The big munchkins paint while the baby naps.

It seems overnight that our world has kind of turned upside down, and is actually still rapidly changing everyday. We’re all adjusting and adapting as best we can, our children too. This is a lot on all of us. We all respond to abrupt change differently. Many people seek out familiarity and assurance in times of uncertainty—things like structure, routine, and schedules— and are asking themselves “How can I create more structure in our day?” 

I will also start by saying that maintaining structure when it comes to our family learning lab has never been a priority—or a strong skillset—of mine. I do come across this question often and—contrary to what some people in my family will tell you—I am not entirely opposed to structure. It serves us at times, I get that. And especially now with so many parents navigating the unexpected reality of facilitating their children’s learning at home for the foreseeable future, this question around structure is on a lot of people’s minds.

Honestly, I have no simple answer to this. But I do think this conversation is an awesome opportunity for advancing discovery and building community as parents and caregivers who are ourselves facing a brand new world right now. So in the interest of learning and growing, I have thought up these 3 writing/dialogue/thinking activities to do when considering whether or not having (more) structure matters right now. Then I’m going to share some of the ways I apply these tools on days when the ideal structure isn’t attainable and I have to use my creativity to find a better way.

My hope is that these short activities will help you get super-present with what your family truly needs. Collaborative, family-centered learning is all about keeping everyone—parents, children, aunties, grandmothers (whoever lives at home with you and in your day-to-day reality)—in mind when exploring what is best. It takes time to learn what everyone in our family needs and to find our optimal flow. Be gentle with yourself and everyone else through the discovery process.

1. Assessing Relevance
First question—and it might seem like a silly question, but trust me, it’s not—Why do you need structure? Make a list of all the reasons you feel you need structure. After completing your list, do a truth-check by asking yourself: “Is it absolutely true, with all that’s going on in my life today, that I need to have/be responsible for ______ (insert item from your list) right now?” Be sure to ask yourself this for each thing you put on the list.

If the answer is YES, keep it on the list. If the answer is NO, scratch it off the list. After you have done a truth-check for everything on your list, rewrite the list on a new page with only the things you said YES to. Set your list aside, we’re going to revisit it later.

Knowing YOUR family’s answer to why structure is or isn’t needed will greatly impact how you go about creating and facilitating your family’s learning practice. In thinking about this, we need to be very honest with ourselves and with all we’re managing everyday. There is no right or wrong way to answer these questions. Everyone has different factors on their plates and values things according to their beliefs, culture, and circumstances. Beginning with clarity here will lead to making choices and finding solutions that really work and sustain us.

2. Assessing Meaning
Next area of exploration: What does it mean to learn? Answer this in your own words, without googling a definition. Just off the top of your head, what does learning mean to you? Write your meaning of learning down in a journal. Now beside it or underneath it, answer this too:  What does it mean to have structure? Again in your own words and without editing or censoring. 

Once you feel good about your answers, take some time to really reflect on what came up for you. Observe the natural moments of your family rhythms. Where do learning and structure already overlap? Where do they diverge? How can they coexist more peacefully? How, if at all, do they require different things? Give yourself permission to be transparent with your answers. Honesty leads to greater clarity and understanding, which in turn leads to more peace, joy, and positivity for our family’s learning practice. 

3. Assessing Possibility 
Now go and get your truth-checked list from the first activity. For everything that you are absolutely sure you need (when it comes to structure) in order to sustain your family’s wellness, you’re going to identify Places of Possibility—P.O.P.s—that align with your family’s learning practice. 

Start with the most important thing on your YES list. Write it down on its own sheet of paper and draw a circle around it. This is your P.O.P. circle. Then consider the following questions: 

How can my children collaborate with me to meet this need?
How does this need already relate to something my children are interested in/excited about learning?
How can I meet this need while being present with my children?

For now, just brainstorm your answers. You can write them down as a list, or draw a line extending outward from your circle for every answer you put down, so that each P.O.P. circle will look like a sun when you’ve accumulated all your answers. 

Just one of the reasons I am usually too scared to let my children paint when I am the only adult in the house.

Practicing A New Way Forward
One thing that determines whether or not my crew is going to have a good day is how much food—read: what kinds of snacks do I have on hand to incentive cooperation at any given moment!—we have in the house. This is determined primarily by how much money is in the bank and how/when we can get to the store.

