Immediately following my TV news career, I started a podcast, and focused on censored or suppressed speech and First Amendment issues during Covid. For almost 6 years, I have interviewed a variety of different people all with one trait in common: heterodox thinking, dissenting ideas. What did I learn? I learned that no matter how deep you dive into the dark corners of the Internet, you’ll likely never get to the “bottom of it.” The most popular and loudest messages crossing our screens are often purposefully planted by special interests to create chaos, hysteria and hate. I decided to leave this system of mind games and become a farmer so that I can actually know something to be true instead of fruitlessly searching online. Simplicity in building a real life: the kids I see running barefoot through our pasture, the vegetable I grew, the goat I milked, the dirt under my nails. Today the world is watching the memorial service for Charlie Kirk - a man who is at the center of a frenzy of internet debate - and yet whose central message included a call to turn off our phones and build a real life.
Remember when herding animals required manual labor? Actually we were shooting video but the animals thought it was the end of the world and ran straight for the barn. It was the fastest feeding time on record, maybe we use the drone more often?!
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I wasn’t a committed homeschool mom from the second my first child was born. I did quite a bit of research because I wanted to learn more about how kids learn - and truly what kind of environments are not just best for learning ABCs but for overall health and development. I wasn’t even sure I would be a good teacher. After reading many books written by education “experts”, we landed on homeschool.
I really had to unravel quite a bit of what I thought was “school” before I could even begin. I went to the same private school K-12 and equated learning with perfect exam scores. As a student, I forgot a lot of what I crammed into my head because I wasn’t learning for the joy of it - I was learning to survive.
I have come to see how much a child learns through simply living - and being bored! They are innately attuned to art, nature, science, nutrition, play, language - if only we give them a chance. I have truly loved homeschooling my kids, especially all the time we get to spend...
I lived for many years with the idea that I would be a career woman first and someday get to kids.
Biologically, this makes little sense as it gets harder to have kids as a woman ages. But even more mind boggling, I didn’t really even think much of it, like the way one considers what he or she is having for dinner. Actually I probably put more thought into dinner. Being a mom was a complete afterthought. One day a friend and I were eating lunch in downtown Seattle and she smacked some truth into my noggin. I decided, ok what the heck. What do I have to lose? We had our first when I was 38 - I found out I was pregnant the week I resigned from my TV news job. Our second came when I was 41.
If I could talk to younger me, I’d tell her that no career is worth delaying or sacrificing motherhood. It has been the most incredibly humbling, soul-stretching, heart-throbbing, belly laughing adventure I’ve ever had.
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