In the beginning we didn't really think that we would be unschoolers. It was a byproduct of our radical lifestyle makeover. I knew I would have a small buffer while we went through the deschooling process, a time where we would allow our kids the space to decompress from the traditional public school model and thought form.
The first few weeks were horrifying for me as "responsible" parent. It was such a foreign territory for me to just allow the space for our kids to seek out things that were interesting to them. They played Minecraft with abandoned joy as often as they wanted. We took them to the local parks and just let them play. We took them everywhere with us and they got to participate in real world activities that they otherwise missed out on while they were in school.
I had moments of pure panic, especially when I let others get in my head and I would run out and buy educational workbooks and then bribe the kids to do them by assigning a dollar value to each workbook they completed. (This awful process was revisited several times in the first year) Each time I got the naysayer that told me I was "damaging my child's educational future" I would falter and doubt myself, my resolve & my choices. And without any prompting our kids would come out of left field and blow my socks off time and time again. They were so in tune with their passions and desires. As I would set back and watch in amazement as they just followed their passions, deep down inside I knew we were on the right path.
I personally had to re-frame everything I knew about education..... which was not much really. I was a control freak corporate junkie turned holistic practitioner after all. I had to put my trust in my kids and that was terrifying coming from my control freak in remission self. EK is and has been my rock through this whole process. He would be loving and patient with me and reassure me that we had in fact made the right decision to take the kids out of a broken system. He was able to embrace the idea of unschooling much faster than I. He didn't internalize the negative chatter that we got from our family, friends & random people that had an option they just had to share. He was able to just it brush off because he's cool like that.
Over the last 5 months we have really settled in to our unschooling. (We had a 6 month set back that I will write about in the near future) The expectations are dissolving away, the negative chatter is less and I have more compassion for myself when I'm having a rough day. Each day I'm grateful for the courage we found deep down inside to jump of the rat race of social norm to just be us.
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