Tag: freedom

Remtana – Driving Lessons Part 2

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Part 14 of the Remembering Montana series reflecting on the three weeks my family got to ranch sit for 3 horses, 2 donkeys, and 2 rescue dogs in the Bitterroot Valley. Most of these are slightly adapted social media posts that I shared while we were in Montana. Others are more recently written. This is one of the former, and I broke it into two parts.

To fully appreciate this entry, I encourage you to read Part 1 before continuing with the rest of Day 15. I link lots of other days in this post since I reference many of the happenings of the past few weeks, but Part 1 is really a must.

Winter is coming…

Day 15 continued, October 4, 2018

So back to yesterday. It was the boy’s and my first full day back from Helena (read about our side trip here and here) and it was rainy and cold. My plan to hole up and work on my projects (writing, jigsaw puzzling, knitting) doesn’t quite play out as intended. Something goes awry with the girl’s morning coffee, and I remember that I promised the kids I’d take them back into Missoula for cupcakes from Bernice’s Bakery and I have some other errands to run anyway, so I offer to take the girl into town for a cup of joe.

We invite the boy but he declines. The girl’s excited because whenever she and I leave the property alone together, it means a driving lesson. Each time she gets to go a little further on the back roads that take us to the main highway and each time she says, “I love this SO much!”

She cheerfully accompanies me on my errands, we get coffee while at Bernice’s, check out another thrift store where she scores a denim shirt she’s been on the hunt for, and on the way home, she muses over the things she’s going to remember about this adventure. In fact, I have to remind myself that she’s a teenager because she’s also this truly lovely person that I enjoy spending time with.

Later that night, as I’m lying awake questioning the wisdom of that afternoon coffee, the light on my phone alerts me that I’ve received a text. It’s the girl, and clearly she thought I was sleeping so would be undisturbed by the text.  I text her back asking what she’s doing. She’s actually in the house on a bathroom run, so I sneak downstairs from the loft where both Hubby and the boy are sleeping, we grab a package of microwave popcorn, make a jar full of Italian soda, and head out to her freezing RV apartment with my laptop to bundle up under a comforter and watch YouTube.

We’re midway through a video she’s really invested in sharing with me and the computer alerts us to a dying battery. The girl says she’ll run over to the house to get the charger. When she returns, she’s breathless and informs me she’s going to walk me back when we’re finished because the sky is packed with stars!

Around 2am, we exit the trailer and crane our necks to “ooh and aah” over the starfilled sky. So few times has she seen stars like this, and I’m again flooded with gratitude for the many new shared experiences with my teenage girl that wouldn’t have happened without the freedom we’ve claimed for ourselves.

I’ve been thinking about how much driving represents freedom and trust for a teen. I notice the more freedom and trust the girl feels she has, the more I treat her with the same dignity and respect I treat the adults in my life, the more she acts like a kind, caring adult.

There were many moments I feared this Montana Adventure would be a complete disaster (read here about why the boy is permanently scarred from this experience,) but the girl will always associate this trip with lots of thrilling firsts–firsts that reinforced that she is respected, trusted, and free. 

Remtana – my view

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This is part seven of the Remembering Montana series of posts reflecting on my family’s three weeks on a small Montana ranch in the fall of 2018. Some reflections are recently written, but this post came from those I shared with social media while we were at the ranch. Scroll down then navigate back to read previous posts.

Day 9, September 28:

It’s Friday evening and hubby has completed his first full week of working remotely. His metrics were as good or better than what he normally accomplishes at the office. He also managed to muck the horse stalls, stay on top of our laundry, help me keep our temporary home clean, play an occasional game of ping pong with his son, and also eat lunch with the family each day.

Freedom. We live in an amazing time where if you’re a little scrappy, you can have the most spectacular adventures! The sharing economy affords us many ways to escape the mundane but it requires some resourcefulness, sacrifice, and a daring spirit. It’s not the life for everyone, but freedom is a value I hold dear, and typing this post, sitting on this patio and watching the light play on the distant mountains, the chill wind nipping a little too cold, a glass of cheap, red wine on this rusted metal patio table–well, it makes me feel alive…and free. Sweet, delicious freedom.

Spring of 2014, I informed the school where I was teaching that I would not be renewing my teaching contract for the fall. I set out to be an entrepreneur, not really knowing what that meant. I’ve made some money over the last 4.5 years, but not nearly as much as I’d hoped. Mostly, I’ve been on a journey of discovering–remembering, really–who I am and what it means to be authentic…and free. I can no longer imagine myself showing up to a career on Monday morning. Not that I mind work–I love work that feels meaningful. In fact, I’m often accused of working too much (for too little financial gain) but not at what most would consider a respectable career. In fact, I’m looking at some part-time, location-independent gigs to financially contribute to my family. Whatever it takes to keep my freedom.


I’m so grateful for a husband who’s willing to indulge my less than conventional lifestyle, for my sometimes reluctant kiddos who think I’m a little crazy, for books like Tim Ferris’s Four Hour Work Week (give it a read if you want to create location independence) for location independence, for unschoolers who’ve gone before and blazed a trail, for sites like trustedhousesitters.com and the strangers who trust other strangers with their precious pets and belongings–I love the way these sites are facilitating connections between like-minded souls and making the world smaller and more accessible. And I’m grateful for freedom…and for my view. 😉

YES, I’ll take it!

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So I took the job at the non-profit and am much more excited about it than I thought! It’s not great money, but I get to do things I’m good at (strengthszone) and will be working to improve mental health for the youth in my home state.

