The right time is never

Hello friends,

I’m embarking on a program of self-directed study and I’m going to take you with me. This is mostly a reaction to having to interrupt my Masters program, for various reasons. I’m hoping to start again next September!

I will be merging book group into this because it seems like book group is a big ask for many of you right now, understandably! And perhaps not what you all need (yet another book group?! Don’t get me wrong, i LOVE me a book group, but there are only so many one can join).

So instead, I am going to do the reading and the thinking and the writing.. and you can join me if you wish. I have made up 6 months of deep dives into child liberation & radical carework and unschooling-adjacent reading and I will be going deep and telling you all about it.

I hope you enjoy it. If you happen to want monthly zooms to come back, let me know! I’m always open to them, but there didn’t seem to be a demand lately so I’m letting them go, for now.

I’ll be sharing my reading list in January, month by month.

If you are new and here for unschool- & youth lib-related stuff, you might like some of my older posts before you read this one:

Meanwhile, I’ve been quiet because things have been really tough.

I’ve been having a tricky allergic reaction to one of my epilepsy meds since about a year ago, but am struggling to come off of it without being really unwell and unable to exist and do daily things.

I haven’t written much about home educating while also being unwell, and that is because I found I need to deconstruct the idea that I somehow must do it all exactly like the other home educators do, even though I am twice as tired/generally unwell all the time (also, perhaps most ‘all the other home educators’ are also tired/unwell/disabled but noone talks about it!)

I have felt so guilty having to explain to my children that some things are going to have to give because I am not well, again. It just seems like there is always something.

Will they grow up and remember a mother that was always tired, always unable, always not well enough?

I know it’s irrational to feel bad about something I can’t control, something that is happening to me. But I do. I want to be okay so I can lead the life that I planned to lead, so I can be the mother I planned to be.

What’s going to happen to the plan?

(Note to self: the plan was dismembered and thrown to the wind years ago, don’t you remember?)

There is no plan. I know that I need to just go with life as it is. Nothing is that great right now, everyone is struggling.

We need to carry on with everything, just as we find it.

I know that is my biggest work right now.

In a sense, unschooling prepared me for this. It prepared me to recognise that there is no rush. We are not on a conveyor belt that we cannot step off of, because we never stepped foot in the factory to begin with.

Knowing this means I can take time to get better, to figure out what the right meds are for me right now so that I can function in society but also not have crazy allergic reactions like the one I am having to my current drugs.

It’s just that my patience is short, I suppose. I thought that perhaps I was done waiting to be better, after the first time I waited to be better in 2019. (See: cancer). Turns out perhaps we are never done, we never get there, there is always something.

It’s also a reminder to anyone who hopes they will home educate when all the pieces come together: they won’t. There will never be a day when everything clicks into place and it will suddenly becomea easy to take such an enormous leap. There will never be a time when you finally feel you’re ready to take your children out of school; and equally, there will never be a time of us unschoolers when it feels okay to let go, to finally admit that perhaps we can’t do it all, but we will have to recognize that perhaps that time is now. For some of us?

To those of us who feel like we are waiting for something to make any kind of change: that something is most probably not coming. Or in any case it might well be very very far away.

I’m going to need to re-read this probably a million times in 2026.

I hope you all have a wonderful rest of a year that I’m guessing has tested many of us in all sorts of weird and perhaps really awful ways. I’m guessing some of us are glad to put 2025 behind us.

As always, thank you for reading and being here.