Free your kids

There is a wonderful page on facebook called Free Your Kids   https://www.facebook.com/freeyourkids

This is only one of this father's wonderfully written thoughts!

"What if I admitted to you that it's scary? What if I told you that many days I get tired of being different? What if I confided in you that poking the tiger often leaves me feeling unbalanced and out-of-sorts? What if I told you that, sometimes, I want to shovel the dirt back into the rabbit hole?

What if I told you that critically examining every piece of information I'm presented with leaves me... drained? What if I told you that I sometimes wish to lower my head and rejoin the safety of the flock? What if I told you that re-examining and critiquing every custom and belief I had instilled in me as a child leaves me feeling insecure and frightened?

What if I told you I must find the truth no matter where it lies? What if I told you that I can't turn it off, that I can't disengage, that I can't simply decide to become "normal" again? What if I told you that, for me, knowing the truth and living my ideals trumps any temporary desire to soothe my soul with platitudes?

What if I told you that living freely doesn't come easy? What if I told you that questioning everything scares the hell out of me? What if I told you my biggest fear was losing everything I had because I failed to conform? What if I told you that following this path is lonely and confusing?

But what if I told you I can't stop? And furthermore, what if I told you I couldn't stop even if I knew for certain that every one of my fears would come to pass? What if I told you that, no matter what, I can't and won't put the genie back in the bottle?"

School

Recently I took a wonderful class on coursera!  If you want you can turn in participation and get credit for taking the class.  I think it costs something like $100 to get a signed certificate that you took the class. 


But I didn't have time to figure out how to turn in all the homework, and I didn't take it because I wanted someone else to know I had taken it.


I took it because I wanted to learn.


I would have to say, of all the classes I have ever taken, it was the most educational.


So what is school?


Is it a set of rules and tests to see if you followed them well enough to get enough credit to be looked at to get hired for a job?


To me, my learning, my reasoning for going to school was to learn.  And that is what I got from it.


If they had been teaching something I could have learned another way, from a book or a video game, or from talking to friends, then that is where I would have gone for the information, not to school.


I do not send my kids to school.  But I am very much for free public school!  I have often lauded the opportunity there is in this country to go to school for free!  But do we have free schools in the U.S.A.?  Are our schools places where  people can go to learn?  Where people go to get knowledge they can't get better and easier someplace else?


Do our public schools give us knowledge or tell us what knowledge to get?  Do they open our minds and help us discover new ways of learning we wouldn't have thought of on our own, so we can open the floodgates of the unknown and drink in the depths of understanding?  Or do they restrict how we are allowed to learn and tell us not only what we "must" learn, but where and how we must find that knowledge.  Are these really, by definition, schools?   Places to measure and keep track of learning?  Yes.  Places to create competition over limited types of learning?  To be sure.  But "schools"?  Places we can go to discover what we never would have known otherwise?  I think not.


Now, there are many schools in other parts of the world, that do serve this purpose.  Even here in the U.S.A.,  there are likely places where what a child discovers in school, cannot be had other places, given their situation in life. 


If the only person I knew who could tell me what the words on a page meant, was a teacher at school, I would gladly walk 10 miles there and 10 miles back each day.  Some kids do. 

             "there are no classrooms.  There are no desks.  It doesn't matter.  There is a teacher,"




Thankfully we have a place that is free to everybody no matter their age, that provides boundless information in increasingly innovative ways.  The Public Library.

                                                           That Book Woman

My kids' happiness

Sometimes my kids do something that mortifies me.  Usually it has to do with respect or unselfishness towards other people, especially their elders and people younger than them.  I want to somehow communicate to them how important it is to love and respect.  But is this concept of "you aren't 'good' unless you are nice" what I really want to teach them?  Do I want them to know that I think "less" of them when they are rude?  Do I want them to know how much more righteous I am, than them, because "when I was there age ...."?  Or do I want them to feel the intrinsic joy of seeing a softly held back smile sneak out of the shy face of an old lady as they make her day?

I love competitiveness, but is "goodness"  a competition?  Do I get my reward from being good the same way I get it from outsmarting a brainteaser?  Do I get my reward from anything from the beautiful inner joy of feeling wonderful, or only as I compare to others - or some imaginary scale I made up?  Even if I'm only comparing myself to myself, is my happiness only from how I measure up?

Then my teenager, when I'm least expecting it, when I'm not tired and judgmental and thinking "he should!" thoughts, stops in the middle of an online epic battle and asks my mom what he can do to help.  

Is the beauty of a moment like this worth it's rarity?  Is it worth waiting for?  If I had raised my kids differently, I could have coerced him into helping all the time.  Is this one true pure act of helping because he truly feels it inside and wants to, worth a hundred kind acts he might have otherwise performed out of the pride of "being good"?

To me it is.

Is it really about how "good" he is, or about how happy he is?  Being good IS being truly happy.  Not a superior feeling of being better than some idea of how things "should" be, but a happy glow inside.  The word authentic comes to mind. 

Zuko	Why can't I do it? Instead of lightning it keeps blowing up in my face... like everything always does.
Iroh	I was afraid this might happen. You will not be able to master lightning until you have dealt with the turmoil inside you.
Zuko	What turmoil?
Iroh	Zuko, you must let go of your feelings of shame if you want your anger to go away.
Zuko	But I don't feel any shame at all. I'm as proud as ever.
Iroh	Prince Zuko, pride is not the opposite of shame, but its source. True humility is the only antidote to shame.

