things you have done over the last twenty years or so and label them crazy, crazy, bat-shit crazy, crazy, crazy, bat-shit crazy, and then, you may think of countless things people have said to you over the last twenty years or so, and you may realize how true those things were....  And self realization is a fucking bummer. I got so depressed my limbs were literally aching.

(Note: the first literal in that paragraph is the newly defined literal as figurative while the second literal is literally literal.)

(Parenthetical fun with etymology continued: I found out this weekend during a bit of drunken googling (once a brand becomes a verb, do I capitalize it?) with my brother-in-law that the -ify of deify, justify, petrify, mollify, etc. comes from the Latin facere which is also the root word of facitious. As those are my favorite group of words and being factitious is one of my favorite things, I am pretty sure life doesn't get any funner than that.)

And this weekend certainly didn't get any funner than that. In fact, it was the worst weekend in a long time. Potentially, it was a game changer in the long term sense.

But, beyond the heavy limbs, beyond the horrible weekend, beyond potential game changers, I want to focus on something positive... And since I can't muster up any positivism in a deep sense, I will just do some crowing:  

Public school started yesterday which fills me with the whole sense of "crap, we should do something" so I was happy to note that while the public school kids were roasting in their desks in the 90-plus-degree heat that we randomly hit on the Colosseum, the Pantheon, the Sydney Opera House, robot street performers, the length of intestines, and the position of babies in the womb. Then, we found a mud dauber wasp (not out on a nature walk, just there on the wall in my bedroom). So, I considered that to be a pretty successful first day of school, I guess.

Today, after the second day of school, our house filled with public school kids once school was dismissed, and I was asked to referee arguments on vocab words, the medicinal use of steroids, soldier pay, and whether or not the Brits had any role in winning WWII or whether it was just the Americans. In every argument, my third grader won against a sixth grader. Of course, that sixth grader could read circles and do math problems around my third grader, but let's not let that get in the way of some crowing.

And so here we are, and I have no idea where we are going, but I am pretty sure it can't get any worse.

Borderline Personality Disorder

If you know me, you know that I hate over-pathologizing things. You're not depressed, you're grieving;  you're not OCD, you just enjoy having a clean bathroom, and so on, but then, I stumbled across a little thing called borderline personality disorder....  oh, wow, there's my entire personality described in the dsm criteria of a mental illness: excessive emotional reactions (anger), chronic feelings of emptiness, chronic boredom, impulsive behaviors (unsafe and inappropriate sexual conduct), tumultuous and unstable relationships, unstable self-image, fear of abandonment, idealizing people followed by hating them.   

In reading, I stumbled across several other symptoms (which may fall under the categories covered above or may not) but that I also see in myself: telling strangers intimate details about yourself, seeing anger in neutral faces, inability to manage time well, inability to keep track of things (driver's licenses, keys, etc), ability to manipulate others easily, self-awareness of certain issues or patterns and unwillingness/inability to change, inability to lie (except through omission) due to childlike nature, non-linear thought patterns, constantly changing emotions (minute to minute, day to day), being drawn to ideological extremes, intelligence, disassociating (I'm not sure about this one, the way that I disassociate may be normal or just drift-y), bursts of happy mania, fluid gay-straight sexuality, tendency to have more than 20 sexual partners, excessive guilt.

There's also a lot in the literature (yes, I'm calling random internet browsing literature) on self-harming behaviors, and aside from making bad decisions (regular and sexual), taking drugs excessively (back in the day, not really now), over-drinking (not too much at the moment), and fantasizing about suicide as an adolescent, I'm not really a big self-harmer besides maybe a bit of head banging and hair pulling while in a rage.  

There seems to be two types (or maybe it occurs on a continuum): people who are visibly very troubled and are in and out of mental health care their entire life and people who can hide all of these symptoms except in front of the people that they are closest to. I fall into the second category, mostly. So people whom I've known for 25 plus years actually aren't that familiar with many of my symptoms (although I have memories of being compared to the Sharon Stone character in Basic Instinct due to all the weird obsessions I was harboring in high school), but my husband and two people I dated about fifteen years ago can easily look at those symptoms and agree that they are a perfect match for me. 

