Archive for the ‘Brave Writer Philosophy’ Category

The One Thing Principle Redux

One Thing Principle Redux

The discussion of how to create a flexible routine as well as how to create a home context conducive to nurturing relationships prompts me to revisit a plank of the Brave Writer philosophy:

The One Thing Principle.

Some of you already know it well. Others of you are new to Brave Writer so this will help you begin to shift the paradigm from which you teach and guide your kids. Remember: we are home educators. We are not recreating school. One of the biggest advantages to being at home is the ability to go in-depth when studying or pursuing an interest. This is the key principle to help you do just that guilt free. Enjoy!

When was the last time you really tasted the food you ate? If you’re like me and millions of moms, you wolf down your meals in an attempt to clean your plate before someone in the family needs seconds, needs a face-wiped, needs to be breastfed, needs you on the phone.

It’s easy to run through the homeschool day the same way – Everyone’s doing math. Good. In just ten minutes I’ll get the older two started on spelling. While they’re spelling, I’ll read with the eight-year-old and nurse the baby. Then I’ll make lunch and think about which creative project will go with the history novel.

As you race along, you might even have the strange feeling of not having done anything worthwhile, even though you are exhausted and have been pushing the family at breakneck speed. There’s a sense in which we “hover” above our lives rather than living right inside them when we’re filled with obligations, good ideas, lots of children and the endless demands of email and phone calls that intrude on our best plans.

We also feel pressure—pressure to complete assignments, books, courses, and projects, and worry that we won’t have done enough of any of it. So even a completed project or worksheet or novel is not relished because we think about all the things we haven’t done yet instead. What an awful trap!

To stop the madness, you have to change how you see the way you spend time.

I like to tell Brave Writer moms to savor experiences
and learning opportunities rather than rushing through them.

As much as I have emphasized the need to slow down, moms continued to feel they weren’t doing enough. That’s when it dawned on me that we needed to refine what it means to “slow down.”

The solution? The “One Thing Principle.”

Ask yourself: What would happen if you only did one thing well tomorrow? What if you focused all your energy and attention on one important idea/activity/project/math concept or novel?

For instance, what if you set up the conditions to enjoy reading one Shakespeare story by Leon Garfield? You could pick the story the night before. You could look over the difficult to pronounce names and try saying them. You could find a passage for copywork to be used later in the week. You could google a few facts about the Bard and print them out to read over breakfast. You might print out a story synopsis to help you answer questions if your kids get confused while you are reading.

Let’s look at what happens the next day if you really were to focus on One Thing. Here’s what you will do:

The next morning, toast some English muffins, serve with black tea, and set them on the kitchen table. While everyone is slurping their tea and putting in too many teaspoons of sugar, read the story aloud, sharing the gorgeous illustrations as you read. Then ask everyone to pronounce the names after you, and pause to laugh at Shakespeare’s sense of humor. Explain a few of his obscure word choices, and make a little diagram of how the characters are related to each other. At the end, read the interesting fact sheet about old Will and marvel at his accomplishments.

When you’re finished reading, savoring, drinking tea and eating muffins, when you have understood the story and have thought about who Shakespeare is, when each child has had a chance to talk about the story if he or she wants to, you close up shop and turn on the TV for a sitcom. Or perhaps you take a walk or play outside, or do some email while your kids jump on the couch like a trampoline.

Then a little later at lunch time, reminisce about the story and why it was so enjoyable. See what part of the story everyone thought was sad, or funny, or creative. Suggest ordering the film version on Netflix or acting out one scene or comparing this story (orally) to one of Shakespeare’s other plays you’ve read/seen before. Make the most of this rich experience before rushing off to the next one.

As a mother, take time to actually enjoy the story. It’s fine that you enjoy your children’s joy, but it’s even more important that you find yourself focused on the story, its language, the creativity of it, the timelessness of the ideas. You must discipline yourself to not think about the unpaid bills, the dinging bell of new email, the ring of the phone or the tug of unfolded laundry. You must not worry that math is not being studied or that your youngest still can’t read.

It is time for Shakespeare and that’s it. When you have enjoyed and relished Shakespeare, you may then go on to one more thing.

Follow the same process for another homeschool experience you want to have but put off or don’t enjoy or feel you’ve neglected.

Take time to prepare, to execute, to enjoy
and to remember before hurrying off to the next one.