I know that if we start our day without the optimal selections of food, that I am going to soften all plans. Hangry children are not feeling story time! I’m going to be gentle with myself as the mother who has to spend a whole day on my own with munchkins who are underwhelmed about having beans and rice, again. I’m going to honor the limitations of the moment and proactively look for other ways to create peace in our day, like more babywearing, more touch, more snuggling, more freedom to play and make noise, more tablet time. By softening the structure of what I wanted our day to be, I am able to be more responsive to the truth of the moment, which is that I don’t have enough food in the house to facilitate a smooth day.

When assessing whether or not a particular structure is really possible at any given moment, always check in to see if you’ve been honest about what is really going on for you and your family. Once I can accept the truth, I can more readily access the P.O.P.s that will get me through this moment. My kids love going for a walk. So maybe instead of feeling bad that we didn’t get our morning reading done, we’ll burn some energy by walking to the store to pick up a few things. My kids love baking, so if there’s no money to go to the store, I might center our day around making cookies with them instead of feeling frustrated that the laundry is still a mountain in front of the closet. My children love dancing, so instead of demanding my kids sit still at the table and eat this very nutritious, you-have-to-eat-this-because-I-don’t-have-anything-else-in-the-house-and-I-can’t-deal-with-you-crying-all-day-because-you’re-hungry meal, I might blast some of their favorite jams and dish out spoonfuls of food while they dance and run around until all bowls are empty and all bellies are full.

It’s not always easy to see and access the P.O.P. And even though I know my grandmother would disapprove, the truth is that it’s much easier to feed children who don’t want to eat what you have when you give them alternative ways to express their freedom. Also, the more opportunities for collaboration we embrace when navigating our family’s essential needs, the more learning moments and meaningful exchanges occur organically throughout the day.

And again, everything going on in our world right now is a lot to process. One day, one breath, at a time. It’s okay if you find it challenging—or even impossible—to find places of possibility with some of your family’s critical needs. For instance, if there is something you have to do that you cannot do with your children, give yourself permission to do that when they are sleeping, or when they are in someone else’s care, or when they’re having a screen time break, or any other creative pocket of time you can access. 

Surviving and thriving in times of uncertainty means that we might have to break a lot to the rules that were necessary to maintaining a structure that is no longer relevant or harmonious for our family’s well-being.

This can feel very uncomfortable or intimidating, and like extremely new, unchartered terrain—because it is!— but this in itself is also a powerful place of possibility and learning for us and our children. Something amazing, and beautiful, and magical might now emerge with the abandoning of structure and the embracing of more honesty, understanding, communication, and creativity.

Remember that nurturing a collaborative, family-centered learning process takes time, patience, experimentation, and practice. Begin where you can begin. Start with where you are today and with what you have in front of you right now. You might soon realize that your new flow is more possible, and feels better, than anything you had before.

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A little over a year ago, without any premeditation, I heard a message one night while I was scrolling through my Facebook feed: “Get off of Facebook.” I didn’t question it, even though I’d been logged on continuously at that point for over 11 years. All my significant life markers in that time period had been documented and preserved in the eternal memory of digitalia. I had hundreds of photos, messages, stories, exchanges, and ideas on there. It was a lot to abruptly just turn off and walk away from. But at midnight, that’s what I did, and I haven’t felt the need to go back. 

It was a simple thing, but so profound at the same time. One of the first things I realized was that I had birthed all my children online at that point. Every pregnancy announcement, every birth photo, every early milestone—all coded and sorted in one of a billion bits of information, accessible to the whole world. All of the sudden that seemed so bizarre and unnatural to me to have these precious moments on display on such an impersonal platform. Who was taking in all my information? Who was celebrating me? Scrutinizing me? Tracking me? 

I know, I know, in this technology age we leave traces of ourselves everywhere. Here I am now, putting more information on my site, Mother Mother Everywhere. But I do feel very different this time because I’m the author of everything on this site. I own and control 100% of my content in a way that is not autonomously possible on social media channels. For me, for where I am right now in my mothering artist reality, this balance feels good to me.

