I’m home safe with my family. Scared and sad, but safe. Everyone who has checked in with me is also safe. Every update I’ve seen from our loved ones has been like a warm hug: so grateful for the safety of my loved ones, so sad for those who have been directly affected by this.

There’s not a lot to say. Here are some good resources from the nice people at Upworthy:

Related posts:

1. MomsRising releases searchable database of safe products
2. And We’re Home…
3. Home again

When I was in 1st grade, I came into class one day and my teacher sat us all down on the rug for circle time and pulled out a Snickers bar. Which he proceeded to eat in front of an entire class of 6-year-olds without sharing one bite.

You can bet he had our attention. And he explained that he was having this candy bar because he had worked hard on something for a long time and in the end he didn’t get what he wanted. He was disappointed, and the Snickers bar was a little present to himself to feel better, and to help us understand how badly he had wanted the thing he was working towards.

My teacher had wanted to be the first teacher in space, and was one of the finalists for the position. We all know how that worked out in the end, how blessed he was to stay home, but at the time it was the thing he had wanted with his whole being for years and he didn’t get it. He was sad.

I’ve never had an ambition that big, but when I feel acutely disappointed I think of him and his Snickers bar.

I’m craving one now, as I sit with a small pile of rejection letters for graduate programs. What’s that? Graduate school?

I stealthily applied to Master’s in Social Work programs this spring, with the aim of becoming an LICSW and practicing psychotherapy. I didn’t get in to any of them, which isn’t surprising since I’d be making a radical career jump into an area where I have no experience or education.

I know, what was I thinking? I’m homeschooling one of my kids. It’s not like I’m drowning in time or money or spoons. But.  I was thinking that I’m burned out on writing as a day job and need to do something really radically new with my life, with my time and talents. I was thinking that I wanted to move into a helping profession and engage more directly with people. I was thinking I had something to offer.

I think that’s true, that I have something to offer. So I’ve picked up my bruised ambition and applied for a couple of volunteer programs in my area, one of which has gotten in touch with me and I’m hoping to start volunteering with them soon. More on that as it develops.

And in the meantime I’m back to looking for a job that will give me a sustainable income through meaningful work. I’m starting to look into what kind of social work oriented jobs you can get without a degree, as a prerequisite for reapplying to MSW programs, and also considering the possibility that this is a dead-end for me, and I’ll have to get my helping people efforts in as a volunteer while doing something else professionally.

But before I dive straight into the hard work of remaking myself and my profession, I’d like a candy bar to commemorate the effort that didn’t pay off quite how I hoped it would.

No related posts.

A few days ago I posted about my unbooking project & my grand plan to send Rio to the bookstore around the corner on her own.

I took Rio to the bookstore and had a conversation with the shop owner, Gil. He introduced himself to me and Rio, and said he’d be happy to have her visit his store on her own as long as he knows who she belongs to and we’re all OK with it. We talked about his store policies and what she could expect from selling books for store credit. He said he was especially in the market for children’s books.

So we went home and cleared out the bookcase in the girls’ bedroom, taking two large bags of books they’d either never enjoyed or long outgrown. We neatly organized what was left. Then we took our haul back to the bookstore, where Gil asked us to leave the bags for the weekend and offered to email me this week with an offer of store credit for the lot of them. Rio happily agreed to this, and we walked home.

Today, the kids’ regularly scheduled activities were cancelled for Evacuation Day. Oh, Massachusetts, how you love your wacky holidays.

So I was home with the baby I care for and my two bored kids. The girls were bouncing off the walls and kept asking for things: trips to the toy store, candy, movies. They do this when they’re bored; it’s a reflex. At one point Serena was so bored she looked up from a movie she was watching and said, “Mama, can I watch a movie?”

Eventually I threw them out of the house. Go play outside!

They were having none of it. So I sent them to play in traffic. “Go practice crossing the street,” I said, pointing them at the little-used one-way street next to our house. I tasked the older one to give her little sister lessons and sent them on their way.

This kept them occupied for about 15 joyful minutes, and then they were back with a new agenda: visiting the bookstore.

I had planned to get a cheap phone for Rio to take with her in case of emergencies before enacting this plan. I don’t expect anything to come up, but I figured a phone would keep her safe from well-intentioned rescuers and other minor pitfalls.

It turns out that getting a phone that doesn’t need to fully function as anyone’s daily phone/calendar/email/toy is still a pretty complex process. So it took us a few days to figure out what we wanted and order it. I don’t have the damn thing yet.