If you build positive experiences around copywork, dictation, Shakespeare, poetry, writing, reading, observing, narrating, conversing, acting, nature, art and more, slowly, over time, one at a time, without feeling you are getting behind, you will naturally build momentum in your homeschool. You’ll discover that you do more things that nourish your family and will revisit the ones that are especially rewarding.

More importantly, your kids will learn to trust you. They’ll believe that you have rich experiences prepared for them that are worth doing. Think about that. Isn’t our biggest struggle “getting our kids to do what they should”? What if they knew that if you said, “Let’s do _______ today” their reaction would be: “That will be fun!” (or interesting or worth doing)? Wouldn’t that make a world of difference?

Here are the One Thing principles to remember:

  1. Prepare (ahead of time). Plan a date, purchase, make copies, organize, think about.
  2. Execute (day of). Follow through with enough time to invest deeply without distraction.
  3. Enjoy (kids and you). Let yourself forget everything else but that experience/lesson. Be here now.
  4. Reminisce (later that day or the next). Talk about what was fun, remember humor, honor connections.

You can follow the one thing principle for any lesson, topic, activity or idea. Overlapping between subject matter happens naturally when you invest this way. Subjects you didn’t even intend to cover are a part of deep investment in any topic. Allow yourself to trust the process. Start with One Thing (the one thing you are dying to do with your kids but keep putting off). Make your plan today!

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The Importance of a Flexible Routine

Brave Writer Routine

Back when I started having babies, I didn’t know there were two schools of thought about breastfeeding. I lived in a third world country and everyone breastfed. It was free, always available, didn’t need refrigeration or reheating, and everyone around me was “doing it.” You nursed a baby when the baby cried or was hungry or needed to sleep. That’s what I was told; that’s what I did. I didn’t know moms who put babies on a schedule.

Then we came to the states for two years and my friends told me that I should schedule feedings and not let the baby get the upper hand, that babies on schedules slept better and were happier. Except that my baby was happy and we slept together and it went well enough, it seemed to me. While I know plenty of moms and kids who have used a scheduling format and their children have grown up to be healthy, happy young adults, I have never regretted not being a scheduling mom.

Still, there are some moms who are adamant that demand-feeding nearly destroyed their well-being, making them feel like slaves to their children. I didn’t experience that and I’ve thought a lot about why. My conclusions mirror how I see the idea of “flexible routine” in the homeschool.

Schedules appeal because they are predictable. There’s comfort in knowing what comes next in the day, every day. We all need some structure (it’s why meals are morning, noon and evening, not just whenever you feel hungry).

So it isn’t structure per se, that is the enemy.

The Question

So then what kind of structure is most nurturing to:

  • your personality,
  • your kids’ needs,
  • and your family’s lifestyle?

In my home, breastfeeding followed a kind of intuitive pattern that matched each of the five babies (that also shifted and adapted to new routines and patterns as the baby became a nursing toddler and eventually weaned). I could predict with some degree of accuracy when that baby would want to nurse and I’d be able to organize the day knowing that there was the “first thing in the morning” feeding, followed by a mid-morning feeding, followed by the post lunch feed, followed by nursing around dinner time, and so on.

It wasn’t so much that I wrote it all out and checked the clock. It’s that over time, I could see a pattern emerge. When it was between the usual times and the baby was fussy, I didn’t necessarily start with nursing. I tried other distractions and so on. But if baby bumped his head, of course I would nurse the baby, even if he had just been fed a few moments before!

The key term shift for me was from scheduled vs. demand feeding, to flexible routine feedings instead. My breastfeeding relationship with a baby followed a predictable pattern (one I could detect and foster), yet could be altered if circumstances warranted it.

With homeschool, a similar style works well for us. Scheduling our days so that each hour has a specific task didn’t work so well. When I created a daily, hourly schedule, I mostly felt guilty for falling behind. It seemed that if we were supposed to have our read-aloud time at 10:00, but we couldn’t find the book, we were now “off-schedule” and an urgency to get back “on schedule” took over. If a dental appointment slowed our reading pace (so many pages, by a certain date), then we were battling to squeeze in extra reading to “catch up.”

The one time I successfully enforced a schedule for an entire semester (when I really did have five kids under 9), Noah woke up one morning and said, “I hate my life.” It was the wake-up call I needed. We had managed to get our work done, to follow that schedule, to keep up with the demands of reading, workbooks, writing and math problems despite life’s natural intrusions. I felt great, but he was miserable.