I'm not really concerned about whether I have BPD or not. One one hand, it seems like identifying a mental illness at a time when I feel ready to change could be counterproductive and could become a crutch/excuse. On the other hand, it has been useful to read about the symptoms because they have elucidated some of the issues that I wasn't that self aware of. For instance, a couple yeas ago, I had a conversation with a neighbor (it was probably my second conversation with her and just so that you know how fucked up I was making the situation at the time, I should probably admit that I was hitting on her husband at the time using some weird manipulation techniques that (I thought) I hadn't used in years), and after that conversation, I came home and announced these huge changes to my husband: I'm putting the kids in school, I'm going back to school, everything is changing, and he protested that it was weird that I would have that conversation with a virtual stranger instead of running it by him. I don't think I realized that was actually weird/unhealthy until I started reading about BPD. There were several other situations that were made a bit clearer as well, and there were also patterns that I identified in my book (the memoir I wrote last year) that seem a little clearer now that I stumbled into the magical world of BPD.

The problem is that I have been aware of much of this stuff for years. I even talk about breaking patterns in my damn journals from fifteen years ago. If I took a red marker through those to identify BPD behavior, every page would be red by the way. So, I bought another damn journal, and I'm going to read it when I'm 50 (in case you lost the math that means I have a journal from age 20, one from 35, and then, I'm reading at 50 so 15 year intervals), and if I still have the exact same set of BPD-emotions, I'm going to... what...  who knows, but I'm exhausted, I have no interest in carrying the same destructive emotional patterns for another 15 years. Also, I think there were a lot of patterns (ie telling strangers intimate things) that I could get away with because I was young and cute, but telling random strangers about your issues when you're old and crusty is just tacky and gross. 

That said, whether we're dealing with BPD or just symptoms that are similar to it (who cares), I know this is not an intellectual game. If it were, I would have busted it at 20 or even last year when I identified many of these patterns in the memoir. I think...  it's more about emotional walls and letting myself break long long term patterns even if they are relatively comfortable to me in their shittiness.   

And what happens if I drop all my defenses, will I become a fat person in a hemp dress? 

Yes, yes, Minger, you will because, all mental health recovery involves getting fat and wearing hemp. 

Will I start thinking more linear-ly and does that mean that I will never be able to write the stream-of-consciousness masterpiece I've been dreaming of since I finally read Mrs Dalloway a few months ago? 

Or there is the remote possibility that by changing some of these behaviors (primarily the one where I fight against/build emotional walls against the people who are supposed to be the closest to me or the one where I freak out at the smallest things by having a rage fit) that I will be a happier healthier person and have happier healthier relationships. 

And what's my block, why do I feel noticeably tenser even writing that? 

Well, that question is why I'm paying for therapy. (and omg, btw, I can't wait until Obamacare kicks in in January so that I can actually get these costs covered, and according to what I've been able to find, it looks like we will be able to get a tax credit that could cover the entire cost of insurance at our income level, so we'll see how that pans out). 

Support

I dipped into a pretty negative place the last month or so, and after writing and deleting a blog post where I realized I was reliving my parents' marriage, I had the even worse realization that I am becoming my mother, so I immediately scheduled some therapy.

(That's supposed to be funny; I am a little worried that if therapy removes my defenses that I won't be funny anymore, but the therapist assured me that she's not that good so I guess I won't worry; I'm so tired at this point, that I would sacrifice a lot just for some peace, but it's a pretty scary process, trying to figure out what works and what doesn't, what is me, what is a defense.)



Anyway, I have an incredible support group, and in their own ways, they have given me respite from my head, lately. A few weeks ago, my good good friend cooked me dinner in her childless apartment, and it was just beautiful watching her cook as sweat streamed down both of us, and the urban-ish landscape stretched out behind her apartment window. She was fabulous, and during dinner, she and her husband who know our entire family well just made me feel very very loved.

