As I write this, it is rainy and gray and muddled. We, living in the American northeast, are in the middle of the notoriously inhospitable New England winter. As I usually do at this time of year, I am again feeling the need to find focus. And finding focus is hard. (Finding the ground even harder!) As I start and restart this column and move text around, trying to write, I realize that I need to pull back and revisit what I wanted this column to be about.

It was supposed to be about my journey as an unschooling father. I hoped to connect with other unschooling/deschooling/homeschooling parents to discuss what it is that we do with our lives. Choosing to raise and educate our children in this way is as much about our story, our journey – and in many ways more so – as it is about theirs. It is a story that we write for ourselves, and – true to form with our educational beliefs – our children will have to write their own.

Not an uneventful plot point in the story that is Nate is the death of my father when I was four months old. I still remember the day in grade school when a classmate found this out and was shocked, couldn’t believe it. It was like that for me too, yet it was also always there. It was a strange balance, between being the not-so-forgotten elephant in the room and being the faded, uninteresting wallpaper all at the same time. This naturally colored my own journey into fatherhood.

My wife had a feeling that our first child would be a son. She remarked to our midwife that she would be ridiculously happy with a boy child who looked just like I did in my baby picture – bulbous head and all! (I did eventually grow into that head she reminds me.) She felt that lacking a father of my own, I had a destiny to be a father to a son myself, to right some cosmic ship or finish off what he wasn’t able to. She just felt it. As usual, she was right.

For my second child, I wasn’t so green in this business, but I wasn’t so sure about it either. But out he popped a boy as well. This must have been the universe’s way of pushing me closer to the cliff’s edge, the uncharted territory, possibly (and I didn’t know it then) a journey that would involve deep growth on my part and patience building lessons (daily – twice daily!!) for my sons.

Then a couple of years back, my wife and I decided to have one more kid. I was convinced that it was a girl. In fact, I foolishly promised my wife a girl. This was foolish in two ways – foolish for wanting it enough to promise something I couldn’t control and foolish for not realizing the thing I was wanting that much was not necessary for my happiness.

Regardless, up until the day before baby number three was born, I insisted it was a girl. Named Ruby. Why I thought that I, with my reproductive organs clearly under a Y-chromosome backed dictatorship, could generate a girl child, I do not know. Same for why I thought I could really avoid the father-son issue so glaringly set out before me.

So, as if to emphasize the point, just to really drive it home, I had another son. And my wife and I had to come up with his name really fast.

Now, raising three sons is not something anyone should take lightly (or without the proper protective equipment) and it is really tempting – and easier than you would think – to avoid deeply experiencing fatherhood. So to embrace it was a leap of faith for me: faith that I am up to the task and that I am doing the right thing.

From what I have seen, this is life. It is, in fact, no matter what we do or try, the old John Lennon “life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans” routine. This definitely applies to life as a parent and as an unschooler. Both of these choices, that I’m assuming most of you, dear readers, have made, are loaded with non-answers, best answers, no answers and best-three-out-of-five type answers. In short, there are many questions and few answers.

And that is where the faith thing comes back in for me, trusting in the choices that I make. I’m not talking about religious or spiritual faith here, although I have nothing against that. And I’m not talking about blind belief in bad decisions like: I’ll take this vacation to the Caribbean and I’m sure I’ll come up with money for the mortgage before the end of the month anyway.

For parenting, it’s trusting my instinct despite the opinion of others and despite whatever baggage I bring along to the task (like being an unfathered father). For unschooling, it’s trusting in my instincts despite not having been educated this way myself. For me – who excelled in school and navigated this structured learning environment with ease, yet knew that it wasn’t best for me or for those who struggled in it – it is a leap of faith to leave this all behind, to stop my sons from chasing gold stars and to embrace the unknown.

As a life learner, I wake up every morning and decide (well, most days decide) that the day is going to be about experiencing it to its fullest…living it in a real, authentic way, not tied to the security blanket of the educational system, but at the same time not hopelessly locked in battle with it. I’ve chosen to live out this part of my life not with it, not in reaction to it but, I guess you could say, parallel to it.

With my fathering I’ve also had to cut a parallel path, not being able to replicate my own father, nor reacting against him, but choosing to live this role out as best as I can and having faith that I am making the right choices and, if not, then at least learning from my mistakes.

I find that not being able to turn to someone or something else in unschooling and in fathering is unsettling, that faith can sometimes be a less than appealing alternative to having a curriculum or model to follow. But at the same time, it forces me to reflect on what I am doing, to rely on myself. And it won’t allow me to coast along and not truly own my life and experience it to the depth that I want to.

So that is what I wanted to get at – the personal, deeper reason behind what it is that I do. I’m loath to wrap this all up with some snappy, trite conclusion, which is never how these life stories seem to end, anyway. And since I keep on writing my own story, and I haven’t reached the ending yet (Insha’Allah), I don’t have to.