The Non-Gardener

There’s a passage in the first parenting book I actually read through to the end, The Continuum Concept, which has taken me six years to get my head around.

The Continuum Concept is a parenting book, but it’s also much more. It’s a book that required I examine all of my previously staunchly held ideas about how the world operates, how we relate, how we need to move forward. It called into question the belief that there is an innate subversive nature in children. It proposed that actually, they want to be on our team, but we just fuck it up. It suggested that children have a much stronger capacity to self-regulate than we give them credit for. It called to me down a deep dark tunnel to surrender my need to control and give over to the autonomy of these little people. It somehow managed to connect with me at an instinctive level and it had me wearing my baby, co-sleeping, breast-feeding on demand and then to a crazy little thing called elimination communication. I found reservoirs of patience where before only intolerance had existed.

Really, I attribute it with changing my life and with rescuing my children from the fate of disconnection and disenfranchise.

It is ultimately a book about connection. About how each of us have the capacity to connect in with each other no matter what our backgrounds or beliefs or crimes. It honours this ability to connect and holds it as the pinnacle of life and humanity. Nothing is more important. Connection uber alles.

The excerpt of the book that I have been, until now, unable to reconcile in my head is a bit about a young man who has been away from his tribe, in the westernised near-by city, and who returns completely uninterested in participating in the village vegetable garden. The rest of the tribe pities him. As in, “Oh, that poor young man has forgotten what joy there is to be had from working in our gardens. That poor young man is missing out. He obviously just needs time to see what he’s missing out on. He will eventually come back.” And they respected his need to not garden, not participate, not engage. They respected it so much that they still fed him, still provided for him, were not punitive at all in their approach to the situation.

My Imposed Consequences Based Approach to life could not accept this perception. I’m sorry, you what? You fed him? The lazy little shit didn’t help and you still fed him? How will he learn?

And then, unschooling happened to me and my family. Radical unschooling in fact. And as I do when I approach something new, I researched, researched, researched and read, mostly, about other families and how deeply they respected each member’s autonomy. How they constantly sought to view situations through the lens of the children’s minds, and to gain understanding and acceptance of their decisions. Sitting in front of the television slowly stopped looking like a child in a daze, a stoned look on his face, unable to do anything else. Instead I thought about how it feels to be engrossed in a really good book, how I think about it all day everyday and can’t wait to get back to it to find out what happens next. About how I’ve read the series of my favourite books eight times and still find joy in them, still experience that same drive to turn another page, and another, and another at 2am. I thought about my son, and what I know to be true about him, and how I could apply this knowledge to help him navigate his way through the day while still honouring his desire to watch Chuggington, again.

I thought about this vegetable garden passage of the book. And I connected the dots between this, and the concept of “strewing”, which is a favourite with unschoolers. The general consensus is that Sandra Dodd first introduced the word to describe the art of dropping hints of Things That Might Be Interesting around the house. Strewing sometimes involves leaving books on the dining room table, crystals on the windowsill, driftwood on the hearth. Sometimes it’s driving past a construction site, or a natural disaster site, or a site with cultural significance. Sometimes it’s going whale watching, or to the movies, or to a friend’s dairy farm. It’s the art of studying our children and predicting what might spark their interest and offering it to them free of obligation. It’s holding the dual acceptance in our minds of them continuing to watch tv, or picking up the crystal and asking about it, looking up in a book about it, going to a shop to see some more, learning about the geology that contributes to it. Or not. Or saying “Wow, this is pretty!” and then placing it back down to watch more tv. And that’s okay.

So, strewing then, and respecting the non-gardener. I understand now, that the non-gardener, in order to eventually be able to experience the connection that comes with working together to put food on the table, needed to get there of his own volition. He needed to have complete discretion, autonomy, agency. Otherwise what he had would have been an empty shell, somewhat resembling these things, but with an undercurrent of resentment and unease.

And this gives me the ease with which to respect my son’s decision to watch tv. To respect his need to chill out. To see the benefits of what he is doing. To do everything in my power to honour this part of him. To help him, as I always do outside of tv, to transition out of it, instead of blaming the tv on his inability to re-engage with family life.

To respect it, while also strewing other opportunities around him. To help him navigate "coming up for air" and having a look around, and deciding whether or not to descend again. And either one is fine. 

This isn’t to say that sometimes I bite holes through my tongue while my head goes crazy with “MORE?! REEALLY? Is it not ENOUGH?!” and that my blood pressure doesn’t sky-rocket when I’ve cooked a delicious meal and he says he isn’t hungry. I too, am living and learning. I too am exercising these unschooling muscles and stumbling along the way, hoping, always, to do better next time. But I love that the pieces that I’m picking up, every day, in lots of seemingly unrelated places, are filling in gaps and making connections and broadening my knowledge and acceptance. Contributing to the better person that is me, evolving.