Last night, I met with a friend who has been, in so many ways, a real growing experience for me to have. I read her bits from some fifteen year-old journals I had found in the basement, and she sang me the song she had written for me (I mean who writes me songs... sublime) which was incredibly touching, and I just love her.

And today, we went to the reservoir, which is really one of my favorite places on the planet, and it's just nice to get out, to know that people have the same goals, similar outlook on life as you and that it doesn't need to be too complicated.

And my other dear friend sent me a letter a few weeks ago, which was so reassuringly her, smart, caring, theoretical, perfect. I cried while reading it and saved it to reread.





There's probably more, but I just wanted to take a second from working to recount a few things that I was grateful for.

Dirty and Paranoid

I have been dirty my entire life, and "not in a good way", my husband would add (with a wink). I was dirty when I lived with my mother who is the cleanest person on the planet, and I have been since I've lived on my own. A few months ago, I was telling Max how dirty the carpet was in the apartment I shared with my husband and our friend when we lived in London--It was black because we didn't have a vacuum cleaner, and we smoked and cooked all the time.

And he said, "Were you mad about it all the time?"

No, of course not, I was never mad about it. I never thought twice about inviting people round for dinner and eating fabulous food on paper plates on the floor. So what's different now--now that I'm not 23, more importantly, now that I have kids, I'm supposed to be clean, and if I'm not, I'm supposed to feel bad about it? I'm also supposed to feel like I'm the worst mother if my kids are not tidy and obedient. Fuck that. Where do these ideas even come from?

Side note, my then-eight-year-old said, "No wonder we look naughty if all the other kids are on behavior drugs; they have an unfair advantage."

I've been trying to shift things, trying to see why things are dirty and not worry what it looks like to somebody who just stops by. If the carpet is covered in bits of foam and strips of newspaper and crumbs, it just looks bad, but I'm not going to worry about it anymore because I saw the day that created that mess, the creation with the foam and the studious taping of newspaper bits, and although it didn't amount to much (two swords), it took a lot of concentration and there must be something to process regardless of what it yields. If the kitchen is full of sugar and dirty pans, I know that it looks like that because the five year old made himself a snack with sugar and we cooked four meals in the last two days (instead of eating fast food or frozen food or boxed food), and I was probably distracted by working and had only done the bare minimum of dishes.

(As a parenthetical note, I feel like I'm working all the time, and my husband is working all the time. We've finally gotten our income up to what it was in 2007. After that year, it went steadily down until maybe 2010, and it's been going up from there. I know of a few things that we waste money on, but I also know that we live in a two bedroom apartment and don't own a second car and never go anywhere that would require renting a hotel room so... (it's too much to make conclusions there--let's just go with the ellipses). Also, we're working about twenty hours a week more than we did in 2007, and the kids eat more, and our cheap rent that we had been enjoying just got bumped up by $200/month (it's still less than the average in town). (And the magical answer to this is that I put my kids in a government institution for 6 hours a day, 5 days a week, and I will magically make so much more money, but we're trying not to go to the place where we question every thing about what we're doing. Constantly reassessing stresses me out; I really tired of the idea that it is financially irresponsible to raise your own children.))

We also break a lot of things. All five of us, accidentally, on purpose, without even realizing that we are, and fixing them is almost always the last priority. None of the people who live here seem to be remotely handy when it comes to fixing almost anything, but I have to be positive and hope that in the next five or so years, my little eight year old will be fixing things.

So I was working and cleaning and trying to reframe things, and then, everything that makes it hard for me to reframe came splashing about... unexpected very clean company, my period which is now on a twenty-five day cycle, my landlord's yearly guilt trip where she goes into all kinds of issue with an accusatory bent--like needing a new roof--which have nothing to do with me and tells me how they worked hard their whole life so they could have what they have and how she doesn't want to raise my rent.

I think maybe that's why she gets to me because she's so emotional. I'm well aware that I'm very hard on her property, but let's just be business-like. Sorry, a BB ricocheted off the fence and hit a window, I will write you a check, I did the last time we broke a window, and I will the next time. If you need to raise my rent because it costs money to keep up your property, that's not a problem.