The Turning Point

That was a turning point for me. I realized that enforcing a program was less effective than enriching our lives. At about that time, I discovered Charlotte Mason (no “demand-feeding” style instructor was she!). Yet her vision of a full, rich, day-with-free-time lifestyle caught my attention. What if we simply chose to include certain activities and areas of focus in our lives each week, in a flexible, yet predictable pattern? Could we, for instance, read poetry every week? We could pick a day for it but not worry so much about what time of day.

The idea would be: We’ll read poetry once a week on Tuesdays when everyone is calm enough to read together. I discovered early on that drinking tea at the same time brought that calmness to the table.

Could we look at art once a week? I started to bring art books home from the library, left them out, would page through them on my own in the evenings (drawing the attention of the kids). I hung prints and identified the artists over breakfast. I took everyone to an art museum. Then we took a hour a week to draw or read or flip through an art book.

What about math? I’m not so good at intuitive math instruction. So we continued with math books, several pages each day. But I didn’t pick the time. We’d simply be sure that at some point in the day, “math got done.” When they were younger, it worked to have them do it in staggered stages so I could help each kid. Now that they’re older, it’s easier to do it all at the same time (provides morale and support).

Read-aloud time became the centerpiece of every day. It signaled that we had eaten breakfast, had all become clothed, had brushed teeth. Once those tasks were finished, we gathered in a group in the family room. I would read. And often nurse someone (and sometimes a baby wouldn’t nurse if I read, so I would have to have read-aloud time during a nap period instead). Still, each day’s read-aloud time reassured us that we were making progress, that we had been together in a meaningful way, that education had happened. It didn’t matter if it happened at 9:00 a.m. every morning. It mattered that it usually happened, most days, in the morning, after breakfast and brushed teeth.

A flexible routine is slowly cultivated.

It doesn’t spring into existence in a book you keep. It’s the patient adding of “what works,” “what needs to be done,” and “what interests” to your lifestyle over a period of time.

Poetry Teatime

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Parenting principles that foster happiness

5 Parenting Principles

Happiness and parenting: good goals, right?

There’s so much written about discipline and training, character development and education, we can sometimes forget the one ingredient that makes it all work: happiness.

I’m not talking about hedonistic vices either.
I’m talking well-being, peace, joy, safety, freedom, contentment; that deep abiding sense of “home.”

We all crave that—adults and kids alike!

As the parents, we get to set that tone every day with the choices we make. Our kids don’t have many choices. They live in the state you picked, the neighborhood you chose, the house you bought or the apartment you rented. They are either in school or not based on your research and decisions. They eat the food you buy, they wear the clothes you provide, they play with the toys you permit.

Recently my teenage son lamented the fact that I didn’t start him on violin at age 3 so that he could one day become a composer. Why didn’t I know that he would want to do that? Of course, he understood why I didn’t—but he was feeling the full weight of MY choices for HIS life.

So our kids are pretty much sidecar riders on our vision of what makes a good, satisfying life. And they know it! They feel it every time you remind them to brush their teeth or finish their scalloped potatoes or stop putting pennies in their noses.

Yet it sometimes feels to you and me that the kids run the show! They throw up thwarting behaviors at every age—pushing the bedtime line back, wanting to stay on the computer for another ten minutes, asking for cookies right before dinner, losing their soccer cleats on the day of the big game.

It’s infuriating and tiring and demanding to constantly make judgments about what they can and can’t do. At some point, it appears that the easiest course is to simply set up the schedule, the system, the program and enforce it. I remember a friend of mine said, “I don’t get why my kids won’t just go with the program! We’d all be so much happier if they would simply cooperate.”

I laughed. Apparently they wouldn’t be happier. That’s why they don’t go along! They have their own ideas of what makes them happy. We continue to imagine there’s a specific map that will ensure peace for us while providing structure for them that creates minimal chaos and maximum order.

Let me let you in on a little secret: There is no spoon. There’s no map either.

When I wrote The Writer’s Jungle, and named it such, my hope was to help moms understand how to survive and navigate the jungle-like landscape of a child’s writing life. There’s no clear path. What is there instead? Minute by minute decisions based on principles that take the child fully into account each step of the way.

