Christmas Card Neurosis.

Posted by Tiff in Funschooling | 10 comments

A large part of unschooling is about accepting your kids for who they are and not pressuring them to be whoever you or someone else (school/society/friends/family/etc.) may want them to be. It’s about letting them have the freedom to express/create/investigate/say/do/think/feel everything they want without fear of being punished/shamed/unvalidated/misunderstood. Unschooling is all about authenticity in thought, word, and action….fostering this both in yourself and in your children. This is a lofty goal and an awesome ideal to shoot for in my day to day life. But there is one thing that sabotages me from doing this every time I come across it.

The trouble always starts out on roadtrips. It’s not the traveling though. And it’s not deciding where to go and what to see. Yeah, art museums and libraries are fine and well and totally educational, but if my kids would rather tour a chocolate museum and see kitschy 20 foot tall Presidential busts that’s all good and educational too! But then we get to an iconic place, usually something amazing and photographic like the Grand Canyon, Old Faithful, or most recently Haystack Rock off the Oregon coast.

At these places, my camera comes out (rather, lifts up, since it’s never put away but always hanging around my neck) and my need for a group picture of my kids overtakes me. Mainly because I want to print it up and put in on a christmas card to send out. Simple enough, except I get manic and rabid about it. At first, I focused all this manic rabid energy towards my kids. I picked out special, clean and ironed matching clothes for them to wear, even if they hated them. I did their hair nicely, even if they hated it. I positioned them into nice and tidy poses, even if they didn’t want to.

I’ll try to recreate a little scene about how these photo ops used to go. First, I would bark at them from behind the camera, “Smile! Naturally! Look at the camera and smile! I’ll give you a treat if you can just do this one thing for me!”

but eventually, as they got more and more antsy, it would devolve into me going totally crazy and saying things like, “This isn’t hard, why are you making this so hard!”

“We’re not moving from here until I get a good smile out of all you guys AT THE SAME TIME, so just DO IT!”

But it wasn’t until I said the following that I realized how out of control my christmas picture mania was. I believe I yelled out “DAMMIT, YOUR FACES ARE RUINING MY PICTURE!!!!”.

What was happening here?! Their faces weren’t the issue. I love their faces! They don’t ruin anything. My issue was the issue! And it all stemmed from this mad desire to keep up appearances.

I wanted this Christmas card of the future to be not just any christmas card. I wanted it to be THE christmas card. The one that all my friends will pick up and ohhh and ahhh over. The one that will make them insanely jealous and wishing they could be me, with perfect kids and perfect house and perfect life. It would be the one that would prove to everyone that unschooling is the way to go. The one that would show how genius, beautiful, and awesome my kids are; ergo, how genius, beautiful and awesome I am. I wanted my christmas card to kick the asses of all the other christmas cards sent by everyone else during the entire season! The kind of card that is so over the moon amazing, my friends would send it to their friends because of the sheer awesomeness of it. This is why I was getting bent out of shape when my kids wouldn’t cooperate or live up to the ideal I had in my mind.

My issue, but I was taking it out on them.

I haven’t gotten rid of this deep deep desire to send the most ass kickingest Christmas card in the world. So when we get somewhere that is christmas card worthy, I tell my kids what’s going on. “OK, dudes, I want this on a christmas card! You know what that means. I want you looking and acting perfect, and it gets me all twitchy and bossy.”

The first time I owned up to this, they prodded around in my mind for a bit, in the way kids have that makes you realize how hypocritical adults really can be…”So, you care more about what people think of us than if we’re happy right now?” “I thought we weren’t supposed to care what other people thought as long as we were being ourselves?” “Why is it so important to you to make other people like us?” “Why do we have to pretend to be perfect and happyif it’s not who we are? We’re not perfect, and it’s more fun to be silly.” “Shouldn’t our Christmas card show who we are? Then why does being who we are make you so angry?”

This is usually how things go. It’s not like I became an unschooler and all of a sudden found my place of zen with perfect understanding and patience. But when I started unschooling, I learned to separate my issues from my kids. So when I do get frustrated or bossy, I own up to it as being from my own need. Sometimes they think about it and are OK accomodating me, so instead of me forcing anything to happen using threats and punishments, it becomes a joint effort. Sometimes they think about it and call bullshit. Which is what they did with my Christmas Card neurosis. They all decided they would rather be who they are than go along with my grand delusion of pretending to keep up a mythical appearance for other people. This is their way of telling me to check myself and walk the authentic walk.

Which is why our Christmas card this year might look like this:

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