Summer has not been awesome the last few years. It is hot, we're crabby, and my husband always increases the amount of time that he spends at work. This sentiment from my eight year old pretty much sums up the last few weeks, "Mama, stop yelling at us. You're taking out your stresses on us, like Daddy takes his out on you."

Heartwrenching.


Reframing isn't about making excuses. It's about realizing that we're the ones who have to live with ourselves, the choices we make, the priorities we set. We need to make our home around what is important to us, and if it's cooking instead of repairs, or going to the reservoir for the afternoon instead of cleaning, or experiencing life barefoot instead of worrying about the the dirt that gets into the carpet, or shaking pans to get the sauce right instead of worrying about the splashes getting on the walls, then so be it.

But stress sucks, and for the last few years, ours has jumped up in the summer, and when it does, the kids need to be obnoxious and naughty and test our boundaries because we've been stressing them out, and we need them to behave perfectly and quietly because we are stressed out, and together, those two things can become a vicious, self-depleting cycle.

I know at the end of the day, that I'm the one who needs to give. I'm the one who needs to let the stress go, just go, not onto anyone.



(I forgot to address the paranoia section of the title, but just think of figuring out where that fits in like a fun puzzle I created for your amusement.)
 

Faking It

I've been in a bad mood for a while now, at least nine days. The only way for sure to tell how long would be to start on January 1st and add 26 days over and over until I got to the date in June when I got my period and had one crabby day followed by four pretty depressed day where I couldn't get even mildly excited about anything and everything was meh, followed by a string of crabby and then rage-filled days. Yesterday, I was just throwing shit at the wall over and over in my mind's eye as I lied on my back and tried to take deep breaths. I was on such a hair trigger.

Earlier in the day, Max had asked me to look up something online for him. My opinion was that he whining-ly ambushed me with a request for a time-intensive and pointless task while I was in the middle of doing yard work which was desperately behind, and his opinion was that he had politely asked his mother to help him with something super important. While helping him, two of them got into a fight about (seriously) who had bit whose arm harder and left deeper marks and thus proved something about bravery. One of them was locked in the bathroom screaming while the other one was banging on the door and yelling insults. This all happened in about a second, and my sensible response was to throw my keyboard across the room and start screaming along with them. Or at them, really. Until, it dawned on me that I'm the oldest and thus the most able to control my emotions and I tried to get some order in the place.

I keep thinking that I was crabby this time last year (and I was), but then, I remember that I was crabby (or depressed) in January when I got back from Minneapolis and then again around Easter and probably on many days between those days as well as on many days between then and now. So, maybe I'm just crabby (or depressed).

Today was perfect though. We went to the reservoir and hiked down to our "secret" swimming spot and swam and hiked on rocks and climbed up another trail and explored the graffiti cave and went swimming again and did some fishing. And I barely worked but made all the money I needed to, and I just generally felt pretty happy and didn't really notice that the kitchen needed to be cleaned or that we all ate chips, leftovers, or fish sticks.


People who don't live with boys, or these boys in particular, have no fucking idea about the constant energy levels, and sometimes, when I'm having displaced anger, I get really upset with people who only have one kid or people who see a kid running and say stupid things like, "They'll sleep well tonight." No, no they won't. Are you fucking high? They have a limitless amount of energy which is both awe inspiring and annoying.

If we ride four miles to the BMX track, spend two hours riding up and down the hills, and then ride four miles home, they will maybe be tired for twenty minutes. Then, they will spend no less than three hours running in circles and doing back flips from the dresser to the bed. It's also impossible (apparently) to shut off the bedroom light without it involving a series of huge jumps from bed to bed until the switch is slammed down as they drop towards it mid-flight.

I'm really trying to make peace with the dirt and the action. The more distance I give the action, the harder it is to tolerate. If I'm spotting front flips, for instance, my life is easier than if I'm telling them to calm down and do whatever, but it's annoying. I can barely walk across a room without having someone catapult themselves on top of me. Oh, but so it is. When I don't feel like murdering them, I think it's pretty cool. On a bad day, there's probably a 90-10 (murder-cool) split, but on average, it's probably more like 50-50 (I'm not actually sure if I can quantify how often I want to murder the action out of them, maybe it's less, maybe it's more--they probably perceive the murderous contingent as higher than I do, and I should probably keep that in mind), but today was a 5-95 (murder-cool) split if I have to pick a number.