Parenting works the same way.

There are principles that create a context for a satisfying home life for all, but they require minute by minute navigating with your child’s input and personality fully taken into account. Here are the ones that have worked in writing and in my kids’ lives. You’ll have others (and I hope you’ll share them in the comments section).

Notice and affirm your child’s
quirky, insightful, unique voice.

Enjoy it, affirm it, cultivate it, mirror it, share it with others and show it off. In other words, pay attention to the things your child says and fall in love with him or her every day that you can!

Pay attention to pain.

When someone says, “I hate this” or “I’m bored” it means…. “I hate this” and “I’m bored.” It doesn’t mean, “I’m lazy and pretending to be bored.” If your child were bleeding from a scraped knee and said, “I scraped my knee. It hurts,” the conclusion you would draw is “He scraped his knee; it hurts.” In relationships, it’s important to take people seriously. When they communicate pain, when they say they’re unhappy, they mean it. Solutions can be found once we allow the other person the full opportunity to explore what is stopping him or her from successfully enjoying whatever the experience is.

Discipline is not done to a person.

It’s cultivated by the individual. Discipline is supported by external structure but is governed by internal motivation. (You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make her drink, idea.) Flexible routines make it possible for structure and motivation to coincide. Schedules rarely last. Punishment never leads anyone to self-regulated discipline, and mostly drives opposing impulses underground while fostering resentment.

Eye contact and physical touch every single day matter,
even with teens (or perhaps, especially with teens).

These are freebies. Our kids are home with us. Touch them often. I had one mom confess to me that her son asked her to rub his shoulders before he started writing and she told him “No, this is school. I can’t rub your shoulders. Get to work.” Ironically, one of the steps for freewriting is to rub your child’s shoulders before he starts writing.

Create opportunities for fun.

That means several things. You must be willing to tolerate messes, chaos, changed plans, silliness, loud noises, taking too long, going too fast, going too slow, spending money, excessive talking, changing the use of an item for the purpose of the fun (snow saucers become slip n slide rides for pet bunnies), wasting food, wasting materials, trusting your kids with adult toys (video cameras, saws, sewing machines), breaking things, losing things, and failure. If you do all this, fun happens.

So let’s boil these principles down into five easily retained ideas about kids:

  1. Enjoy them.
  2. Take them seriously.
  3. Make a flexible routine.
  4. Be affectionate.
  5. Have fun.

Tomorrow is Tuesday Teatime (a great way to do all five!) and we’ll have new photos posted from yet another Brave Writer family to share. Then on Wednesday, I want to hear from you some of the ways you apply these principles in your home. I’ll share some of the ways we’ve done it over the years, too.

I’ve loved all the feedback about this series. Keep it coming!

Joy is the best teacher.

Posted in Brave Writer Philosophy, Homeschool Advice | 20 Comments »

Developing a philosophy of mothering

Developing a philosophy of mothering

I’ve never received more comments or email than I did for the On Being a Mother entry. I wrote it quickly, without much revision, as a way to affirm to myself the value I felt in being a mom despite all its obvious hardships. That piece drew a lot of support. Loved hearing from all of you.

There were comments and emails too, though, from those who are on the outside looking in, feeling that mothering really is a hardship, that they don’t enjoy the company of their children, and worse, feel guilty about it. Guilt for something you can’t control is the worst feeling you can possibly have. I have no intention ever of adding to anyone’s guilt! Sorry for that unintended side-effect.

I’m all about nurturing ourselves and our kids
through our pain to health and vitality.

That’s the whole Brave Writer modus operandi! Moms who struggle are certainly as invested in their children, love them as much, yet feel they are missing the genetic material to help them have that energy and joy in mothering that they hear about from their friends.

Their experience is a bit like never having had an orgasm and having to hear how great sex is! You feel instantly shut out from the “universally glorious experience” and you can’t imagine what you’d have to do differently to get to that blissful state of being. Believe me, I get it. (More than you know!) All of us have had that “outside-looking-in” feeling in some area of our lives.

In no way do I want to minimize the pain and bewilderment that women feel when they are handed an 8 lb. bundle of limbs and told “Go, therefore, and mother.” The crucible of total responsibility up against very real human limitations drives most of us into an emotional collapse at some point in our children’s lives (and more than once!). That’s why it’s so important to embrace this “more than full-time” job with the expectation that you can find tenderness, connection and love, or you won’t make it! Chronic stress and disappointment in your life is the stuff of which midlife crisis is made.

