V i n a B a r h a m

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Notes on Unschooling as Liberation Work

Note: I am currently hashing out my thoughts about our Unschooling life as it pertains to Love + Liberation. And I hope to post bits and pieces of my thoughts around this as part of my own process in working through with what I believe and how to move forward in our Unschooling journey centered on Love and Liberation for all.

Our life as unschoolers is a big part of my liberation work.

What I mean by liberation work is twofold.

First, I mean liberation from institutions that are oppressive at its core (like forced education) + from the conditioning we all have received about learning, agency and childhood.

And second: liberation as having the freedom to create and materialize the visions we have for our life and a more just and fair world.

The truth is, we can only create more of the same if the tools and training we receive come from the same oppressive shit.

Our children deserve better.

These systems, frankly, need to die.

::Pause::

So some questions I am often thinking of:

What would it mean to be real partners with our children in their own development? What does it look like to honor our children’s autonomy and agency in choosing how to spend their days based on what calls to them? What does it mean to trust our children to lead their lives, to trust in their wisdom, their innate curiosity and drive to learn what interests them? What would it look like if we truly deeply honored all kinds of intelligences and gifts and abilities and bodies and skin color? What would it take to make this truly accessible for all?

::Pause::

When I first started this Unschooling journey many years ago, I mostly asked the personal equivalent of these questions. As in, how do I practice this and live these questions as it pertains to our own family.

But as I have gained deeper awareness of systemic injustices all around me, the scope of these questions naturally expanded beyond the personal.

Because our personal liberation is always connected to the collective. My child can’t truly be free unless all children are free.

But we can’t get to the collective without first working through the personal.

So if we are going to fight for all of our children’s future, let’s start there.

Lessons I’m Learning On How to Resist and Thrive

So lately, I’ve been focusing my energies on three things:

  1. working on dismantling my internalized racism/anti-blackness (yes even as a NBPOC, I have also been conditioned towards implicit bias towards whiteness and the work never stops)
  2. loving myself, taking care of myself and my family and reconnecting with my Filipino roots before colonization had colorized and Christianized our way of life and
  3. working on identifying and weaving my gifts and how I can be of real service in creating alternative realities to these g-dd-mn systems.

I’ve been learning a lot about my own fragility, my own tendency towards saviourism, my capacity to posture and be performative in how I show up for those who are more marginalized than I. I’ve seen how I can co-opt struggles that are not mine in my attempts to show solidarity. It’s easy to fall into.

Again, the work never stops. We keep waking up over and over because there’s always something new to learn about ourselves and each other.

Through this, I have gained a bit more empathy for those who struggle with wanting to show up but unsure how. I’ve taken to heart that I can be just as complicit in someone’s oppression as the next person. We all share this ability as human beings. Just as we share this capacity to choose humility, understanding, empathy and radical love.

I’m learning how to examine my own oppression more clearly while also practicing deep gratitude about the privileges I hold and that has helped me be where I am today. I know that the clearer I am about both, the more I know how to show up in ways that are more authentic and in alignment to love and justice. Knowing who I am at the core and honoring my boundaries are also both essential to sustainable activism.

I’m still angry about a lot of things. And I am still following the news. And doing what I can to resist.

But I also know that my resistance needs to be rooted in deep self-love and knowledge, in real solidarity, in humility, in continual learning and growth.

I was all about Fire element the past few months, raging and ready to burn everything down. But Fire alone is not enough. We need to ground ourselves deep into Earth wisdom, swim in the intuitive depths of Water and gain clearer insight as we take a higher perspective, a birds eye view if you will, with the Air element.

Slow. Steady. Soulful. Strategic.

We’ve got this.

PS Print show above is available in my shop.

Who Am I Before

Who am I
Before they came and
Declared my people
Savage
And in need of
Saving

Who am I
Before they turned me
Against my mother tongue
So that I would find it
Shameful to speak with my lips

Who am I
Before they convinced me
My ancestors’ ways of healing
Of being
Of magic-making
Were less than
And Never worthy until
Proven
Sanctioned
Declared
by those who claim authority

Who am I
Before I saw the land that bore me
And raised me
As a place that couldn’t sustain me
And my dreams
And my liberty

Who am I
Before I started to
Believe that my freedom
And happiness could Only be found
Somewhere else
And made my home
Among the people
Who ravaged mine

Who am I before I
Became someone
who swallowed up
This sweet tasting poison
of whiteness
Until only the darkness of my skin
Remained the thing they couldn’t
erase
touch
Bind
Who am I before I
was asleep
To all
The indigenous women
Within

Now I know

The wise
The Powerful
The angry

The multitudes that live inside me

The love
The potential

The beauty
And the fucking brilliance

All That is me

Mothering As Resistance

If I let the number of times I was convinced I have f*cked my children up keep me down, I wouldn’t be here at all.

