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.

---

more from our family learning lab

ARE YOU READY TO live a more fertile and creative life?
JOIN THE FERTILE FREEDOMS MOVEMENT

leave a comment

Photo by Colin A. Danville

Dear Children,

You need to know that tears are as much a part of this life as laughter. For the most part, your days are made up of giggles and squeals, of running and jumping, of exploring and questioning. You spend your time investigating curious ideas and constructing impromptu experiments to test out those ideas. Along the way you stumble into your discoveries and are led to ask even more questions about yourself, your family, your life, the world, and everything in it. 

You know sadness too. You know the sting of busting your head on the floor when you’re moving too fast, or having a toy unjustly yanked from your hands, or being sent to the corner for the very mean thing you said to your brother or sister. You know the disappointment that comes from not getting your way, or from having to wait until the elusive next time to get the thing you really, really want. 

But mostly, you associate crying with a phenomenon of your frustrating moments as children. Not often do you have to witness your mother’s unhappiness, but it can happen. It does happen time to time. And you need to know that this is also a normal part of life. Sometimes your mother will have tears falling down her face, and you won’t know why, and you won’t be able to make them stop with a gentle kiss on the cheek. You won’t be able to pick me up and rock me side to side as I do for you. You won’t be able to pull out a breast and soothe my woes as you nurse me to sleep. You won’t be able to strap me on your back and carry me around until I feel better. All these ways are how you’ve learned to tend to tears, and it may come as a shock to you that none of these methods will help you if you see your mother crying. 

Unlike your tears, I won’t be able to explain all of mine to you. In those moments, it’s generally very complicated. Sometimes it will be because someone else said something harsh or cruel to mommy and my feelings are hurt. Sometimes it will be about some drama in our family that’s too much for munchkin ears and brains to comprehend. Sometimes it will be because my heart is broken and it will take me a really long time to mend it and recover my joy. 

You, sweet as you are, will naturally want to help me feel better. And you may feel powerless at the realization that there is no instant remedy for mommy’s pain. One day, a long, long time from now when you are adults, you will understand what I mean by “some things take time.” Right now, you live with such raw devotion to the present moment, you can’t fully fathom this time that it takes for grown-ups to sometimes feel better. Still, in your own way, you will try to soothe me. And I will be grateful, even as I know I won’t be able to pretend everything is okay so that you feel good about your efforts to make mommy feel better. 

It’s important that I teach you how to honor all of your emotions. Some emotions are more difficult to experience, but they are as much a part of the fabric of humanity as all the lovely, feel-good feelings. I am responsible for showing you how to navigate your emotional landscape as authentically as you can. In showing you my tears, I am helping you understand that grief, loss, heartache, and despair are natural parts of the human experience. Little as you are, you too are human. And one day, you will have to grow through your own awakenings into the depths and possibilities of your emotions. Sometimes I won’t be there to pat your back or hold you in my lap while you feel the full weight of your sorrows. Sometimes your tears will overwhelm you, and the sobbing will move violently through your body, and you will have to let your storm run its course. You will have to give yourself the time and space to find your own way back to peace.

But you are a ways off from such adult labors. For now, you will experience most of your tough moments within reach of your mother’s loving support. You will be encouraged to use your words as they come to you, and as you mature, to be thorough in sorting and identifying what is really bothering you. This is a critical life skill, and as your mother, I am here to model emotional intelligence and emotional literacy for you. These are things we practice for a lifetime. As you grow, you will come to find your own truths, your own rhythms within this dance. In this way you will learn to have empathy for others, as you too will know intimately what it feels like to sometimes have to navigate the sad, lonely, devastating parts of life too. 

Tears are not something to be afraid of, is what I’m really saying. Tears bring us clarity, like how the rain washes out the old and makes room for the new to shine and bloom. Sometimes we have to cry so that we can finally admit our honest needs to ourselves. Sometimes we have to shed our tears so that we can stop resisting and censoring the thing pressing so passionately on our hearts. Sometimes we have to release our hidden dam of salty waters so that we might access the breadth of our own brilliant visions, so that we might feel the fullness of the moments we are creating with this one life we each have to live. 