My goal in the parenting journey is to experience pleasure with my children. In other words (and here, the sex metaphor really is apt!), I’ve deliberately cultivated happiness as the chief aim of parenting. Not discipline. Not character-building. Not training. Not even education. My main concern for my kids and for our family has been to create a happy, peaceful, honest, nurturing, attentive-to-each-person’s-peculiarities environment so that our relationships with each other would be about connection, not about tolerating or managing each other.

It’s my belief that in a space of joy, humor and kindness, education, love, and satisfaction thrive. Relationships become a source of strength and refuge from which to live the rest of our lives rather than an obstacle filled with frustration and pain. I’ve often said, “Joy is the best teacher.” I’d add, “Peaceful relationships are the foundation of a joyful life.”

Lizzy asked in the comments:

I wonder, Julie, what or who it was that helped you develop your perspective. Was it your own mother? Was mothering a dream you’ve had since you were a little girl? Are you one of those folks who has read ‘all the books’ for inspiration?

These are great questions with longer answers than I can do justice to here. But let me tackle it this way. I never thought about having kids (didn’t like babysitting, couldn’t figure out why babies were “cute”). I come by my passion for children through mothering, not through any inherent maternal drive. My mother is incredible, though. She was the one who threw “back-to-school brunch” parties for my friends in 7th grade. She’s the one who patiently typed my essays in high school. She’s the one who has shared her very real self with me and has always listened to my pain without editing it. She’s also the one who lost her marriage to an affair and checked out emotionally for several years of my young adult life. Her deliberate recovery and prioritizing of emotional health has had a huge impact on me as an adult.

I also had the privilege of being mentored in homeschooling by an utterly free spirit of creativity who showed me the value of picnics over math pages, and dress up clothes with face paints at 10:00 in the morning on a Tuesday. As I’ve given myself to mothering and have paid attention to the writing process as it’s worked out in parent-child relationships, I’ve discovered that people thrive when they have space to be who they are, when their pain is taken seriously and when both are addressed with compassion and creativity.

That goes for both moms and kids. If we get too lost in our children, we become withered, unhappy, grouchy adults. If we are too consumed with our adult selves, we lose sight of our kids and overlook their needs for devoted attention.

Between these extremes is an awesome middle ground;
it’s the space where what you do as an adult
can be shared with your children and vice versa!

It’s the space where you tune into your own needs (I have to get out for a haircut or I’ll scream) and also keep an eye on what’s happening with your children (they need naps). If you love Mary Cassatt, you share her paintings with your kids. If they love Wii Dance Revolution, they get you to compete. There’s a give and take that includes touching, eye contact, sharing interests and problem solving. It’s a mutual admiration society that is fed by time together where all members get something from the shared experience.

In other words: joy in mothering is directly related to ensuring that you do things with and for your kids that make you all happy. Really.

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Posted in Brave Writer Philosophy, Family Notes, General, Homeschool Advice, Unschooling | 12 Comments »

On Being a Mother

On being a mother

Oprah featured moms on her show a couple weeks ago. The two “experts” who “wrote the book” were bubbly, sharp, blond business-type women who wore chic outfits that had never seen spit up or spaghetti sauce stains. They rallied the audience into a frenzy of confessions about motherhood which variously decried the hardships of this “first order of creation” occupations.

“I hate the fluids of babies: pee, spit up, spilt milk, snot.”

“I cried the day I drove to the car dealership to buy a mini-van.”

“There were days I wanted to ‘send them back to the hell from whence they came’.”

On and on the tales of woe pored from the mouths of devoted parents. Video clips of small kids on bikes, disastrous laundry rooms, “stuffed to the gills” cars with seats and sippy cups floated by, making one wonder why anyone would sign up for the task of mothering, let alone sustain it for decades. Moms confessed things, too, like the one who said she didn’t want to wake the sleeping baby by stopping the car for a potty break, but she needed to pee so badly, she took a Pampers diaper, stuck it between her legs and let it “go” as she drove. Yeah, I thought that was way more information than I needed to know about her, too.

There was a surprising lack of joy
represented in the discussion of mothering.