There were more layers of revelations in those first few months of being off of Facebook. One, I didn’t realize how much time I spent posting bits of my life and perusing through everyone else’s. Immediately after disconnecting my account, I started writing letters to the mothers in my village. Nearly everyday for the next 3 months, I wrote intimate, longform dialogues exploring all the things that were too raw, too personal, too radical to share in public domains. I was able to open up about traumas, heartbreaks, losses, disappointments, hopes, fears, and dreams in this very meaningful way that created shared space for the other person to receive and respond to me in her own time. I loved the extended ability to share and to share so deeply. But even more that that I loved discovering the possibilities of slow communication. There’s so much we lose in the pressure to speed through everything. A text, an email, even a phone call can’t hold the fullness of all our stories. As mothers and women we need regular interaction with safe spaces where we can unravel, come undone, be seen and witnessed with loving, gentle reception. This is what I was able to access more abundantly once I signed off of Facebook.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago, and the same internal directive sounded off in my head: “Sign out of Instagram.” Again, there wasn’t a lot of forethought or questioning. It just felt very right and very important to do right then. I haven’t missed seeing the posts of my friends and people I followed. I’ve made more of an effort to reach out to people directly when I genuinely want to connect with them, share a story or picture of my kids, or invite them to participate in a project with me. Even my mass emails have come to a pause. I want to reach out to people who are reaching out to me. I want to experience a mutual, human connection that feels good for everyone involved. This is an interesting space to be in as I’m still in the launching process for Mother Mother Everywhere, but so far it feels like the right way to move forward—building personal, one-to-one relationships with the mothering artists I’ve created this site for and growing slowly from there. 

This is a whole new dance for me. In the past posting on social media has been a central part of how I share my work, grow our business, and stay connected with my loved ones who live in other parts of the world. I have given a lot of thought to the potential ways that deactivating my accounts could cause me to lose touch with people and opportunities. But the more I consider everything, the list of benefits of signing off of social media grows longer and longer everyday. This morning I made a note of the 5 biggest improvements to my life that have happened since tuning out of Facebook and Instagram, and tuning into me, my art, and my family: 

1. More time to read: I always thought of myself as a slow reader, and so oftentimes large books intimidated me and I didn’t even try them. Now, I welcome little pockets of reading time and just get in as much as I can in those interludes, usually while breastfeeding my baby to sleep.

2. Ability to practice learning a new language everyday: I have been intending to start studying a new language for our next family residency for a long time now. We’ve been dreaming up the details of this journey and the more we make plans, the more critical I feel it is for me to reach a level of proficiency in the language before we arrive so I can support myself and my family in acclimating to life in this new world.

3. Reading more books to my children: We read so many books everyday now—and sometimes the same book gets read 10 times in one day! There are books all over the house, and reading time is a spontaneous adventure that has become even more accessible now, as I’m more present with them in all the freed up moments I have from not being on social media.

4. More extensive research about writers, artists, mothers, and fertility studies: I have always loved researching the lives of writers and artists who fascinate me. I also love studying and learning about the diversity of mothering expressions and fertility practices through the history of humanity and around the globe. I enjoy all the extra minutes there are now to journey deeply into another creator’s process or discover the intricacies of ancient fertility rituals in a world that was once so far removed from me.

5. More time to write, create, and dream: This is the most rewarding part of shifting off of social media—having the time to be more of the creator I have always dreamed myself to be. Mothers especially are constantly told that our children prohibit us from deepening our practice as creators, but really our children inspire us to learn how to create in different ways. A significant part of my expanding creative momentum has come from identifying my former relationship to social media as a major obstruction to having abundant time for writing books, dancing, and dreaming up more creative programs for my family and my mother village.

I don’t think this is a one-size-fits-all conversation. We all have different ways of engaging, navigating, and benefiting from the current technology advances in our world. It’s important to pay attention to what we need as mothers and creatives in this now. Only we can hear the inner voice of our intuition guiding us toward a more fulfilling and joyful reality. The most important thing we have to assess day by day, moment by moment is are we listening, really listening, to ourselves, to our passions, to the creative revelations inviting us to become more of all we want to be. The time is there for us to create with it what we will. It’s always been there, and the more we trust our paths as mothering artists, the more time we’ll discover we have to bring all our creative visions to life.

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from richelle:

Ah! I am so there! I was wondering why I hadn’t seen you on IG! But I have just recently signed off social media myself and it already feels so right! Life feels so much more spacious, less cluttered. More room for what matters, less of what doesn’t. All your reasons I am either experiencing or excited to hopefully experience. Thrilled to see what evolves in this time and space. And I know social media will still be there if I ever decide to utilize it again. I also know that would look very different for me than it did before.

Love,
Richelle

The munchkins enjoy taking over Mommy’s pilates mat and inventing their own magical world of possibilities.