So my lovelies, when you do see me crying sometimes, know that I am just expressing one of many emotions on the spectrum of feelings. One of the most essential strengths to cultivate in this life is the ability to give yourself permission to feel. When you see mommy crying, that’s what I’m doing. I’m giving myself a moment to be real with the undersides of joy. I’m taking the liberty to be whole and human, and teaching you to do the same. 

With all my love,
Mommy

---

leave a comment

I am mothering very differently from the way my mother raised me and my brothers. I think about our differences a lot as I navigate the ups and downs, the losses and the growths, the sweets and the bitters of my own journey as a mother. One of the things that stands out most about the way I grew up and the way the munchkins are growing up is that I am caring for my children nearly all 24 hours of the day, every day of the week.

This was not the case for me when I was a child. I didn’t spend the whole day, everyday, with my mother. And the more I unpack the implications of the separation—largely fostered by school and work rhythms—built into our routine as children, the more questions I have about what it means, about what it costs, that I choose to mother in such a radically different way.

My mother worked (and still works) as an engineer outside of the home my entire childhood. I was in daycare from infancy. I was on formula very early on because of a medical emergency that had my mother in the hospital weeks after I was born, and also because she had very little maternity leave. My children have been breastfed exclusively, with me nursing them at the breast, no pump, no bottles. All of their early nourishment has been from the countless hours of holding them, wearing them, carrying them around with me wherever I go so I can feed them from my body.

I went to public schools from kindergarten until starting college. In the elementary years we spent the after school hours at the library down the street from the school doing homework and waiting to be picked up (hopefully) by the time it closed. There were no cell phones or GPS trackers back then. On days they were running late we couldn’t call my parents to see if they were on the way or if we should just walk the six blocks to my grandparents’ house in the dark, the night lit up by the cars passing by and the street lights overhead. Our vulnerability as children didn’t occur to us. And my parents generally trusted that we were fine, and that they’d find us either standing in front of the library or at my grandmother’s dining room table eating a snack.

This was also an era before the after school market was in full effect. The local librarians were our unofficial minders for the post-school day, pre-dinner time hours from 3pm-6pm. Nowadays, parents who have children in school away from home often spend hundreds, sometimes even thousands, of dollars per year on before and after school care and programming. In this way we have something in common, as neither of us spent money on after school programs, but of course, for very different reasons.

In the summers the schedule only slightly changed. We were at camp in lieu of being at school, or at grandma’s house for the bulk of the day. For many years, when we were all younger, there was an annual weeklong family vacation to some place near a beach or an amusement park with my parents, my brothers, and my cousin. 

My parents had two cars and I didn’t start taking public transportation until I began junior high school, and even then, it was just for going to and from school. All the weekend, holiday, and extracurricular activities were made possible by the convenience of riding in a car. My mother never had to manage meltdowns or snack distribution or rush hour crowds on the bus or the train. She mothered us privately in the comfort of her own vehicle. 

My children experience transit more communally. We have to touch the world as we move through it. We are exposed to the greatest—nice old ladies who strike up friendly conversations with the munchkins—and the not so greatest—belligerent alcoholics who spill their 40 ounces all over mommy when the bottle explodes after being illegally opened up on a moving bus— of humanity as we navigate the city landscape on public transit. We are a car-free, “B.M.W.”—bus/metro/walk—family, and have been for most of the munchkins’ lives. Getting from here to there mostly happens in the public domain, with ample eyes and ears to witness—and judge— the loud, messy, chaotic uncertainties of mothering little people out in the world.

My overall description of my mother when we were children (and even still to this day), is that she was nice, kind, and gentle with us. She didn’t do a lot of yelling. She almost never used profanity. We didn’t get spanked as a form of discipline. My mother wasn’t strict. There weren’t hard rules, bedtimes, or fixed punishments. If we did something wrong, mostly there was a conversation, some extended dialogue space to work through whatever it was. 

I’ve been thinking about reasons why my mother was mostly soft with us. One theory is that because she had regular intervals away from direct, hands-on, mothering labors, she didn’t experience burnout or the mental exhaustion that comes from fielding every need, every question, every tantrum that comes up in a single day. Our time together was generally limited to the early morning, the evenings and weekends when we weren’t at one of our activities. Our hours and minutes were scripted to an external system that was the norm for almost everyone else around us. In the few hours each day she had to spend with us, she was generally in good spirits, and we were the happy beneficiaries of all that goodness.