Mostly being a mom was held up as the hardest job on earth, the most demanding, the most self-sacrificing, the most misunderstood and overlooked work on the planet. A kind of shared martyrdom, underdog status united everyone and Oprah, never having mothered anyone, had to declare that indeed, they were right. Mothering equalled sainthood (which we all know implies burning at the stake and smiling through it!).

With my kids in the room, listening to the pain of childbirth and engorged breasts, the relentlessness of little voices, the demandingness of the small child’s need for food, sleep and comfort, the annihilation of a woman’s identity and sense of self, I couldn’t take it any more.

After all, far from being the hardest job in the world,
mothering has been the happiest, most satisfying,
life-giving, joyful, rewarding, fulfilling and
(dare I admit it?) easiest job I’ve ever had.

Oh sure, the hours suck, there are anguishes deeper than the ocean, there are seasons (years!) of such utter exhaustion you can’t imagine ever being rested again… but all those discomforts are easily and unequivocally overturned by my children, themselves.

I punched pause on the DVR to set the record straight:

“Being your mother has been the single greatest joy and privilege of my life: not a burden, not a perennial unrelenting source of emotional and physical agony, not the ‘hardest job in the world’, not the knee-capping blow to my ‘adult individuality’ nor has it been the thankless, under-appreciated, most overlooked profession these mothers would have you believe. In fact, my sense of personhood, identity and self-knowledge have grown more through mothering than any business I’ve started, any degree I’ve earned, any relationship I’ve pursued. I thank YOU for being the best people to ever happen to me.”

Then I spewed in bullet style the privileges and unique joys that came with mothering them (all five of them, each one popping into my life like a fresh daisy, every two years for 10 years).

Cuddling:

Being your mom means I got to have someone to cuddle non-stop for 12 years while sleeping with at least one of you at a time, nursing you, carrying you, holding you, helping you in and out of car seats, backpacking you.

Sleeping together:

There is nothing more divine than a baby who falls asleep on your chest while you fall asleep and the whole world stops while mother and tiny child become fused as one content, quiet, shared being. No meditation, yoga, prayer circle, private retreat has ever come close to providing me with the depth of peace, pleasure and abiding hope that sleeping with a baby has given me.

Playing:

Board games and hopscotch, dress-ups, face paint, finger paint, walks in the woods, trips to the zoo, picking up bugs, rolling down hills, blowing bubbles, eating too many cookies, watching Arthur on PBS, rewatching Disney movies, cards, chasing a dog in the backyard, trampoline jumping, creek splashing, snowman building, skiing, middle of the night slumber parties, bike rides, soccer in the backyard, soccer on the official fields, ultimate frisbee… What adult gets to do any of this on his or her 9-5 job? Talk about luxury!

Conversation:

Oh it starts off good – why do bubbles float? How did I get red hair? Why doesn’t Santa Claus visit Moroccans, too? But boy does it keep getting better! I’ve learned about human rights, veganism, Role Playing Games, Shakespeare, Klingon, fashion, exercise, lacrosse, birds, fantasy novels, conspiracy theories, atheism, feminism, linguistics, alternative monetary systems for world peace (serious!) and more by talking to my kids.

Mothering is the job that means:

  • taking the dog and kids for a walk in the woods is on task.
  • teatimes and picnics are considered achievements worth trumpeting to friends and family
  • even on bad days, someone tells you “Hey, I love you Mom” and then hugs you so tightly, you believe it.

There is no comparison to the jobs I’ve had in business and writing. Sure, affirmation and personal achievement are nice… but they are nothing like the bond that comes from the devotion of loving people who live every day looking for you to see them for who they are. I’ve found that the easiest thing in the world is to love my kids. All it takes is entering into their lives on their terms and giving all I’ve got. I get it all back and more.

Yes, there have been nights where I cried myself to sleep over a non-stop crying toddler or a teenager’s emotional pain. There are times when I feel out of control and invisible and fearful for my child’s future or welfare. But the rewards of mothering so far outweigh any of its challenges, I can’t relate to the repeated refrains of “how hard I have it” simply because I chose to have five kids. Instead, I just feel perennially lucky that my lifestyle has included such richness, tenderness and connection to immortality through my children.

I think it’s time we blew the whistle.
Mothering isn’t a job. It’s a privilege.

Follow-Up Thoughts

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Posted in Brave Writer Philosophy, Family Notes | 77 Comments »