Sometimes looking at all the materials for homeschooling that are available these days is dizzying. There’s 500 different ways to do 1000 different things. Charts, flash cards, kits, gadgets, online tools, printouts, things to assemble, supplies to manage. I have gradually been pulling back from the sea of overwhelm as I embrace a more minimalist approach to my life, our home, and how we navigate the world. The last family trip we took—to our family reunion—we managed to carry everything for 5 people in one backpack, one duffel, and 3 kid-sized backpacks. We took the bus to the metro, the metro to the Amtrak, and the train to our destination. We didn’t rent a car when we arrived but just got rides from family. 

It was exciting to see us moving through the world a little lighter. The year before we’d gone on an overnight, to a place much closer, and I’d packed twice as many bags plus a full suitcase. In our home space I’ve been slowly finding my way through the decluttering maze, learning how to let go of things that I don’t really need. The biggest help to me so far in my newborn minimalism is Francine Jay’s book, The Joy of Less. Even though I haven’t finished all of it, her STREAMLINE process opened my eyes to how much more freely I could be living if I reduced the amount of things I had to keep up with, care for, preserve, restore, and buy. 

In looking at our supplies for our family learning lab, I started to see that we don’t need a lot of materials to have very meaningful experiences. The main elements I really want that will support our optimal flow is simple, effective wall-space organizers so that my toddler can’t get her hands into all our materials. Right now, we have very little “up space,” and Jubilee can pretty much access everything. But if I had some floating shelves to keep our basic materials—art supplies, paper, worksheets, puzzle pieces, building materials—handy and out of her reach, there’d be much more efficiency with our space. As it is now, to set up something for the munchkins, I have to dig through all my toddler-proof hiding spaces and retrieve whatever it is we need to do our activity. 

I’ve also been softening my own understanding of what qualifies as a meaningful moment. The more I follow my children’s leads, the more I see that they extract great meaning, joy, and enthusiasm from very organic moments. Walking to the bus stop, shopping at the grocery store, talking to someone on the train, looking at the same dinosaur exhibit at the museum, collecting sticks in the park, playing in dirt, reading books on the front porch, running back and forth from the front of the house to the back, making up their own imaginary worlds inside their blankets and constructing elaborate storylines to go with them. Most of what they love to do doesn’t require external materials. This revelation has been really profound to me because I see that it’s not the things they crave, but the experience of play, surprise, experimentation, discovery, and expanding connections about how their world works that makes the moment rich for them.

The question that keeps me reflecting and continuing to grow into a more minimalist flow is, “what’s the bare minimum we need to have a wonderfully engaging experience today?” So far our book collection, magnetic tiles, building blocks, race cars, our chalkboard and dry erase board, writing tools, coloring tools, blank paper, speaker system and music playlist are our daily go-to materials. Also, our home’s ample open space—we have almost no furniture—for them to run, dance, and play capoeira throughout the day is extremely essential. None of these things take up a lot of space, and we can spend good chunks of time diving into various stories, games, experiments, and activities with just these few things. 

It’s taken time to evolve our family learning lab in this way. I started out wanting to buy lots of things that seemed to make for a stimulating moment. But the things would soon become used up, dried out, discarded, lost, broken, missing pieces, forgotten about. Meanwhile, the munchkins would happily move on, not the least bit concerned with the absence of the thing that had so entertained them. Instead, they would create with whatever was around them, and find absolute bliss in the process of being present with their surroundings. I am always fascinated at how the most mundane object, or tattered book, or thrift store toy can bring recurring moments of pleasure to them on any given day. Watching them enjoy their home, their toys, their adventures, their world is very enlightening. They have a gentle wisdom about them that inspires me to keep going deeper with my own minimalism goals. 

I’m still learning how to determine what things we really need, but I am getting better at distinguishing between items that will just take up space and items that will aid me in facilitating our family learning lab. Plenty of times I am adding things I see online to my imaginary wishlist of all the things I would get for them if I could buy them right now. But then I’m snapped back to the reality of what I hold in my hands in this moment, and how we’re rolling with what we have today. I remind myself that, as I am, I already have all the things I need to nurture a dynamic and exciting learning environment for them. 