But the march of progress cannot be stopped. These children needed to go to the bookstore and they needed to do it NOW. So I gave them my phone and told them to call their dad if they needed anything and off they went.

They came back a surprisingly short time later full of TRIUMPH! They crossed the street alone! They talked to the bookstore man! They  made it home alive! They were very, very pleased with themselves.

And then they were calm and happy for the rest of the afternoon. It was almost like trusting them with some increased agency and responsibility made them healthier, happier children. Imagine that.

Related posts:

1. Go play in traffic: Bicycle Safety on Busy Roads
2. Serena's first phone call
3. the games kids play

I’ve decided to set most of my personal library loose in the wild.

This would have been unimaginable to me even a short while ago: I love books, and mine have always been my most treasured possessions. I used to keep a shelf of extra-special books next to my bed so I could rescue them easily in case of fire. I am not kidding.

Then one day quite recently I didn’t want them anymore. The kids have been wanting more space in the house to store their Lego creations, Rio needs some shelfspace for her homeschooling materials, and aesthetically I just flipped a switch and became capable of imagining my space *not* lined wall to wall with bookcases.

This impulse reminds me of the time I quite suddenly cut my hip-length hair off at the nape of my neck. I did it at 2 a.m. in my own bathroom, prompted by a meltdown in which the baby kept pulling it. I have never regretted this. 8 years later, I am still discovering ways that having short hair makes my life better and suits how and who I want to be in the world.

I still love seeing long hair on other people, and I will probably always enjoy being in a room filled with books. But I think I am done with my own collection.

So I took a pass at one bookcase and realized pretty quickly that I had no attachment to most of what was on the shelves. They were old textbooks, trendy books I’d picked up meaning to read but actually had never touched, gifts from loved ones who don’t quite get my reading tastes, yard sales finds, duplicate copies of stuff I love. I could keep every book I had ever had a strong emotional attachment to, or even really enjoyed reading, and cut my collection down by at least two thirds.

Importantly, I realized that a lot of the books I own are good books that I want people to be reading, but that I will never read again. Likely, no one will ever read them again if I don’t set them free.

So I did. I bagged up all the books I no longer wanted, just from that one bookcase. I have ten left to sort through.

My plan is to take all these books to the used book store around the corner from my house, and trade them in for store credit. Which I will then give to my kids, who can start to buy some books of their own. Rio in particular is just entering that voracious reading period of childhood, and I think a steady supply of gently used books will do her a lot of good.

The second piece of my plan is a little wild: I am hoping to let her go there on her own.

I don’t know why exactly, I just love this idea. I’m imagining being 9 years old and having a nerdy bookstore around the corner from my house and a stash of credit to buy anything I wanted. And the power to get on my bike and go there. I mean, hell, I’m imaging being 34 and having that and it’s a pretty awesome feeling.

On the other hand, my kid is a few months shy of 9. I *never* see kids that young out alone in my neighborhood. Will the Mom Police (or the actual police) come and give me a stern talking to if I send her out into the world without me?

She’s excited about doing this, and I am certain she has the maturity and skills to handle it. I think I’m going to ask the shopkeeper how he feels about her coming in unaccompanied, and if he’s alright with it we’ll give it a try.

No related posts.

It’s been quite a month for my engagement with the media as a poly activist. 20/20 re-aired our segment two weeks ago, in a two-hour special dedicated entirely to cheating cheaters and their cheating ways (plus us). That wasn’t the classiest move ever, what with polyamory NOT BEING THE SAME AS CHEATING. But our segment was unchanged; we looked just as wholesome as ever.

Then Katie Couric pulled the segment we taped for her at the last minute, for reasons that remain a mystery. Her producers tell me that they loved our interview and plan to air it In The Future; I’ll keep you posted if they give me a head’s up as to when, but I won’t be surprised if it just goes live one day and I only hear about it after the fact. Just please, Katie, do me a favor: don’t put us in an episode about cheating.

And finally today, I just got word that Destination America (a weird little Discovery Channel offshoot) is planning to air the segment they filmed of me and some of my best beloveds last summer. They tell me the air date is this coming Saturday, March 16. It’s not listed in my TV listings, and I don’t have a time, so I’m not sure how real that is.

I’m hopeful that it will air, because of all the media stuff we’ve done this year, this little-known Ausatralian production crew seemed like it had the best chance of presenting my family and friends in something like the way we actually relate to each other.