Maybe today was the first day of the rest of my month, maybe I'll get a few good days in until the vengeful 26 day cycle comes back around.


One of the reasons that I don't blog often is because I prefer to make a relatively cohesive statement (which is time consuming), and here, in these post-sun-hike dehydrated musings, I've ruined my well planned/partially-written-in-my-mind posts on boy action, moods that don't correlate with reality, and some other things, but at least I've reminded myself that the boys will always perceive more murderous emotions than I emit so I should try to emit fewer. And if all else fails, fake it.

That's really fabulous advice that should be cross stitched on a pillow. If you feel like murdering your kids, just pretend that you like them. Just fake a little love. It's better than throwing your keyboard at the wall.

Inner Voices and Casting Issues

Toward the end of my midlife crisis, my soul got older and fatter and sat down crossed legged; it felt very visual, very tied to that metaphor/concept.

In part of becoming more grounded and more comfortable there, I became engaged in a gradual but constant process of trying to be more okay with myself, with what we do, with the things that don't look like what other people are doing, whether it be the dirty carpet or the lack of artwork on the walls, and most importantly, with the flaws that the boys and I show.

Someone said today, "You're especially too hard on yourself." It was a really comforting sentiment to hear--because I interpret it to mean that I must not be as bad as I let myself think I am sometimes--and I can't tell you how much I appreciate the people around me right now.

I've thought a lot about inner voices the past few months.

When I started thinking about painting the living room, I thought, over and over, "I can't paint a room."

Really? It's four fucking walls, not brain surgery.

After a couple weeks of listening to that discouraging voice, I called my friend for the basics of painting and a much-appreciated pep talk (between that conversation and this post, she became a mother, and I am so happy for her baby that he gets to have this person who has been an encouraging voice in my life for twenty-six years as his mother), and I was off. It was easy, and it makes everything feel so much cheerier, but while painting, I tracked the voice I was hearing in my mind to two specific memories where that was said to me.

Regardless of how those lines were delivered, regardless of the intent of the speaker, those were the words that stuck for a long time, and as a mother, you know you have that potential. What you say to your children will become their inner voice.

Of course, there's always room for forgiveness, always room to say something kinder, to alleviate pain, to try to explain a joke, but you can't take it back. You can't take back anything you say, at least not easily.

Beyond what we say to each other, the way we cast each other is important too. For a long time, I was casting my kids as bad, and myself as a horrible mother--of course, I've also been looking at some of the voices that have explicitly delivered those sentiments to me as much as to the scenes where I just thought that was what everybody thought.

I'm always happy to jump in with my faults--it's just better to get them out of the way before someone notices and calls you on them, and I do the same thing with the boys. Yesterday, my neighbor was telling me how nice my son was, and then, I had to go on and on about what a fire-birthing-fuckstick he can be at times. She's like, "Your son is so nice and polite and honest and gentle," and I'm like, "Oh, wait until he loses his temper. He can get really angry and crazy."

Just, take the compliment and move on.

There are times when I lie in bed next to them and whisper nice things to them to try and undo some of the damage, but beyond words, I notice that the days I believe they are good, are the best days. The days I can distance myself from the voices in my head that make me feel like I need to cast them or myself in a certain negative light are the best days.

And a lot of that is about settling in, about not feeling that I constantly have to explain away some issue that someone may be seeing or that they may eventually see.


At least once, Max has said, "Can you hear me, or are the voices in your head too loud?"

He was referring to the captivating voices that make me not notice anything that is happening regardless of how near it is, but in the context of this, it underlines an important issue, the voices can be loud, and for three people, I have the potential to encourage their voices to be pleasantly loud or encouragingly loud. And in my own mind, I have the power to cast them as good little creatures rather than issues that need to be managed.