I try my best to be the soft, gentle mother. And on days when I have ample food (read: plenty of snacks for bribing…er…incentivizing…) in the house, and when there aren’t any major financial calamities on the horizon, and when I don’t have any sick little folks to tend to—I am very much that soft mother of my dreams. 

But sometimes resources are tight, my patience is thin, the weather is dreary, the children are cranky/bored/tired/frustrated with the limitations of the moment. On these days I find I am more of the hard mother. I yell more. I restrict freedoms more. I am less playful. The normal volume of their ruckus from self-directed explorations seems too loud and I am asking for unreasonable amounts of quiet, calm, stillness.  I have to demand food be eaten, or else people will be hungry asking for more food that we don’t have. I don’t believe in spanking them, but I may send too many munchkins to the corner too many times, or take away the tablet for too long on days when I feel overwhelmed by my labors and under-supported. I may deny too many requests for sitting in mommy’s lap. There may be too many tears that fall and too few hugs to soothe hurt feelings.

I don’t particularly like the hard mother, but I understand her now more than ever. As a child when I saw other friends’ moms who seemed very strict or mean, I was always thankful that my mother was so nice and laid-back with us. It never occurred to me that maybe the harshness in my friend’s mom’s tone was the culmination of her making it through the day as best she could. Maybe she was short on the rent and someone’s birthday was coming up. Maybe she was dealing with a difficult or abusive partner and deciding whether to stay or to leave. Maybe she was tired from being the only person on-call for all her children from sun-up to sun-up, and in this moment she’s got nothing sweet left to give. Maybe she only had beans and rice for dinner and she didn’t feel like dealing with the headache of feeding children who don’t want to eat the only food she had in the house.

Tucked cozily into the backseat of my parents’ cars, or my grandparents’ cars, or my aunts and uncles cars, I was oblivious to the ways in which having to commute on public transportation as a family alters your capacity to be gentle and receptive to the perpetual, insatiable needs so natural to day-to-day living with little people. Growing up in a relatively stable and privileged environment, I couldn’t appreciate that maybe that other mom who is snapping at her kids in the grocery aisle has only enough money to buy what’s in her cart, and she can’t entertain all these extra requests for candy and treats—even though she wishes she could—without feeling like she’s going to lose her mind. And after all the whining and complaining in the store, this same mom might be in for an epic tantrum as she hauls heavy bags and disappointed children home on a crowded bus. Meanwhile, we used to drop all sorts of extras into my mother’s shopping cart, and rarely did she ever make us take them out. Then we’d pile into the car, happily munching on our snacks of choice as my mother loaded groceries into the trunk.

I think my mother would have been a very different mother if she’d opted to be at home with us, if she’d chosen to homeschool us, and essentially be our full-time caregiver as well. I don’t know if I would have experienced her as a soft mother if she had been constantly juggling shifting resources and fluctuating finances. I don’t know how she would have managed having small children so close in age like mine are. We were all 4 and half to 5 years apart. She had years of recovery between each birth that I have yet to experience. I don’t know if she would have had the mental, emotional, or physical stamina to deal with mothering us every single moment of every single day—and still be so soft, gentle, and accommodating. 

This reflection brings me deep pause, especially when I am having a rough day with the munchkins and I am wishing I could access the softness my mother had for me. This is when I have to acknowledge the implications of my choices, the weight of my world as it is. Within my very intentional practice to be home with my children, to facilitate their education through our family learning lab, to run our family business, to spend as much time together as a family—also exists the very real costs to this life. There are times I don’t have all I need to go gently through the day. There are moments when I’m too spent to be the soft mother. And I am getting better at celebrating the hard mother for showing up any way, even as she wishes she could be someone she can’t access right now. Because a hard mother is still better than no mother at all. 

I like coming up with titles and labels for things. Sometimes I’ve played around with the term intensive mothering, meaning a mother who is with her children all day, and laboring for them and from her own body—breastfeeding/babywearing/homeschooling/being primary caregiver—all day and all night—co-sleeping/nursing through the night—too. I’m not settled on the terminology, but I think you get my meaning. In this current day reality when so few mothers in this country experience their children for extended periods of time beyond the first 6 weeks of life, this path I’m on is often fraught with loneliness, anxiety, and chronic depletion. It takes time to discover an authentic way to sustain your sanity, especially when those on the outside looking in perceive your children to be your biggest obstacle to sanity. 