I have a lot more to say about polyamory and media and me, but I’m going to post it at HuffPo where my readers have signed up read long noodly posts about polyamory. I’ll link back here when I’m done.

Related posts:

1. As Seen On TV: Talking Polyamory With the Media
2. interesting poly/parenting article

So it’s like this, today: Rio is lying in bed in a patch of sunshine, reading a graphic novel and listening to music. The baby I care for is napping. I’m stealing a moment to myself to write a blog post before tidying up in preparation for this afternoon’s crafty gathering.

This is how I imagined homeschooling would be when I fantasized about it: peaceful, self-directed, with a sense of flow and rhythm. Spacious-feeling, if that makes sense. I’m enjoying it.

The morning didn’t start out this way. Rio decided spontaneously to stay home from Parts&Crafts, which is fine but I didn’t have anything like an activity plan for her. Then she wanted, for the first time in weeks, to break out textbooks and do lessons. Which is also fine except she needed my help to tackle a new math concept, and the adorable baby on my lap was having none of that.

All this has me thinking more about my concept of teaching her the way I feed her. How will that work?

- I need to spend some time each day selecting and preparing learning materials/experiences, just like I do with food.

- It has to be OK if she doesn’t “eat” what I offer her. This works out with food because I don’t make the food just for her; if she rejects it I still get to enjoy a yummy meal, and I don’t get cranky about wasted effort. I guess that means I should focus on setting up learning opportunities that will educate and entertain both of us? Or ones that I can easily set aside to do my own thing if she goes off to read a book instead.

- Maybe it makes sense to continue doing a weekly gameplan of what we’re going to learn and do, just like I do weekly grocery shopping and meal planning.

- Actually, I suck at meal planning, and often find myself running to the corner store for essentials because we neglected to shop. Better not count on me making and sticking with weekly lesson plans.

- I’m really good at holding space for regular meals, and can probably show up for a routine that includes set times of day when I’m available to help with lessons and/or do activities together.

- Just like we don’t eat candy all day, we don’t play video games and watch movies all day. She can do those things outside “school hours”, but no “junk” screen time during homeschool times.

All this feels really Right to me, as a parent.

What I feel like I’m missing is a way to evaluate learning and set goals. Food and eating aren’t really goal-oriented activities, they’re just part of the flow of our lives.

In general goal-setting and tracking progress aren’t strong suits of mine. I’m terrible at tracking spending, keeping an eating/exercise journal or maintaining a chore chart. I rely on electronic tools to automate a lot of that for me, and I still struggle with it.

We have a pretty good homeschooling app for tracking lesson plans and such, and Rio is great about setting it up each week and checking off when she Does A Thing. I don’t feel like I have enough of a master plan to be making good use of it though; asking her to do spelling quizzes or spend time on Khan Academy just feels like spinning a hamster in a wheel without a good sense of what I’m hoping she’ll learn or why.

So. I think we’ll continue to muddle along for now; I’m not distressed about our current activities at all. And I’m hopeful that as we settle into routines, there will be clear openings for setting long-term goals that have meaning for both of us, and for evaluating how we’re doing on those goals.

Now, to write something for myself, while she finishes up her book.

Related posts:

1. Sneaking Up On A Theory of Homeschooling
2. more thoughts about school
3. Being Nibbled By The Homeschooling Bug

We’ve been homeschooling for about six weeks now. Long enough to settle into a routine and tweak it a few times. Long enough to make a few false starts on project and approaches. Long enough to have a decent sense of a few things that don’t work and a few things that appear to work pretty well.

What’s out: textbooks!

What’s in: gadgets, long afternoons reading in cafes, pop music, awkward questions.

We started out like so many families do, trying to replicate school at home with a curriculum and daily lesson plans and expensive textbooks (including some of the same one she used to use in public school). None of these textbooks has been touched in at least a month.

Parts and Crafts has been a huge part of this. She’s gone four days a week, spending her time with people who trust her to be for the most part responsible for herself and her learning. She quickly learned from the other kids how to be more self-directed with her time, and found activities that interest her more than following me around asking for homework assignments. She gets some of the potential of homeschooling now, and she likes it.

I feel like her engagement with Parts and Crafts has lifted the huge burden of filling her time with entertainment and structure. I don’t need to worry about what she’s going to do for eight hours a day. She’s doing it somewhere else, with people who both giving her things to fill her hours with and teaching her how to make her own fun. Aces.

