Profiling

As my regular readers are aware, we now count ourselves lucky to be members of an unschooling community. We've found some amazing people, and we're having some really good times.

What draws us together?

It's not the usual things. We don't all work at the same company or in the same profession. We don't all come from the same ethnic, socio-political, religious, or any other sort of background. We're not all the same age, and our kids aren't all the same age. We didn't go to school together, or pledge (or refuse to pledge) the same sororities and fraternities.

Yeah, we all homeschool the same way. But homeschooling looks pretty different in each unschooling household. Actually, homeschooling looks pretty different for each unschooling kid.

So, what is it? Well, I'll tell you. ;-)

We're all people who think our kids' needs and our relationships with our kids come first, before anything else. We all want and build and maintain peaceful households. We all try, every day, to stop and think instead of going with the knee-jerk reaction, the old tapes, the bad habits and ingrained patterns. We all try to see, continually, with fresh eyes.

But what draws us together is not those things but the result of them, and the result is a group of people who accept each other for who they are. We LOVE our differences from each other.

One of us is a recovering control freak. One of us likes songs with ukeleles in them. One of us rarely smiles. One of us would rather play or talk about WoW than anything else. One of us prefers not to be addressed by strangers. One of us has no volume control. More than one of us live the nightshift. One of us learned to play the piano. One of us is a diva. One of us likes weapons. One of us uses Latin to make a point. One of us is depressive. One of us makes a mean pomegranate martini. One of us bleeds intensity and it hurts. One of us saves babies from burning buildings.* One of us needs to be alone. One of us needs constant stimulation. One of us just likes to observe. One of us will never outgrow Legos. One of us laughs big gutbuster laughs at the drop of a hat. One of us believes empty wall space is a sin. One of us adores musicals. One of us can't stop moving or she'll die.

Maybe that's it. We all accept—no, we all love individuality.

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* An inside joke. No babies were endangered during or prior to the making of this blog post.