But no, I don’t believe that at all. In fact, I’ve spent these first 6 years of motherhood undoing the cultural programming that has tried so hard to convince me that peace of mind is only accessible through the calculated separation of mother and child. Rather, I’ve been experimenting—and stumbling, and crying, and feeling defeated at times—with a more collaborative process between a mother and her children. How can we craft a life that holds space for all our needs? How can I, as mommy, access more softness for my children and myself, without having to labor against myself—working on someone else’s clock—or outsource my children’s nourishment, primary care, and education to another person or system?

I don’t yet have all the answers to these questions. I still feel like I’m very much at the beginning of my mothering journeys, even though I’ve got some solid years in this work too. The deeper I grow as a mother, the more I appreciate my mother, and even the ways in which I am still very much like her. There are elements of her that have penetrated deeply into my practice. It’s just sometimes tricky to identify them because structurally our mothering realities are oceans, worlds, galaxies apart. 

In the meantime, this concentrated unraveling of soft mother/hard mother has me being more intentional about finding and celebrating moments of being soft and gentle with myself, of choosing compassion and forgiveness over being so critical or angry about a mistake, of moving slowly through our days and not feeling pressured to keep up with speed of capitalism. The more I learn, the more I practice, the more I see that the softness I wish to share with my children begins with me. 

As with most things I’ve been exploring as a mother, I don’t have a blueprint or guidebook to follow. In many ways I am mothering from scratch, feeling for my way through the unknowns as I grow. I know there are many moments of softness and gentleness that I already share with my children, as evidenced by their general happiness, bubbly energy, and enthusiastic curiosity about their world, the future, and the everything it will bring. I trust they are reflecting back to me the best parts of my mothering labors. I trust I’ll grow better, stronger, and softer with time.

---

leave a comment

Mommy and Daddy’s first summer together, laughing during a break from my photo shoot at the same park where we met the year before. Photo by Colin A. Danville

My Dear Children,

You will hear this story told many times. It will come out differently depending on who’s doing the telling, and when the telling is being told. The story begins in multiple places, and is too layered to fully tell as a simple, chronological tale. This is why I’m taking the time to write this part down now. A story is a living thing, and over years, over decades, over lifetimes it changes and grows in some ways, waivers and recedes in others. For me this story of how I met your father is an essential thread of who you are, of how you came to exist as you know yourself to be. 

As mother-rooted as I am, your life would not be possible if it weren’t for the generous collaboration of your father. His contributions initiated your sacred transformation from human potential as eggs in my ovaries to human beings in their earliest form as zygotes seeking a deep and warm welcoming within my uterine wall. For my part, you’ve all been with me since my mother conceived me in her womb 10 moons before I was born. You have each survived so much to be who you are today. You began as one of two million opportunities of the future. It is extremely magical, holy, and amazing that you are here, as you are. I celebrate the miracle of your life every moment of everyday. 

As I grew from baby, to girlchild, to young lady, to grown-up woman, to artist woman, to invisible mother, to new mommy, to breastfeeding mother, to dancing mother, to mother mother—I gained more and more conscious awareness of our physical, spiritual, and emotional connections as mother and children. I believe you all played a significant role in leading me to intersect life paths with your father when I did. We actually met a year before we became involved. We were introduced to each other on Easter Sunday at the drum circle at Malcolm X Park in Washington, DC by a mutual friend. I didn’t know at the time but your father had previously been in a relationship with that same friend. She and I weren’t particularly close, but we were friendly, and I’d known her as an artist in the community for a few years by then. 

A few weeks after our first introduction we were both attending that mutual friend’s thesis defense at Howard University. It was another sunny, spring Sunday afternoon. I was very late to the defense, having procrastinated all morning and moving slowly to get out the house. Your father walked in moments after me. The place was packed; our friend didn’t realize we were so late. It was a festive moment. She passed with great feedback from her advisory committee. Her paintings were hung up all over the walls and people took in the depth of her work over delicious plates of appetizers. It was in front of one of these paintings that your father and I had our first real private conversation. We talked about the colors, the shapes, the meanings, the possibilities and implications of interpretations of the story illustrated in the painting. 