And so, finally, for my uncle who has said he likes kids' quotes and who deserves a prize if he's read this far, my favorite few things that these good little creatures said yesterday:


"I need a levitating shirt." --the sun-burnt one while crying in dramatic agony.

"You know what happens when you leave me alone with a sink." --the little one.

 "I'll just tell the cops I'm a seventeen year-old midget with bad knees. It'll be fine." --the free range one

"I need a new outfit for every day of the year. It's important to have style. I need to get my panache on." --the one who (please, god, please) is going to have an act a a drag bar some day

Function Over Form

A few days after writing "No Rules", I finally realized (explicitly because I think the realization was already there implicitly in the text) that it is more important to be responsive to your kids' needs, your needs, the situation at hand than it is to abide by any rule or ideological paradigm.

Because I tend to be a fairly ideological person, this is a theme that I have to constantly revisit and relearn. Now, in unschooling, we are facing the same issue--but somehow, this time it's a lot easier for me to choose function over form. By many people's standards, that means I am no longer a real unschooler--I could care less about that. It also means that I have to foray into the world of mainstream education and hear crap touted about the importance of early reading and early intervention and other conventional ideas that really rub me the wrong way.

What is Unschooling?

Unschoolers really like to argue about this question. On the defensive, they say things like, "unschooling is not ignoring your children." I would argue that for some people, it may be. My neighbor came to me last year and said her kind and amazing and polite (my adjectives) son had been kicked out of another school, she was tired of drugging him to keep him compliant in the classroom, she was interested in unschooling, but she was worried that as a single mom working from home that she couldn't give him what he needed. My advice was that keeping him out of school where he could ride his bike and get bored and read books and watch movies would be a more positive experience than failing and getting punished at school. In this instance, I would say that she could ignore her son (to work) and it would still be considering unschooling.

Conversations like these--whether they are started on the defensive, a state many unschoolers seem to maintain because of their counter-culture lifestyle, or started because people love to crouch this movement in light and love and peace and rainbows and glitter and then judge other people when they don't--are a useful way to talk about ways to optimize the unschooling philosophy, but for the purpose of defining unschooling, they are not useful.

Unschooling is, just as suggested by the word, not school. In not being school, unschooling is not restricted by place (ie. it does not happen in a predetermined spot like a school building or at the kitchen table) and not restricted by time (learning is always happening). Disciplines (literature, history, math) cease to exist--this is not a new idea, Foucoult wrote about this. Learning moves from an exclusive reading-and-writing-based model to whichever model works best for the learner who is considered a learner (or even just a person) not a student, because there are no teachers. Learning happens for the sake of learning itself not to get a gold star or impress anyone or to beat another student. There is probably more that can be said, but hopefully, you've got the basic idea.

So, there is my form, the outline by which we have lived most of the last nine years. It has been fascinating. The things these kids have decided to pick up, the things I have learned about learning just by watching them, and the ways they have challenged me to move past my presumptions has been amazing, and I wouldn't change a thing about it.

Dyslexia and Unschooling

While reading about dyslexia, I couldn't have been happier that we have embraced such a different-than-most lifestyle. On any list describing a dyslexic person, insecurity is pretty near the top, and in every case, it is insecurity based on the fact that the dyslexic person, although they were incredibly intelligent, just couldn't make it in the reading-and-writing-based learning model that is used at most schools.

My kids have never had to face this. They have learned most things through observation, through watching videos, through experimentation, through being read to, and they have expressed what they have learned through mimicry, through conversation, through play.

As I continued to read, I decided that my older two children have all of the tendencies of dyslexics (and they have a 50% genetic predisposition for it), and if what I am reading and the many people I have talked to about are correct, the dyslexic brain does not learn to read naturally. Its bits (let's go with bits because I can't remember the technical phrase) are positioned in such a way and its processes are run in such a way that it does not have the ability to decode language in the same way that an average brain does. At the same time, the positioning of these bits lend themselves to strengths in areas like narrative reasoning, predictive abilities, and three-D imaging.

