I grew up with two fathers. I grew up in two families, with two mothers, two fathers and two sets of siblings. Only one of my siblings travelled with me from one family to the other, and often we didn’t even do it at the same time. It has been confusing for my identity formation and my sense of being in the world: two cultures, two realities, two versions of myself.
But that’s not the point today. Today I’m thinking of something one of my fathers always said:
We never give up.
Never ever do we give up.
A good slogan to hold on to back when I had cancer. And something to think about when we’re wrestling with our seemingly impossible lives.
Our two older children, aged seventeen and nineteen, are starting a university-preparatory education this January after never having attended school, having been unschooled, meaning they’ve never encountered the traditional school format. It is their expressed wish to go to university, so the path is fine and good for them. Voluntariness is a central concept for unschoolers, far more important than the negation of school as such. In fact, completely central.
Right there at the centre of it all, along with the relationship, the diving into life with everything it entails in a context of unconditional love, of belonging, of being with someone who knows who you are. Right down to the bone.
Over the past almost eight years, we’ve become nomads. At the same time that the young ones are studying, we are racing around the world. Projects, people, adventures, hikes, art museums, and much more fill up our calendars.
Yesterday, toward the evening, stretched between a birthday party in Denmark and an event we’re hosting in Tarragona, Spain, with only a few days in between, stretched across the German autobahn at 120 km per hour and a battery drained by the rice cooker and the coffee machine and the gamer computer, we sat there studying maths and grammar under a rechargeable LED lamp swaying with the car’s movement. Car sickness hits when you write in a moving car, the tiredness was overwhelming.
But we never give up.
One child has to learn eleven years of mathematics in three months and be ready for exams by Christmas. The other is working on their weakest areas, and it’s really cosy.
It’s pretty wild to have been unschooled for more than ten years and then suddenly have the format of school like a knife at your throat. The big bad word “exam” stands looming in the winter darkness, and we must navigate staying true to who we are while finding compatibility with the world we once said no to.
You can learn maths under a swaying lamp in a car on the autobahn. If you really want to. That’s the whole point. You can learn if you’re interested. Often, unschooled children learn simply because they’re doing something that makes sense, and the learning as such is not the goal of the activity. You could actually say the opposite right now about our effort. Learning is the goal. Understanding a foreign system and learning the necessary tools and skills, and hopefully also acquiring the valuable knowledge that is worth taking away from the experience.
The goal of the activity is to learn. The method is new, actually quite fun. Both kids are enjoying a concrete challenge and wish there were slightly bigger holes in the calendar to immerse themselves in academics. That’s actually always been the case. Having time to read, draw, do math, work on projects, explore different academic disciplines, and gather knowledge and skills has always been high on our family's wish list of activities. It’s a kind of free time for our children. Their work and everyday life are life as such. Dealing with relationships, practical tasks, travel activities, exercise, and work. Studying is a luxury, and we throw ourselves into it with heart and soul.
Weird, backwards, complex world. Here we come. With swaying lamp and focused minds, we race southward and learn mathematics and study technique and history, before we land in the next huge event.
Can it really be a break to do fractions and solve quadratic equations, write reports on red-shifting and cosmic microwave background at 120 km per hour? Or is it only the one playing GTA who’s truly taking time off?
All three are equally working, equally engaged in life, and equally committed to precisely what they most want. And I boil potatoes, check math exercises, read through constructions, write blog posts, and drink coffee.
It’s a party in this life, an adventure. A slightly busy party, maybe, but a great party. And a long journey sometimes, into the unknown most of the time.
And while the car moves closer and closer ot the beloved other side of the Pyrenees (where the sun shines), I think about my childhood. My second father, who often would lovelingly bump his fist into the kitchen counter, straighten his back and speak the words: We will never give up. He would move on to making more food, cleaning more dishes, doing more work (he was a high school teacher and had work to do at home, checking the students' homework), talking with the five kids we were, never giving up.
He passed away on New Year's Eve almost five years ago, and I miss him. But not too much. He is with us here in the van, with us in our lives, when we also say, 'We will never give up.' And when I pass the eight most important rules for math that he taught me on to my children.
A strange memory attached to him is this: He died twice. He died, not really waking up after a minor surgery, just slowly and calmly moving into the next world. As things are in a hospital, he was given CPR and the works, and brought back to life. The first time around, he was dead for 25 minutes. On life support for some hours, while the family gathered and the doctors explained all they needed, and we all knew he wanted to go, he was ready. My mom had died eight months before, and he did not want to go on without her. It was sad, and we cried a lot, but it did make sense.
I was not there. I was on a faraway coast, one of the prices we pay as nomads. I couldn't make it back, so I stayed in the moist and beautiful winter fog in Portugal, in close contact with my siblings, while we waited for the second departure of our father.
The call came just as we parked in a hillside village where we were to celebrate New Year's Eve by watching a French circus perform the most beautiful circus variation I have ever seen. Overwhelmed by the grief and the turning of the year, we laughed and cried and took it all in, and we knew he had not given up. He had moved on.
And it was all all right. So complex and fine, so full of love and beauty. And the year turned, and we walked the earth without him. Without giving up. Today I am driving and suddenly teaching my unschooled teenagers classic school stuff while on the road, pushing to do something many would say is quite impossible, while the car is moving. It is all good. It is part of who we are. And I am sure this optimism, this doing it even when it seems impossible, this never giving up takes us way further than any other more “realistic” strategy. Life is not simple, and time bends. Believing we can do the near impossible is a strategy that will help us overcome mediocrity and boredom, and make our lives richer.
I am sure of it.
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