Seemingly trying to make up for our mutual guilt at being so late, we both stayed to help clean up and were two of the last people to leave. We ended up walking together to the African American Civil War Memorial where I was going to dance. Your father offered to walk with me since he was about to go and train at his capoeira school a few blocks away. A warmth, organic and light, was budding between your father and I. It was not something intentionally sought after, on either of our parts, but there it was spreading by its own will anyway. I thought it only decent to inform your father that I was actually in a relationship with someone else at the moment. Still I gave him my card so that he would hopefully call me to follow-up about leading a wellness stretch session that he said would be good for me as a dancer. We couldn’t technically exchange numbers because he had no cell phone. This was truly bizarre because everyone and their grandmother had a cell phone by this point, but your father—well by now you’ve figured out he’s not like everyone else, especially when it comes to modern technology—he never called me, of course. Instead, being ever thoughtful, he posted my business card up in his favorite coffee shop on the message board in case anyone was looking for a dancer. (Ironically, no one ever took my card off of the board and a long time later, after we were in a relationship, he went back to retrieve my business card and finally put it in his wallet, which was where I’d thought it had been all along.)

We unexpectedly saw each other once more months later in October, a few weeks before I was leaving for my dance residency in Trinidad. I was facilitating a public space movement workshop for international artists in different spots around town. Your father was a bike courier then and magically ran into our group twice. There’s a famous photo he took of us at Dupont Circle to document the day. It was really a special moment because the person I was dating then was supposed to come to the park to see me teach my class, but he somehow couldn’t find a large group of dancing people after being there for two hours, so he said. Meanwhile, your father found me quite easily, two times at that. I thought it was telling, in many ways. 

In April of the next year when I was back in DC after living in Trinidad & Tobago for four months, your father and I bumped into each other again downtown on L Street. By now he actually had a cell phone. I was pleasantly shocked as we exchanged numbers for real that time. That rainy Friday in mid-April is the day we mark as the beginning of our partnership. L Street, as we like to call it, is a whole other point from which we could start this story. I’ve written about L Street many times, and will no doubt write about it on more occasions as the years go by. Remember, the story is a living thing. It grows as we grow, changes as we change, more details revealed or lost each time.

It was not “love at first sight” all those years ago that Easter Sunday at the park. But perhaps the necessary roots of warmth, openness, and curiosity that can just as well anchor a spirited seed of love through its rough and awkward beginnings were present enough. From that fleeting introduction grew something very tangible and lasting. Here we are, nearly a decade since that initial encounter, a whole tribe of munchkins to our name, a family business, and a long list of shared dreams that will take us all around the world.

So, my little lovelies, as you witness this perpetual dance between your father and I, as you watch us continue to stumble and grow, to fall and rise, to laugh and cry, inside these relentless labors of familymaking, and parenting, and being artists—all the while raising a lively band of bright beings—I hope you come into your own understandings of where and how you each began. I hope in time you choose to find your own way into the telling of these stories, adding your memories to the expanding whole, remembering all the particulars that we might one day forget to mention ourselves.

Love All Ways,

Mommy

---

leave a comment

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.

---

leave a comment

Any given night at TheFamily Dances home studio, James training capoeira, an African Brazilian martial art, with the munchkins.

First, I think I should preface this piece by saying that I have always believed the most profitable, peaceful, and joyful way forward as a mothering entrepreneur who is growing a family business is with my children being an integral and physical part of the process. In looking back, I see that much of what I initially experienced as hardship or what felt discouraging was the unwelcoming vibe I felt from some business spaces and interactions where the dominant, unquestioned rule was that children don’t belong in an environment where revenue is being generated. 

The root of my entire entrepreneurial reality sprouts off from this singular divergence in perspective: I know my children belong with me, their mother. Our children are not obstacles to be overcome, silenced, or shooed away in the pursuit of greater things. We are a family moving through these possibilities, changes, and growing pains together, and it costs us something major every time we have to separate. Rather, my intention has always been to discover creative strategies of collaboration, flexibility, and shared learning so that all our needs—as parents and children, as entrepreneurs and artists, as teachers and learners—are honored through the long, slow growing labors of building and running a family business.

