I want to bring you into a moment in my life that often leaves me feeling separated from the majority SDE community. It’s just after 1:00 a.m. and I’m making my last DoorDash delivery. I’m $100 short on rent and have two days to make it up, plus gas. My 10-year-old daughter calls me because she wants me to come home. She’s with my 16-year-old, but it’s not the same. She just wants her mom. I give her my ETA and stay on the phone with her while she works out math problems. I’m exhausted and don’t feel like thinking about math, but it’s one of her great loves, and I made a promise to show up for my kids in this way, and I enjoy hearing her voice on the drive home.

She meets me at the door, where we find a huge, gorgeous moth and spend time studying it and taking pictures. I realize, when I get inside, that the air conditioner isn’t working, but it’s cool enough outside to leave a balcony door cracked and get comfortable enough to sleep. We’re too tired to read tonight, although she manages a sentence or two. Reading has been our nighttime ritual all her life, unless I’m studying – a thing she’s come to dread. I’d spent the day leading up to this working eight hours, plus an hour commute each way, and trying to get a six-page paper written for grad school. I’m also coming off a rough Ulcerative Colitis flare, requiring a round of prednisone and still in enough pain to need Tylenol to fall asleep.

I can’t put into words the feeling of isolation that comes up for me, as I’m responding to unschool facebook group posts and messaging other unschooling families, trying to align my schedule with anything they might have available, trying to get a crew of teenagers to meet my son at the skatepark for one of my only days off this weekend. We’re new to the city and are still building our community, but sometimes it feels like we’re more of a burden than a vital part of it.

We moved here to be closer to my mom and sister, in case I get hospitalized again, so my kids have somewhere to go. I have a benign brain tumor, a diagnosis that led to a week-long hospital stay where they found a blood clot in my brain, and I had no family to help with my kids when it happened. I had to hire sitters and beg friends to take turns staying with them for an entire week. We don’t know what the future holds, but we know we have time, and we don’t want to waste it.

This city has a thriving alternative school, homeschool, and unschool community, one I’ve tried very hard to be a part of, because we all know how important it is to maintain community for our kids. We’ve made some great friends. My daughter attends an unschooling “clubhouse” a couple of times a week, and I devote most Thursdays to co-collaborating with Flying Squads so my teen gets to make friends while exploring the city. I rarely meet other single parents, and even more rarely do I meet one who identifies with my socio-economic status and health issues. Park meet-ups become awkward because I want to talk about it, but people don’t know how to respond. I want to relate to people and feel included, but the more I talk about our family, the less I feel like people in this community relate to me.

I have thriving friendships outside the SDE community, and I’ve made a close friend with a single mom whose child attends the Sudbury school my kids attended until we couldn’t keep up with payments. I’m bonding with my fellow instigator at Flying Squads and genuinely enjoy our conversations every week. There’s still this feeling that follows me, that has often followed me throughout our unschooling journey. We’re a little bit set apart, a little bit outside the... norm? Box? Strange words for this community. Yet, somehow, there does seem to be a standard we don’t quite fit.

When I chose to opt out of the system, it meant doing everything the hard way to create the peace our little family craves.

I know I can’t be the only one who barely keeps the lights on and still fights to help my kids maintain autonomy in a world that wants them to conform. So why aren’t we talking about it? We do so much unpacking to move past the conditioning that taught us forcing our kids through a conventional school to meet the status quo is the only way they’ll become thriving members of society. Why aren’t we doing the same to break the stigma and start having real conversations about poverty in our community?

In part, I believe many of us strive to maintain a good image of the unschooling home. There’s a lot of stigma attached to both self-directed education and living below the poverty line. I don’t have a how-to guide for navigating an unschooling lifestyle as a poor single parent, it’s simply who I am. Much of my time as a parent of unschoolers has been a process of learning to “survive and thrive,” as my economics textbook puts it. When I chose to opt out of the system, it meant doing everything the hard way to create the peace our little family craves. It means finding unconventional ways to maintain the grind so that my kids don’t have to be a “cog in the wheel.” Surviving takes up a lot of my time because, yes, I have to put food on the table. But it isn’t enough to survive, we also have to find a way to thrive together as an unschooling family. I want to have a conversation about how managing that balance is near impossible for families like mine, but we still fight to do it because it means so much to us.

Society tells us not to talk about money, but we’ve never been the type of family to quiet down about our experiences. We push back, we speak our minds, and we don’t hide or feel ashamed of our situation. We know who we are and we’re happy. As a community, we make space for conversations about many types of struggles. I know discussing money makes people uncomfortable, but I believe we can move past the discomfort and learn to connect on this topic. How many other families in our community might relate to my story but don’t have a voice because it’s a topic we avoid?