Unschooling is based on the idea that humans are natural learners. A baby who learns to roll and crawl and coo will turn into a toddler who will learn to talk and walk and jump, and that toddler will turn into a human who is interested in the world around him, who will tell stories and ask to be told stories, who will figure out how things work and build his own ideas.

Before the rise of the city-state (and if I've gotten tipsy around you anytime in the last ten years, you'll know how I perilously idolize hunter-gathers even though I try to argue myself out of it), it would have never dawned on anyone to read anything because humans were living in preliterate societies. There was no dyslexia because there was no reading. There may have been ways to distinguish whether or not someone had certain qualities that eventually down the road could have predicted dyslexia in their ancestors--or maybe all of the brains were dyslexic because the formations that favored reading hadn't evolved yet--clearly, I don't really know because I'm not an evolutionary brain scientist.

Although I'm not an evolutionary brain scientist, I am a mother, and we figure shit out, and I've figured out that in my opinion, my older two are not going to read naturally--their brains just aren't wired for that. (I can hear the unschoolers cringing here.)

Because the unschooling philosophy is so firmly entrenched in the idea that all people are natural learners, the community largely fails to acknowledge learning disabilities--unfortunately, I haven't read enough on any learning disabilities but dyslexia so I can only comment on that. I've heard many stories about parents who, rather than assigning their kid a label and intervening, wait until their kids learn to read haltingly at fifteen and never fully comprehends how to do it (mind you, illiterate kids are buried in schools all the time at a much higher cost, I would argue). This is where I break with this philosophy in order to favor function over form.

I agree that all people are natural learners, but I don't agree that reading is necessarily a natural pursuit. (Take any of the disciplines that I discarded above, and I will argue to the death (maybe) that learning about them is natural--even something like civics which didn't exist before the rise of the city-state is natural because people want to know what is going on around them--even if they can't read about it, even if they have to catch a documentary or listen to the news, even if they only want to know a smidgen about it, but I digress).

So, My children cannot read. They're only 8 and 9.5, and in most unschooling circles, that wouldn't be a problem. In fact, many homeschooled kids (and even kids who go to school) don't learn to read until those ages or later--I'm touching on so many counter-cultural ideas that it is tempting to go off on a explanatory tangent, but I'm trying to keep my train of thought--if you want me to extrapolate on something, just ask in the comments.

Many dyslexics are smart enough to memorize enough words that they can read for the gist of content (especially when they rely on their advanced narrative reasoning skills and predictive ability). However, many of these readers will always struggle when they encounter a new word, from what I understand, or when they have to read something that is very de-contextualized. I know too many adult dyslexics who cannot fill out the paperwork at the dentist, who cannot send a text message without grievous errors, who choose their professions because they absolutely couldn't do anything reading-and-writing centered or even anything that remotely included reading or writing.

I want my kids to grow up in an environment that plays to their strengths, to their interests. I want their challenges to be ones that are organically selected rather than ones that are arbitrarily forced on them by a set of state standards. However, we living in a reading based society. I want/need to ensure that they can read and write. This is critical.

It sounds simple when you write it. Of, fucking course, reading and writing is critical. But the schools aren't treating it critically when they only employ, for example, one special ed teacher who doesn't have the training to diagnose dyslexia, and many unschoolers don't treat it critically either.

In short, there's my philosophy, and there's where we're departing from it so that my kids can learn a critical skill. I would go on and on about the effing cost of the so-called-best programs and the well-trained tutors, but someone is calling my name.

However, I want to just say that although I have decided that I don't think two of my kids have brains that are naturally wired to read, I think that most kids can learn to read easily and naturally when they're ready. As I said above, by foraying into the conventional education arena for answers, I have to hear ideas that I don't like such as that "no kids learn to read naturally". Uh, I know tons of kids who have learned to read naturally, quickly, and fluently with no instruction (most at an age that is significantly older than the reading age that is pushed at most schools), and I hate hearing such disparaging comments about it. I think that sentiment underlines some of the fundamental issues I have with the whole teaching-learning model that most of us currently embrace.

But oh, well, live, learn, don't get too crazy about any one ideal, and carefully consider your koolaid...