My children would be motherless.

Because the truth is, I fight this voice in my head that constantly says my children are better off without me. This belief that I am worthless if I can’t be perfect is real. I know it’s a lie, but it still takes a lot of work to live like it is.

And it is damn exhausting.

:: Pause::

My therapist says that the bar I set for what I consider good  parenting is not only somewhat unrealistic, but very much white-centric.  And daaaaaaamn she is right. I didn’t consider how my mothering intersects with my own lived experience  as a Pinay daughter growing up in a deeply colonized culture, as a first generation immigrant teenager and now as a mother to Filipina-American daughters living in a very gentrified city.

How could I have even considered that?

I unconsciously worked hard to become assimilated throughout my teens and adulthood. I swallowed up the message of whiteness until I thought it was the core of who I am. I drank that shit up over and over even when it kept poisoning so many parts of me that I am now working hard to heal.

Slowly I am beginning to understand how moving to America has shaped me in ways I didn’t ask for. I’m beginning to understand that my oppression is different from other sisters of color, that I can be complicit in perpetuating oppression to others if I don’t do the work. And now as a mother to two daughters who are going to grow up swimming in the sea of white supremacy, mothering them has become a way of resisting systems designed to condition them to doubt their capacity and diminish their worth.

So between all of that and constantly breaking free of this nagging voice in my head that tells me I am not good enough (in general)…I feel emotionally wasted.

And I just want to give up.

::Pause::

But here’s why I keep going:

I look at my children and I know they don’t deserve this shit.  None of our children deserve this shit. 

And that maybe my mother, my lola, my lola sa tuhod….maybe they all thought the same when they were close to giving up. So we keep falling flat on our face and we keep picking ourselves up because it all comes full circle. Someone fought hard so I can be here and I’m sure as hell gonna do the same for my daughters.

We just got to learn how to do it together, in all our messiness and shit.

Or they don’t stand a chance.

We Got Work To Do

Lately, I’ve been having the hardest time finding words about Tr*mp, the march, everything.

But giving voice to my lived experience is part of my resistance so I’m gonna try.

::Pause::

Last night, I went to see my therapist and we started talking about how we arrived at our decision whether we are gonna march today or not. I’m damn lucky I get to have a therapist of color who is down with that kind of shit. So many of us are in need of this kind of healing, but few of us have access.

All that to say, I am not marching with y’all today.

Personally, I don’t have a lot of spoons to spend. Healing is hard work. I can’t fight if I am dead. So taking care of myself and my little ones are my priority.

POCs, queer and disabled folk have been fighting for our rights for so long. For our humanity. For our survival. Many of us daily do the work to reclaim a piece of ourselves that was stolen, colonized, silenced, raped, assaulted or killed.

And now we have an administration that gets off maintaining our oppression because they want to make America white and Christian and able-bodied and male again.

So we won’t stop fighting now.

But white people, you got some serious shit to do. White supremacy is yours to take down.

So go ahead and march today with your pussy cat hats. I raise my fists (and both middle fingers) in solidarity from the comforts and safety of my house while I maybe nurse my tiny brown human. People of color deserve safety and comfort too.

But I better hear you make noise and resist for POCS, queer, disabled and other marginalized folx after today. I don’t trust most of you just yet, but I’m willing to be proven wrong. I want to be proven wrong.

Do away with the White Feminism already, okay? Because you think it’s our fault that we have not yet reached this unity you keep alluding to over and over and over again. I’m so sick of hearing that.

So today, I will kiss my babies, go for a walk, get schooled in how best to contribute, listen to the voices of those who have been in the trenches long before it became cool and show up for who I can when I can.

We got work to do.

Love Is Your Liberation

When you lose sight of your light.
When you feel small and shriveled.
When shame steals your voice.
When self-loathing shrouds your vision.
When you’ve forgotten what your brilliance looks like.
When you disappear into the darkness.
When all you hear is deafening silence.
When you are drowning in waves of doubt.
Know you are not alone.
Know you matter.
Know that you will find your way back.
Love will be your liberation.
She will fight for you with blood, tears and bones.
She will shred the lies one by one
with her sword and fire
until the illusion
burns burns burns
and you die
and descend to who you’ve always been.

Flesh. Breath. Eternal. Here.

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