This journey to nurture our family business, TheFamily Dances, has been a turbulent, hilarious, exhausting, inspiring, and constantly shifting ride. We’ve been bumped and bruised, we’ve been buoyed and carried, we’ve been loved and encouraged, we’ve been heartbroken and resilient. It’s so all-encompassing of the human experience. And to share so many of these moments with our children has deepened every part of the discovery.

I am actually in the middle of reconfiguring our business structure right now. Unlike the beginning when I jumped into these entrepreneurial waters 3 years ago, I’m taking my time and doing lots of research for every step. I tell people all the time, especially mothers and women who assume I am so much more skilled and advanced than they are, that I’ve made a lot of mistakes, and I’ve learned a lot in the wake of those mistakes. I’ve discovered accessible, and often times free, resources for support. I’ve met people who I would have never talked to and had meaningful conversations with them about the intersections of business building, familymaking, and living your dreams. I’ve signed up for business expos that would have intimidated me in the past. I’ve presented at a fitness festival with a 12-day old baby tied on my still bleeding body—not recommended at all, Mamas. When in doubt, remember this: Postpartum recovery over potential new clients! I’ve made business deals with a baby at my breast. I’ve set up large contracts with children crawling all over me, screaming and begging to be fed, again. I’ve rushed into filing the wrong documents, and spent hours, weeks, months trying to undo the mess.

Me taking a pause from vending at our booth and facilitating a Liberated Booty dance circle at the Black Luv Festival.

My first season of business ownership has been fully immersed with mothering and family life. This is not a model I was taught or had the mindset to plan out well in advance. I grew into this way, and I really love it for all it is teaching me about honoring my wholeness as a mothering artist. So often one of the barriers many mothers express to me is feeling like there’s no room to cultivate their creative works within the overwhelming flow of their family life, other jobs, and daily responsibilities. Through years of experimentation I have been reimagining who has the power to shape my time and decide my priorities. Ultimately, our family business is able to grow, even through all the bumps in the road, because as the core operator of our enterprise I own 100% of my time everyday. 

For mothers and women who are feeling they are a long ways off from owning all their time, I encourage them to start with where they are. For instance, there are 1440 minutes in a single day. I ask them, is it possible for you to decide what you want to do with just 30 of those minutes? With just 15 of them? With just 5? When we break our time down into small increments, we start being more receptive to the opportunities we have to shape more and more of our moments. And over time, with lots of practice and intentionality, everything really does start to add up. Whatever the amount of time we access as ours on any given day, the important part is that we practice this gesture of creative autonomy, and exercise our freedom to choose how we use the time we do have. It’s like a muscle we have to stretch, grow, and strengthen daily. The more we are in the habit of making choices about what matters most to us, the more responsive and resourceful we become in the actualization of our entrepreneurial endeavors.

The past 3 years have marked a critical stage of growth for me in many different ways. When I began this journey, I was resistant to taking on all the administrative duties of running our family business by myself. I thought James and I should split the work 50/50, but that proved ineffective from the very beginning. It took me a very long time to embrace the reality that as partners we had very different strengths, and that for the wellness of our business and family, I had to take on leadership in this way. I wrestled with this also because in the beginning of our business building I had an infant and a toddler, was tandem nursing, and caring for them all day and night too. Running the administrative wing of TheFamily Dances so that James could be the face of the business when we facilitated our programs fostered a lot of resentment initially. When we would get into arguments I would say, “I wish I had a Binah to do all this for me too!” I think I spent the whole first year of our business trying to figure out how to get out of being the operations manager/financial officer/contracts negotiator/space rental coordinator/insurance finder/paperwork processor/relentless payment procurer (because you know, some people make you chase your money down after you’ve provided the service…boo!)—all the complex backroom stuff that is not as fulfilling or exciting as dancing and facilitating movement with the people!

After hosting our first family capoeira roda at our home studio with our beautiful community.

