A Family's Story

By Katherine Michalak

Some changes happen gradually, step by little step. Though these steps may take us a substantial distance, the transitions never seem impressive. Because of their indefinite nature, these changes often go without the recognition that would come from an obvious rite of passage, like getting hired for a coveted job.

In the interest of giving my family’s gradual changes the recognition they deserve, this essay shows our continuing metamorphosis from one form of family—where parents raise kids—into another form, where everyone lives together as equal adults.

Elizabeth and I, currently fifteen and eighteen, have been unschooled all our lives. When she was six and I was nine our family moved to Crestone, Colorado, our home ever since. Crestone is a tiny town, located in the south-central part of the state and populated largely by people seeking alternative and spiritual lifestyles. It offers children and teenagers little in the way of stimulation, but when we settled here, my sister and I saw outside activity as secondary to our home life. We were our parents’ primary focus and though this doesn’t mean they gave us constant attention, it does mean we were supported, nurtured, and guided through our domestic undertakings. Dad earned the money for our household by working in construction and later woodworking and Mom provided the consistency we needed, always home and available to us.

For several years after we moved, our family’s life was governed by the building of a straw bale house. Dad built it single-handedly on a small budget and progress was slow, requiring flexibility on everyone’s part. Our living quarters moved often as we attempted to live in and finish the house simultaneously. For four years Elizabeth and I had our bedrooms in an outbuilding while our parents stayed in a travel trailer and later in a semi-finished part of the house, connected to us by an intercom.

Construction-related tasks and household chores took time, but Elizabeth and I also had much of our days free and we spent them doing math, knitting, baking, creating crossword puzzles, and reading. We also went out into the pinon and juniper and played imaginary games for hours at a time. After the house was finished, we spent long days at the bar in the kitchen doing art projects that pushed our concentration spans to the limit.

One quintessential family activity was taking road trips and we continued the practice despite work on the house. Before moving to Crestone, we’d driven twice to Kino Bay, a low-key town a few hours across the Mexican boarder and after moving, we went back to Kino and then all the way to the Yucatan, this time pulling a travel trailer. One of my father’s valued memories is of all of us biking in Kino, exploring the sandy alleyways and admiring the bougainvillea. Elizabeth and I have strong memories of being nestled in the back of the Suburban, facing the receding road. The middle seats were folded down to make more room for us and for the luggage piled behind our heads and at our feet. Made comfortable with foam padding, oversized sleeping bags and pillows, we spent days lounging there on the way to this or that destination and listening to books on tape while Mom and Dad talked up front. This was the era when we all wanted to travel together, to read in the same room, and to take walks as a foursome, the era when Dad could dispense words of advice and wisdom to his daughters and we would look at him with admiration and appreciation.

From the time we moved to Crestone when I was nine till I passed early adolescence, the four of us were caught up in our intense but straightforward role as a growing family. Well-established in our lifestyle and our ways of interacting, we were like a completed jigsaw puzzle that read “family.” People sometimes surprised us by complimenting Mom and Dad on the energy they felt from our family and Dad took their words as confirmation that he was on the right track. Mom, too, found such comments reinforcing. Elizabeth and I enjoyed the compliments but were uncomfortable with them, feeling that many of the people who spoke knew little about us.

By the time I was thirteen and Elizabeth was eleven, the house was pretty much finished and we were rooted in Crestone. But nothing about our daily lives was permanent. This time was difficult for me as I struggled with who I wanted to be. It was also difficult for my father, whose fears of my coming teen years only went away as I grew into my identity and Elizabeth moved gracefully through adolescence.

When I was fifteen, my mother brought to light the transience of our family as it was. Presenting her vision that at sixteen I start taking classes at the local college and later enroll full-time at a college that suited me, she opened my eyes to the waning of my childhood. I was unwilling to go to college, partly out of fear and partly because I realized how much home had to offer. Young people search for community and here I was already part of a community based on time-tested bonds. Young people search for freedom and at home I had the space to find my own best work habits, experimenting with how I maintained music and writing practices.

Because I resisted college, Mom had to choose whether she would respect my position or push her own vision on my life. When I was younger she had supported me by sharing her knowledge and life skills and now that I was growing up, she decided her greatest responsibility lay in honoring me as a free thinker; she didn’t push the classes. She realized that considering the issue of being internally driven versus externally driven, the question of college represented what was for her the crux of unschooling and she was determined not to violate my internal force.

My attachment to staying home gave Dad a lot to think about. He’d been reading about trends that teens were staying home longer, as well as coming back to their family homes after college experiences, and now he had to consider how such choices would affect his own life. He admits that there was a certain appeal to being an empty nester with greater personal freedom and because Mom wanted to offer me our home indefinitely, he had to face that he might not become an empty nester for a long time. None of us knew how long I would stay—an extra year, an extra five years—but that the arrangement was open-ended was enough to challenge Dad’s assumptions.

As when I moved into my teenage years, my father had his concerns about my future. He worried that a self-chosen career might not materialize for me, since one hadn’t for him and he had moved by default into construction. He felt that my mother’s laissez faire attitude would make it easy for me to become a drifter and if it had been up to him he would have made college a mandatory experience.