The Last Airbender season 2 ch. 9 "Bitter Work"


When we think our happiness is dependent on how we measure up on the "righteous scale", we not only rob ourselves of the subtle and underlying taste of true happiness,  but we judge others as we judge ourselves.  Pointing our fingers and mocking at their lack of righteousness,  we hold out a barbed hand to rescue them.  But if they truly followed our idea of perfection, would we enjoy it?  Would we enjoy the lack of someone to ridicule?  The lack of someone to "help!" 

"And it came to pass that I beheld a ^atree, whose ^bfruit was desirable to make one ^chappy.
And as I partook of the fruit thereof it filled my soul with exceedingly great ^ajoy;
And I beheld a great and ^bspacious building
 filled with people, both old and young, both male and female; and their manner of dress was exceedingly fine; and they were in the ^aattitude of ^bmocking and pointing their fingers towards those who had come at and were partaking of the fruit.

  And after they had ^atasted of the fruit they were ^bashamed, because of those that were ^cscoffing at them; and they ^dfell away into forbidden paths and were lost.

And great was the multitude that did enter into that strange building. And after they did enter into that building they did point the finger of ^ascorn at me and those that were partaking of the fruit also; but we heeded them not."
(I Nephi ch. 8)

One Sunday as I opened the heavy soundproof door of the Chapel, my toddler spun across the room as only a three year old can, and made sound contact with the edge of the door.  I hadn't pulled it open very swiftly, and I hadn't realized how fast she must have been spinning, so at first I didn't know how badly she had been hurt.   Her ear splintering screams, however, immediately testified as to how mistaken I was!

I rushed her to the kitchen where I desperately tried to get her to let me put ice on it, closing the doors as I knew only too well that she was all anybody could really hear as the meeting started.

Seeing my friend in her car just outside the door, I took my child in my arms and went to see if she had anything that would help calm my daughter enough to endure what I deemed as the necessity of ice.  

Just outside the door I bent down again to try to hold the ice against the rapidly growing lump on her forehead, hoping it wouldn't split open.  And that is when a concerned lady stuck her head out of the door and said in all the splendor of her concern for the insult of the child, "Did you ever consider that she might be crying because it's cold outside!" and then disappeared with a humph (I had previously always wondered what this would look like in real life, lol, but she really did it!) before I would have time to dare respond to her exceeding wisdom.

Sugar, as any drug, is wonderful when used appropriately, and calmed with a chocolate coin, my daughter got her head iced and her concussion eventually wore off.  We were very worried at first, but then I had time to worry more about my feelings towards this lady.  I so wanted to forgive her, but I didn't know how.

Wasn't I a freedom fighter?  Would giving her some slack lessen my stand against judging people.  We never really know what is happening when we look in on a situation, from the outside.

So many times I have discussed with like minded friends online the importance of standing up for children.  That is all she had really been doing.  But my bitterness towards her wasn't just for being grossly misjudged.  (Did she really think I was perhaps punishing my wildly protesting child by making her stand out in the cold?)  But what if I had been?  What if I had been that evil and bad?  I have seen less than kind parents in public places like the grocery store, and I have known very well that it was the parent more so than the child, that needed my love.  If I drew attention to the judged inadequacy of their love for their child (which we all can unquestionably tell by a persons parenting skills),  I knew very well that child would be beaten and blamed for the embarrassment later on.   So I had no illusion that this lady was really trying to help.  Perhaps she had that illusion, though.

Then it hit me!  I could only feel greater sorrow for her circumstance than for mine.  Her response was ignited by a true belief way deep down in her soul, that her self worth was inseparably dependent on how "good" of a mother she was.  A deep scar that I knew only too well myself.  A battle I fought desperately in the dark hours when the state of the house was such that I thought I deserved for CPS to take my children away.  A thought that nagged at my sanity when I had just recycled all the library books because circumstances I felt helpless to control ended up resulting in a bleeding head because they had become airborne in the hands of an unsettled toddler.  I knew this feeling to the depths of my toes, to the back of my throat where tears reside.  If there was one dark cloud behind which the monsters of my life reside, it was my inadequacy as a parent making me know I was not worth being loved.

Thankfully I have a husband who believes in forgiveness, imperfection, and trying again and again - not in the beauty of succeeding, but he beauty of trying.  Perhaps this lady had no such person in her life.  Perhaps her judgment of me was merely an outlet for the pent up tenseness that had built inside of her her whole life.  I could only feel horror at how decisively I had judged someone drowning from prejudice,  so incredibly like myself.

I laud Christ for waking the religious world up to their reliance on pride in their actions of righteousness.  He gave the world a taste of true joy from authentic kindness - without caring what the judgment of ones self or others was of the action.  Now I look at my warped idea of following him, and need a wake up call to authentic joy from good.  Good is what makes us truly happy inside.  And I need to somehow lay aside my piety of self righteousness that makes me like or hate myself depending on how I judge myself on my scale of righteousness.

It is like the cotton candy parable.  I love cotton candy!  If I went to the fair and didn't get any cotton candy because I couldn't afford it, and then upon returning home, learned that the cotton candy had been free, would I be sad because I was "bad" for not having gotten to eat cotton candy, or would I be sad because I wanted to eat cotton candy and missed out.  Sin is not happiness.  It is it's own punishment.  We don't need our own, or anybody elses opinions to make us embarrassed or sad for causing our own sorrow by sin. 

And true happiness doesn't come from recognizing where we measure on a scale of righteousness, only from feeling happy deep inside from following our inborn love of doing good.