The title of the blog is clearly word play. Part One of why I chose this title talks about the irony of the name.
There’s another reason I chose it. I am trying to restore my family. And I am trying to restore myself. Yes, I married into the name, Justis. When the kids were little, we did a little geo-caching and whenever we scored a find, we’d sign as The Justis League. When I was a teacher, I’d always introduce myself to my second grade class with a cape on, throwing my fists into the air, and singing out, “Mrs. Justiiiis!”
Teaching really took it out of me. There was little patience left over for my family after those 9-10 hour days of performing for 7-8 year olds then scrambling to be ready for the next day of non-stop classroom management, trying to inspire kiddos whose bodies were screaming at them to play to sit through lessons instead. Okay, I didn’t require a lot of sitting because instinctually I knew it was ineffective, but we were still pretty confined to the four walls of a classroom, a lame “learning” environment that requires intense creativity on a teacher’s part to keep kids engaged.
When I worked up the courage to walk away from the classroom in spring of 2014, I spent the next few years trying to be an entrepreneur which meant lots of personal development. Over that same period, I really examined my thoughts on the classroom and education in general, and came to many of the conclusions I share in this blog. Once I started looking for resources to back up my suspicions, I realized I was far from alone in my contempt for the system.
The years flew by quickly and my oldest entered middle school. And things started falling apart. My family felt like it was coming unraveled and the bonds continued to fray in her 7th, then her 8th grade years as her resistance to school grew and my husband and I argued over the wisdom of forcing it. My son had never thrived in the classroom and he was concurrently developing awareness of the mismatch of his nature and the system he was trapped in. Around this time, it also occurred to me that my influence as a mother had waned; that my rant against the mainstream wasn’t falling on deaf ears, but bored, apathetic, or skeptical ears. Yet, here was evidence in my own children of the damage the system wreaks on their confidence and their love of learning.
I had thought I was creating a strong family culture, but suddenly it was painfully clear that we were not the tight knit family I always thought we’d naturally be. My husband and I seemed to be operating from completely different paradigms and our differences were taking a toll on our relationships with each other and the kids. Some intense situations (that I cannot share yet due to lack of consent from my loved ones) brought excruciating awareness that it was going to take far more conscious effort to hold onto my kids. Figuratively, of course. To do so literally would actually push them away.
Restoring Justis became my mission. To help my family back to authenticity, to restore what a family is meant to be—a place of safety and trust where one is free to explore possibilities, to be unconditionally loved through failures, and recovery is modeled with grace and dignity. Okay, maybe that’s a bit idealistic, but it’s the dream, right?
It’s a daily challenge, and I often feel at a complete loss as to how to restore that influence. The book, Hold on to Your Kids, helped me forgive myself a bit. It talks about how society is structured in such a way that it damages what should be our children’s natural attachment to us as their mentors, making it much more difficult to parent than it should be. I also believe that our culture of control and coercion, plus the requirement that we turn over their caretaking to the school system for such a huge chunk of their childhood, weakens the bonds nature intended human young to have with their parents.
So, I try to express gratitude to the universe daily for my children whose purpose it sometimes seems is to challenge every hard-earned tenet of my personal philosophy, to ensure that I walk my talk, to obliterate my ego and force the utmost consciousness of every word I speak, every action I take. I get lots of opportunity to model making mistakes and then taking responsibility for them.
I do believe that parenting is supposed to be pleasurable, and that when done as nature intended, it wouldn’t feel so hard, but I’m making up for too many years of unconsciousness, of lazy parenting. I didn’t think I was being lazy, I just thought I had more time. Things can feel pretty precarious these days; Restoring Justis means tightening the bonds that hold my family together. And it means everything to me.
Restoring Justis 