After extensive conversations with the Exec Director, I am very pleased with our mission alignment. It’s clear she values what I can offer in terms of a unique understanding of cultural impact on children’s mental wellness. She’s also giving me tons of trust and freedom to assemble a more honoring lexicon to use when describing children’s responses to their emotional experience and supporting them to healthier decision-making skills.  

I am contracted to write emotional intelligence curricula, coordinate and oversee the organization’s youth programs, build partnerships within the community with other organizations who offer programs for struggling teens and also those who need our programs, act as liaison to the national Youth MOVE National community, and potentially to offer trainings in the community around how to work with children to increase emotional intelligence and mental health.

This will be a project-based position with no clocking in and out (halleluiah!) I just need to go in every couple of weeks to share my progress on projects and ensure I’m not going too rogue. There will, of course, be other scheduled requirements such as representing the organization at events and offering content to various youth communities, but for the most part, I am free to complete my assignment how and when it works best for me. In fact, I’m even taking my kids to SoCal for a week this month to visit good friends, and it’s no problema. I’ll have to do a little work while there, but that’s okay.

This is a huge relief for me. I’ve not been part of the 9-5 grind for so long, instead enjoying (and thoroughly appreciating) being the captain of my own ship; I really thought I might be unemployable. Every job description I read felt like prison and caused my heart to sink as I thought about going back to Monday Morning Malaise. I may still have to supplement with another part time gig, but I’ll take this any day over the ridiculous job descriptions that sound like they’re designed for a team of 20 people or maybe a superhero or maybe just to make sure you know who owns you.

I know the day may still be forthcoming when I’ll have to succumb and take a “real” job, but I’ve managed to create income and keep my freedom for the foreseeable future and I’m so so so so so grateful.

Educating Freedom

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Some good friends of mine, a tight-knit family with parents in human support fields, both working with adults who are struggling to function (imagine that) were telling me how difficult it is to drop their 5-year-old daughter off at kindergarten. She screams and resists and they pretty much have to drag her into school.

Red flag? I think it should be. Yet, we’re brainwashed into believing there are no other options. This is what kids are supposed to do. They go to school where they’ll learn everything they need to know to function as human adults in our society, right? So what is it they need to know?

Historical facts and dates? They’ll forget those. How the world works? I learned everything I know about physics when I became a second grade teacher because I’d forgotten every little bit of science I learned in school. How to read? When I was a third grader, I sat silently terrified, surrounded by “big kids” in a sixth grade reading class because I had already discovered a way to escape my life in highly engaging chapter books and devoured them voraciously. That’s all I remember about “learning to read” in school—oh, and that I was “smarter” than my classmates because of how quickly I sped through the colors of the SRA reading program. Algebra and geometry? What I learned in my high school algebra class was that I hated math; in geometry, I developed my social skills by convincing the kid behind me to let me cheat off his work so I could avoid my creepy perv of a teacher’s hand on my waste when I went up to his desk to get help.  What do you remember learning in school?

I’ll bet you remember learning how to sit still and raise your hand when you wanted to speak. I’ll bet you remember paying careful attention to the bathroom policy so you’d know how long you’d have to hold it. Or maybe, you remember coming up with clever ways to convince your mom you were sick so you could stay home. I remember thinking if I took the thermometer out of my mouth when my mom was out of the room, the reading would be off enough that she’d have to keep me home—clearly all that science was paying off!

I remember getting antsy when someone else turned a test in ahead of me because it meant I’d lost the race and someone else might be “smarter” than me. I learned that there’s only one right answer and not to ask too many questions. In high school, I learned really well how to fly under the radar, how to be invisible, how to cram for tests the night before so I could get away with ignoring my homework. I learned exactly how little I could do to still graduate, so I guess I learned efficiency?

I also figured out the best time of day to leave campus and walk across town to my boyfriend’s house. (Though there was that one day my dad randomly drove by and I was busted!) I learned that my hair and make-up mattered and that my wardrobe was insufficient. In fact, once when a boy was picking me up for our first date after I had agonized for hours about what I could wear, he looked me up and down and asked if I could change. I learned that the best way to get through high school was to be in the popular crowd, yet I never seemed able to quite break into that. The next best way was to always have a boyfriend, whether I really liked the boy or not.

So what did I really learn? I learned that using my resources was cheating, my worth was determined by how well my teachers liked me, needing others was bad, my thoughts and feelings held no weight, attractive people did better in life than nice people, that my gut was not to be trusted. I learned to please the adults who were always right and that authority figures had total control over my life.

I learned that anything I studied could be forgotten after the test, mistakes were punished and there were no do-overs, failing was to be avoided at all costs. I learned to study my teachers so I knew exactly what they wanted and just how little I could do to keep their favor or at least not attract their contempt.

And I learned what freedom means. It means giving up control over the majority of your time so you can have the freedom to buy a house and toys. It means busting your ass to build someone else’s dream so one day when you are old, you can stop working and be free to finally figure out what your dream is. It means sacrificing your childhood and your sense of self so you can appreciate living in a free country where you get to watch other people live their lives on reality TV.

There’s a powerful reason that five year old girl screams when she’s dragged into that classroom. Children know what true freedom is…and what it isn’t. Alarm bells are ringing in her head and heart; she recognizes that environment has no real interest in who she is and its sole purpose is to suck away her one and only childhood and educate her how to be in this free world of ours.