What I do need to worry about is the overarching theory behind her homeschooling, and the longer-term goals we hold for her education. I want her to have her pick of colleges when the time comes. I want her to learn how to work hard on things that don’t come easily to her. I want her to learn some history and some Spanish and her multiplication tables. I have a lot of aspirations for her, and it’s not clear how to distill these down to clear goals for her homeschooling.

Ideally, I’d like to have a theory to approach these questions with, which will help me frame goals and work backwards from those to daily routines and lesson plans.

So far so good. I’ve been taking it easy on this for the past month, waiting and watching to see what she learns and how she learns it, where she has strengths and where the gaps are. I’ve been thinking a lot about how we can tie-in academic work to existing interests for her, like combining math lessons with cooking and board games.

Mostly, we’ve just been cooking and playing board games.

Slowly, a theory is coming into focus for me.

What if I approached schooling like I approach food?

Here’s how I feed my kids: I put healthy food on the table for them at regular meals that we sit down and eat together as a family. I trust them to decide what to put on their plates, and how much to eat. Snacks are similar: I prompt them to eat a few healthy snacks a day, but I let them choose what they want and how much. I restrict sweets to a degree, and try to model the kind of healthy eating habits I hope they’ll have as adults.

Sometimes they eat great food! Other times they eat peanut butter & honey sandwiches at every meal for a week straight. I have absolute faith that this will sort itself out over time, and that what matters most is the good food habits their dad and I model, not the details of what they eat this Thursday.

How do I translate that to homeschooling? Can I just make a learning rich environment with regular offerings of educational materials and experiences and let Rio choose what she’s going to learn and how much? I already restrict screen time the same way I do sweets. It seems to map pretty well, as an approach.

But I worry about the safety net. What kind of weird gaps will emerge in her education if we take this route? It’s fine if she never tries leeks until adulthood; less OK if she just gives division a pass.

A doctor checks in on her every year and makes sure she’s growing normally and talks to us about her eating habits. Who will do the same for her homeschooling plan? Technically the school district can require some kind of portfolio of her work, but they’re beyond laid back about this. Will that be enough oversight to keep us on track?

So this is how homeschooling is going, and the questions I’m grappling with about it now. I like the child-led, food-like approach a lot as a theory. Now I just have to help it unfold into practice in a meaningful way.

Related posts:

1. Homeschooling for Grown-ups
2. Being Nibbled By The Homeschooling Bug
3. homeschooling, day 1

Hi all! I’m stealing a weekend away with my inestimable girlfriend, visiting Portland Maine for restaurant week. It’s all snuggles & naps & good food around here. So this post will be short; I have some very important lounging in bed to get back to.

But first! I wanted to let y’all know you can see us on TV talking about how we do this open relationships thing. 20/20 is re-airing their segment about us tonight at 9 p.m.

And on Tuesday, March 5 we’re scheduled to appear on Katie Couric’s show for a brief discussion of poly family life.

I have a lot more to say about media portrayals of polyamory in general & of me in particular. But right now: coffee in bed.

Related posts:

1. Talking!
2. Rio!!!!!!!!!

1. If you’re genderqueer, can you have a baby all by yourself?

- no, it turns out sex and gender are different things; you can be genderqueer and have a body that is genetically female or genetically male or none of the above, and it’s sex that determines if/how you can make babies. (there were a lot more words to this answer, to get it across at kid-level).

2. So what I really want to know is how do two people who are the same gender make a baby together?

- well, two people who are the same gender might also be the same sex or they might be different sexes but have similar gender identity. If two people who are the same sex want to have a baby, they find a different sex person to help them, or they adopt. There are lots of different ways people can get help in having a baby.

3. Wait, so how was the first person born when there weren’t any people to give birth to people?

- well, a long time ago…(interrupted by the next question)

4. Did animals just start shapeshifting into people or something?

- yes, that is exactly what happened. [insert theory of evolution here]

5. Can I have a piece of candy?

- hell yes.

Related posts:

1. conversation while cooking dinner
2. 20/20 Tonight!
3. parenting vs. sex

We’re air people now. 

Here’s what happened. We were on the see-saw about whether or not to do this for *months*, and had pretty much decided to keep Rio in school. She was doing great academically, starting to make friends, and settling into a routine. She had a part in the school play and won a fancy prize for being an awesome student and things just looked rosy. It was clear that school really liked her.