I have my very attentive presence to offer them, my constant commitment to answering the million questions about the sun, robots, growing old, muscles and bones, living and dying, traveling to Africa to see their other grandmother, the mechanics of airplanes, the magic of mixing colors—all questions usually thrown out there for inquiry before breakfast is even served. Our ongoing dialogue, our physical intimacy and perpetual proximity to each other and our home space, our creativity, our questions and ideas, our continuous, unscheduled time together—these are the elements of truly meaningful learning moments. Our most precious things can not be bought online or found on sale at a big box store. We are each other’s greatest resources, and we already possess the essential tools that we need to grow, learn, explore, and create more joys.

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Bloom exploring how trees are living and breathing too just like human beings.

The more I deepen my process as the facilitator of our family learning lab, the more I keep coming back to how I want to feel inside these labors. Most recently, the word that stays with me is kindness. I want to feel kindness as I am learning how to create and hold this dynamic, creative, discovery-based, learning space for my family. 

This is also what I want for my children, to feel kindness from me, their family, and the many folks who will be a part of their world as they dive deeper into the magic of learning. I want their journey to be anchored by positive, gentle, encouraging adults, who support them in taking larger leaps when asking questions and seeking answers, when braving the unknowns that pop up when conducting an experiment, when stumbling through the inevitably difficult parts of their own transformational discoveries.

I am making more of an effort to acknowledge this intention of kindness as a core element of our whole family learning lab process. The truth is, I have not been treated kindly by some of the people in my family and my community when it comes to choosing to nurture my children’s education outside of the dominant “send your child to school” culture. Every time I have encountered a negative comment or incident, it’s been very hurtful, and it takes me a while to recover my sense of confidence and hope in my vision for our family learning lab. Mostly, I do this emotional restoration work alone, in the privacy of my own thoughts, or between the lines of my journal, or within my liberated, dancing body while the munchkins run circles around me in their own playful delight. Sometimes I have vented, and even cried, to other mamas in my village who have dealt with similar criticisms or mean things said to them about their homeschooling process. 

When I think of how a tree grows, how any plant grows, I think of it flourishing in an environment where it is treated well, where it has all it needs to expand and take up more space, where it is immersed in the forward momentum of its becoming. A tree would have a hard time developing into its full potential if when it was a sapling it was constantly kicked at or stepped on, its roots yanked from the ground before its foundation was solid, if in its delicate infancy it was denied adequate water and sunlight, restricted from fresh air to breathe. The tree, wired for growth, would indeed keep trying to become more of what it dreams to be, but after a while, the constant lack of support from the external environment would overpower even its will to live. It would gradually give up, its passion to live fading more and and more each day.

I don’t think we’re much different as humans. We need kindness, support, generosity, and protection when we’re in our most vulnerable stages. When we’re at the beginning of something—whether as the embryo in our mother’s womb, or as a little person holding the pencil to the page for the first time, or as a mother navigating the dense jungle of cultivating an authentic learning process for her children that dreams outside the lines of the society’s rules for what education is— when everything is newly forming and still determining its path toward sustainability, we need a lot of positive encouragement, space to grow and become, and an overall gentle, loving presence from everyone intimately involved. 

So many times I’ve pondered what my experience as a mother and as a learner would be if the people closest to me were simply kinder to me. I know I am doing my best everyday, and I know I’d be doing even better if I had more loving interactions with people in my family and community. It’s ironic that through their meanness about my choice to create a new reality outside of the school system, those naysayers actually reinforce my belief in my dream for our family learning lab. Through their words it becomes clear that their education, and mine too because I grew up in that system too, was tragically incomplete. If in their adulthood they have become so closed-minded, so fearful of new ideas, so hostile towards something that disrupts their notion of the truth—then what useful thing have they really learned to be able to thrive in this vast and changing world? 

Creativity, innovation, openness to fresh ways of understanding, conscious, deep listening skills, the ability to consider alternative perspectives even if they’re so different from your own, and an ever-growing passion for what we are learning are what propels humanity forward. To grow, we have to have room to come undone from what we are, and reemerge as something new, and likely something better. 

In our family learning lab I am daily searching for more and more opportunities to model these expansive qualities as the norm for a vibrant, heart-centered education. I want my children to seed their learning practices in the lush soil of a warm, welcoming, and loving environment. I want them to understand on a soul-deep level that their growth as human beings, while ultimately initiated from within themselves, is supposed to be unconditionally supported from the people around them, people who at the very least should have the capacity to be loving, kind, and gentle with them—and their mother—through the learning process.

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It makes a difference in our everyday moments how much love we feel from those around us. This is always true. And as mothers who are navigating the unchartered terrains of discovering what family-centered learning looks like for our children, this love is necessary to sustaining a vibrancy, a joy, a hope in our work.