But the truth was, our business needed me to do all these internal, invisible labors. I tried my best to be gentle with myself in the reckoning process. After all, prior to becoming the matriarch of a family that dances and does capoeira, an African Brazilian martial art, I lived a lovely life as a dancer and movement facilitator, traveling around the world doing my thing, on my time. I had all the time in the world to be my own arts administrator and be in the spotlight. The roughest part of adjusting to our emerging family business flow was having to temporarily step out of the spotlight to sustain James being front and center while we built our brand one product at a time. For logistical reasons, it was more manageable to focus on James facilitating our capoeira programs. It was frustrating that he didn’t always grasp the enormity of all I did so that he could literally just show up to a work site, do an awesome presentation, and then leave. Sometimes he would ask me why I hadn’t put more energy into setting up more dance classes or workshops. I would look at him incredulously, like where was the extra life energy supposed to magically appear from? Not only did I not have time to set up my own programs and facilitate them, I had very limited time with the little munchkins to devote to my own dance practice. 

I often felt completely bewildered, misunderstood, and unappreciated for the early part of our family business experiment. It took a lot of time, experimentation, and reflection to give myself room to realize that even with all my mothering and caregiving labors, I still had so much power, freedom, and opportunity to grow my dream family business. I had to come into my own place of illumination within the dense wilderness of entrepreneurship, and identify a way forward that made me feel whole as a mother and an artist and a business woman. 

Our first apartment, where TheFamily Dances was born, back when there were only two munchkins to our clan.

The truth was that building a business was not impossible. The biggest hinderance for me in the early years has been overcoming this aggressive, (mostly) external ideology that in order to develop something sustainable and profit-generating that I would need to dissect my selves, boxing Mommy-self into one corner over here and Business Owner-self into another one over there. And while in my heart I knew that was not the authentic process for me or the way forward for our family’s wellness, it still took a lot of time, energy, tears, and revelations to fully embrace my visionary strategy of collaboration with my children being part of my core practices as a mothering entrepreneur. 

My process as a mothering entrepreneur evolved primarily through necessity: necessity of proximity to my children for postpartum healing, for breastfeeding, for homeschooling, necessity of being deeply engaged in the labors of growing my creative practices as a mothering artist, and necessity of saving precious financial resources by shrinking our overhead and facilitating our programs as a family, thereby not incurring the expensive costs of separation—read: paying for childcare and the costs of transportation to and from childcare. 

Nothing has really been smooth, though. Many of the scrapes, bruises, and criticisms have been felt more personally by me than by us as a collective family unit. But with every hard lesson comes a bright spot of understanding that encourages me to try again, and step forward with a little more confidence than I had the last time. Just yesterday I successfully negotiated an advance payment for one of our projects in the middle of baby girl’s nap time. The boys were hollering for me to get them their snacks in the background, but their father was there to tend to their needs (read: tend to their demands because you know, they always want more food!) so that this time I didn’t have to use wild, silent gestures and plead with them to wait five more minutes while I finish the very important phone call. 

Breastfeeding Jubilee and attempting to do our own family photo shoot on my phone at our home studio.

And yes, plenty of times it happens like that when I’m home alone with them. I’ve learned to be okay with that too. This is one of the realities of being a mothering entrepreneur: sometimes the kids are making noise or needing your attention when you’re handling something major. This reality though is not a deal breaker. The work of growing the business can still happen in these collaborative moments of motherhood and business ownership. It will look and feel different from what we’ve been taught to think business is. It will take time to find your own flow through the process. But it’s all doable, and it’s more fun for everyone when we get to figure this familymaking, family business magic out together.

In this next stage of business mama life I am really excited about expanding our brand and being more intentional with how we nurture relationships with clients, identify ideal programming partners, and become more visible within the family business and creative economy sectors. I am overflowing with ideas for new products, programs, and services that are more aligned with our family dreams, and also naturally integrate with homeschooling, worldschooling, and opportunities for presenting our work as a family of creatives around the globe. I am happily, and gradually, making my way back to center stage too, and activating more performance opportunities that celebrate my dancing mother self. I’m also looking forward to documenting more of my internal journeys as a mothering entrepreneur and using my platforms as a writer and facilitator to create more visibility and awareness about how mothering artists can find shared and successful pathways through motherhood and entrepreneurship. Basically, the future is looking grand! I’m ever-grateful for all I’ve learned so far, and also for all the discoveries to come that are inevitably a part of this magical labor called growth.

---

Learn more about our business TheFamily Dances

---

leave a comment

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.

---

leave a comment

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.