But she didn’t like it back. She was cranky at home and while she cheerfully did her homework most days, she began to have a kind of dismissive attitude towards learning, something we’d never seen in her before. Her dad worried that school was crushing her soul. I worried that she was developing an Attitude.

We still kept her in school, though, and tried to work with her to get her to accept it more, be more present with it, get the good out of it. There was a lot of good. Her teacher was wonderful, and she really enjoyed some of her extracurriculars.

And then after the winter break she just sort of stopped going to school. She stayed home one day because she didn’t feel up to it, and missed another day due to an epic tantrum, and a day because she wanted to do something else, and pretty soon she had missed four days of school in three weeks.

I said, “This is not OK. Either she needs to go to school all the days that school is scheduled, or she needs to stop going altogether.”

And to my very great surprise, she and her dad both said, “OK, let’s try homeschooling!”

And the next day she stayed home again and Martin went in to school and cleaned out her locker and filed the last bit of paperwork and POOF! She’s a homeschooler.

I think we’re all sort of reeling from the sudden change. Rio is looking to me for a LOT of direction. Every 10 minutes she’s all “OK, Mom, what do we do next?” She’s excited and curious and engaged in a way I haven’t seen her since the school year started.

Which is great, and also exhausting, because I don’t have all the answers. I don’t know what we do next. I don’t have a carefully detailed lesson plan for each day, or textbooks to assign work from, or even a very firm grasp of what our learning goals for the year should be and how we’ll know when we’ve achieved them. It’s a little scary.

And going to quickly improve, I’m sure. I anticipate us finding an equilibrium where she has more self-direction and I have more resources and plans. I’ve found a spelling curriculum I like, and ordered math and cursive textbooks, and I’m sneaking up on having a plan about reading and writing that goes beyond, “I dunno. Read something! Books are awesome.”

But ultimately I don’t anticipate our homeschooling looking this much like a traditional school. I expect the cursive workbook to get used for a few weeks and then gather dust as Rio discovers what she’s REALLY interested in learning.

It’s clear that she needs quite a bit of structure and guidance right now, though, so I’m aiming to give it to her as best I can. Structuring my time and telling other people what to do with theirs aren’t really my strong suits, though, so it’s uphill work.

This week she’ll have more structure in her days because she’s going to try out Parts and Crafts, our local community education resource center. I love these guys and their crazy project pretty hard. They’ve got this wonderful mix of freedom and structure in their program, with a lot of resources and support for kids, but ultimately placing responsibility for the kids’ education in the hands of the kids themselves (and to some extent their parents). It reminds me in important good ways of Sudbury Valley, but it’s a few blocks from my house and doesn’t have the Weighty Philosophy issues that SVS has.

The one caveat, and it’s a big one, is that in a program with 15 kids, Rio would be only the second girl to join. Someone has to go first (or in this case second) in breaking gender barriers, but I’m not loving it being my kid. I’ve been thinking a lot this weekend about how to support her having a good experience as a gender minority in her educational setting. I guess we’ll see how this week goes and what kind of issues (if any) emerge.

It seems naive to just throw her into that without addressing it, but I don’t know what strategies will be effective without knowing what the problems might be. One thing I’ve thought about is that I’ve been invited to offer a writing workshop to the kids in this program, and I wonder how I can bring anti-bias themes generally, and issues of gender and justice specifically, into my workshop. I’d love input on this, especially from the awesome women’s studies teachers I know read this blog.

So this is where we are: trying a bunch of things and seeing what sticks. Figuring out what she needs to learn and how to teach it very much on the fly.

For all that it’s been scary and overwhelming, and I’ve been still sick and low energy and kind of shell-shocked all week, there are things about homeschooling that are already full stop awesome.

I love getting to spend more time with my daughter, and seeing her engaged and excited by learning new things. It’s great to be talking with her the way I have been about this process, bringing her into decision-making about what we’ll learn and do together. I love how very big she is, how much of a grown person she’s become in the past year or so. It’s a gift to be with her on this journey.

Resources, support and suggestions all welcome. Like seriously: tell me what your favorite book was in 3rd grade, or what math program your kids use in your homeschool, or how you’d address the potential gender issues in her new program. Lay it on me. With love, please.

Related posts:

1. a funny thing happened on the way to homeschooling…
2. homeschooling, day 1
3. Being Nibbled By The Homeschooling Bug