When we feel loved, supported, celebrated, and seen we function differently. We greet the day with more energy. We face the challenges, we find more creative solutions, we hold onto dreams with a more expansive and lasting faith in ourselves and our process. Love matters, and feeling deeply loved matters the further we journey into these unknowns.

I come from a family of educators, engineers, and business owners. Academic achievement was always praised. Sometimes my great-aunt in New York would send us money for getting good grades. The Honor Roll and other merits were the expectation, period. Doing well in school was just what everyone did. Getting into college wasn’t so amazing, as I was a fifth generation college student—something that is phenomenal for a black family surviving generations of racism, violence, and economic oppressions in the United States of America.

For me to have had such a privileged start, for all the sacrifices that were made for me to have a “good education,” my choice to nurture my children outside of that system, and instead within in family-centered learning model rooted in love, experimentation, and passion, is baffling to many people who had a part in raising me. Most often this is expressed as bewilderment. Sometimes its more hostile. It takes a lot to be present with the process. I spend long stretches of time allowing for the slow revelations of truth to happen organically in our family process. Many days I am practicing how to really feel my way through to what and how our family learning lab will be. And on days when there is no clear and tangible love shown for our efforts, it can be frustrating, even heartbreaking.

In my family we communicate on a seven-person text group about all things related to the family. It’s my parents, my husband, my brothers, and my sister-in-law all on one thread. It’s how we stay connected across multiple households. Of all the grandkids, my children are the only ones who are not in a sit-down school. (Yes, I’m experimenting with moving away from words like “traditional” to refer to the dominant school culture.) When my nieces and nephews get rewarded at school, or accomplish something exciting, or do something interesting, there is an outpouring of positive messages from the family. Their goodness, and the value of that goodness, is easily identifiable in the system of standardized education. A report card with As and Bs, an award from a school contest, a certificate from the principal—all of this is familiar to the adults in the family and so the expression of encouragement and congratulations for the children who achieve these things flows effortlessly.

The story is different for my kids. Yes, they get there share of accolades too, but learning-based praise mostly comes when I share something simple and concrete like a picture from them at the library, or sitting with a book in their lap. When I share other types of moments from our unorthodox family learning lab—perhaps an experiment of some sort that got really, really messy, or some dance game that they invented all by themselves— sometimes there’s crickets on the line. I’ll check back all day, and there will be nothing, no acknowledgement of their growth, their discovery, their work to learn something new. They are too young to care about the responsiveness of the adults in their family, but as the mother who is laboring so passionately to cultivate this richly immersive world for them, it hurts to be so unseen in this way. I put so much into shaping this happy, free, creative life for them. And even though I know their happiness is what matters most, I am still grappling at times with the emotional consequences of choosing a path not fully accepted by our larger family.

After almost four years of intentionally growing into our family learning lab process, this is the first time I’m accessing language to articulate how the silence feels. There is a pang of doubt reverberating too: Will my children miss out on being celebrated—on being loved in a certain way—because they are not being educated in the way that is deemed normal and appropriate by their extended family? What risk am I taking in walking this unscripted path with my children, one that is not fully understood or appreciated by others in their family? Is the love and labor I’m seeding into their their brilliant black lives enough to carry them, to carry me, through?

This week the munchkins and I stumbled into a hilarious interpretation of some fun facts about the planet Venus. Reading a book about space that Wonder selected from the library, we came to a page with an image focused on a red-hot planet enveloped in the dense blackness of outer space. Wonder looked at it and said he wanted to know about the “fire rock.” I thought that was such a cool and accurate way to describe what he was seeing, and I told him so.

As I read to them about why Venus is the hottest planet, even though Mercury is the closest to the sun, we started having a conversation about how the clouds are able to trap so much heat. I spontaneously thought up a way to illustrate this concept to them with something that they would love—their favorite super hero blanket that makes a daily appearance in one munchkin adventure or another. I thought if they could feel how being wrapped up in the blanket made them get warmer, they might have a better grasp of the idea that the clouds surrounding Venus made the planet maintain such a high temperature. At first I wrapped them individually, and they took turns getting to be Venus. But then they wanted to be wrapped up together—great, I thought, more heat! This is where the laughter got really good. Every time I wrapped them up they would try to move together as one hot planet, and this was a very comical (and perhaps slightly dangerous, but only one collision with the floor, so yay!) feat for sure.