In the midst of all the emotion about my future, Elizabeth was going through her own challenges. She had convinced everyone that her life was definitively mapped out, including detailed plans for a horse ranch in Wyoming, but now she didn’t want that life. With this realization came a loss of pride and she was thankful that Dad especially had respected her certainty but also made it clear that changing her mind was okay; now she wasn’t trapped in her old ideas.

It seemed that each of us was in a state of uncertainty, even as our lives continued happening day by busy day. No longer fully engrossed in the present, we felt ourselves tipping towards a future that was unrevealed. What new dynamics would establish themselves? All we could do was wait and see, talking through our feelings all the while. Though we still looked like a conventional little family, in the sense of adults guiding and children following, we knew we were outgrowing that identity.

* * * *

I’ve always been intimidated by the Crestone health food store. Small and old and crowded, it holds a sea of people’s energy and for years I contemplated how scary it would be to work there. I couldn’t imagine having the confidence for such a job. After the question of college was set loose in my mind—and with it the question of working as I got older—the image of that particular job began to haunt me.

How could I be afraid—not only of working at the store, but of every worldly avenue to adulthood—and still have faith in myself? Maybe I was compromising my future by not overcoming this fear, which threatened to discredit my reasons for staying home. Even so, I couldn’t bring myself to venture into the larger world. What felt right was writing every day, playing guitar with consistency, and working in my garden. Choosing to do these things to the exclusion of college, I ignored my nagging self-doubt and the grey cloud in my mind that obscured The Future. Instead of dealing with that cloud, I focused on the many parts of my life that were still bright and sunny and most of the time my daily life wasn’t the worse for the future’s uncertainty.

Still, I felt released and suddenly free to expand when, after two years, that melancholy cloud associated with the future suddenly dissipated. Both parents credit my new perspective to several seemingly minor experiences that got my foot out the door of the family home. They point to choir, because it immersed Elizabeth and me in politics, socializing, and community. We both play fingerstyle guitar and they point to the concerts and master classes we’ve started going to. These concerts expand our interest beyond the isolated practice room and beyond family opinions. They point to my experience at Not Back To School Camp and to my taking voice lessons, both of which increased my general confidence.

Because I didn’t recognize these experiences for what they were—introductions to the larger world—and because they were relatively small and isolated, I wasn’t afraid of them the way I was of college and holding a job. Yet they quietly built my confidence, helping to wash away my fear of the larger changes. I now work at the very health food store I used to fear, feeling competent and confident.

Looking back at that time when all I wanted was shelter from the world, I realize I was right to sit with the fear and not force myself to overcome it. Doing so would have been unnecessary and counterproductive, because growth was already happening; it just wasn’t visible yet. Not even Mom, usually the facilitator and solution-finder, needed to provide me with new experiences. She respected my aversion to the larger world so completely that she turned down the store’s first job offer, thinking I still wasn’t interested. Yet the job—and my openness to it—came about anyway. Even Dad’s concerns about my future dissipated as his faith in my chosen vocations grows and he continues to offer Elizabeth and I support.

Over the past year, “community” has become a buzzword of mine, used in reference to our family’s becoming four equals who share friendship and a living space. As a foursome, our family still spends time together, but doing so takes more commitment than it used to. Mom used to prioritize free time away from her daughters and she now has to prioritize “connecting time,” since Elizabeth and I are always disappearing into our rooms to play guitar, write, or study.

Looking back, I’m sure we’ll value this time. It will seem special and innocent, much the way our first years in Crestone building our straw-bale house now seem to me idyllically simple. Yet we’re unable to look back on what’s current; we’re immersed in all the vibrancy of suspense and we get to watch ourselves handle it. Are we preoccupied with the future, longing for recognition when we finally do move in new directions? Or are we becoming fed up with emphasis on the coming years, feeling that the biggest change has already passed, taking place when we became four equals? Depending on the day, I might feel either way: I might dream of making celebrated changes during the next year or I might be most interested in what we’ve already gone through. Either that, or I might feel just a little bored with all of it. The rest of the family feels similarly inconsistent.

The truth is, we like seeing it all as significant and worthy of recognition. Every dull spot, burst of tears and exciting new project is valued as a mile marker along the path and during times of unrest; we celebrate each hour of happiness and peace that we achieve. This honoring of the mundane is what makes our family what it is; it’s what keeps us engaged during unremarkable time and it’s what will allow us to maintain our family relationships when we finally go our separate ways. Not many of our transitions have announced themselves with fireworks to the world, but we’ve valued every little transition anyway and we’ll keep valuing them when, calling each other up once we’ve gone our separate ways, we realize that there isn’t any big news to report. Because even long-distance relational challenges are still rites in their own way, milestones for a family still growing up.

Katherine Michalak, is happy to have her writing career well under way. She’s recently been published in The Christian Science Monitor and has had multiple articles appear in Life Learning Magazine and Growing Without Schooling Magazine. She lives in Crestone, Colorado.
 

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