Watching them laugh so full-heartedly was a beautiful moment. I was like, I LOVE this moment! This right here, this is why I keep trusting the evolution of our family-centered learning practice, for moments like this! It came to me that whether or not they choose to become astronauts or engineers at NASA, they’ll always have this random nugget of knowledge about why Venus is the hottest planet in our solar system. And that little bit of knowing will be anchored in this delicious memory of laughter, of touch, of play, of warmth, of sweet brotherhood, in a bright, spacious, sun-filled room, with their mother and baby sister.

This is what is so sacred to me, the ability to cultivate these lasting moments with such care and tenderness, without any limitations on our time or subject or methodology, and with a lovely and deliberate proximity to my children.

This personal celebration is what I have to hold onto when after 24 hours no one on the family thread has commented on the picture I sent—with a full explanation—of the boys being the planet Venus. When I finally ask my mother, the engineer, if she saw my message, she says she’s concerned I’m introducing things that are too complicated for them to understand. So then I tell her that they wanted to learn about the planets, and the whole thing just happened on its own. But that is the full reach of her interest with this learning moment that is so wonderful for me as a mother.

For a second I am quiet, waiting, longing for her to say more, feeling like the little girlchild who wants her mommy to see she’s doing a good job and to say so out loud. The brief silence is just long enough for me to realize the extent of all I’m wanting from this exchange, of all I’m asking for from my mother, whose definite love for me and my children does not fully eclipse the uncertainty she feels about how her daughter is raising her grandchildren. But even as I can grasp the totality of all that is impossible and imperfect with this moment, I am still holding out for a slight miracle, for a hint of celebration in her tone, for a recognition, a validation of my creativity, my genius, my innovative, on-the-spot, really-amazingly-clever-bringing-joy-to-my-kids idea to facilitate an embodied understanding of the planets orbiting the sun in our very gigantic and multidimensional galaxy! Isn’t that something? I want to ask, but I don’t.

Remember the love! The mantra plays inside my head, even as my mother and I continue to talk for a while about all the other family news. I have to remind myself, again and again, of me and the munchkins’ special discovery, of our complete and fulfilling experience of shared joys and expanding understandings of the world around us. This is the love, this is the LOVE! This is us making our own bliss, even if no one else can see it, hear it, touch it, believe it. This is us, having a really, really, happy encounter with some scientific facts about the “planet of love” itself. This is us, moving through these moments on our own terms, and embracing our connection to all things in this magical universe we call home.

I love that my children are very close in age, and are learning alongside each other all the time. There is a constant interplay of roles exchanged, a fluid and unpredictable shapeshifting amongst themselves. They morph back and forth, between teacher and student, leader and follower, at rapid speeds. Everyday, everyone gets to be everything. And sometimes, I get to be a kind of nothing inside their fantastic world, a grateful witness simply enjoying the opportunity to be in the midst of their boundless, learning magic.

I always tell people I get how those one-room schoolhouses could really work. Like, the older students get stronger in their skills by having to teach the younger ones. And the younger ones are consistently being encouraged to do more, know more, and grow more, because they see that children not much older than them are leading the way.

This lovely dialogic space of knowledge fosters trust, community, and a deep and lasting spirit of possibility for everybody. The whole of the learning phenomena is made real and tangible. A complete and visible transference of information and experience can be accessed by each participant, can be held and claimed in some authentic way as his or her own.

This interdependent dynamic is something I cherish about our family learning lab process. When everyone has frequent opportunities to be the “teacher,” new levels of understanding are brought to light. Listening to my boys explain things to each other in their own words gives me so much insight into what they really care about, what excited them most about a game we played, what they comprehended from the story, or what they took away from a conversation they overheard on the bus.

Between my children and those in our village, I am fortunate to have so many little teachers around me at all times. I learn so much about life, creativity, change, growth, risks, hope, faith, loss, love, passion, imagination, heartbreak, and resilience everyday. I am grateful to my munchkins for being so generous with their knowledge.

Even though it’s been a little over three years since I started consciously imagining and creating our family learning lab, I know we’re still at the beginning of our radical and beautiful experiment. It makes me feel really amazing that in just a short time I’ve given birth to all these amazing people, lovely people who are each becoming my most amazing teacher in their galactically individual ways. I also feel really good knowing that even 10 years from now, 20 years from now, we’ll always be at some part of the beginning.