Louise Fearn describes how she discovered the wide open space beyond the System.
Currently, my son Wilf is not in school, so I’m at home. I was explaining to him that we couldn’t just buy a bigger house and get a bigger mortgage. He thought about this and said something like I don’t want to be at home needing support in a way that means you can’t work. No child wants to fall outside of the system. They want to be successful and liked by staff and peers. It’s only when they can’t meet the system’s expectations that they opt out, losing a lot of self-esteem along the way.
I started to reassure him, horrified that he thought of himself as somewhat of a burden. I started saying things like ‘Children who go to school and have parents that go to work—they also have difficulties. They also have stressful days and things they can’t have—like bigger bedrooms—and they also have to work flexibly around their living space. It’s just a different set of problems. A different life and a different set of problems.’ But as I was saying this to him, scrambling for the positive, I had this sudden realization: Wilf being at home had left this wide open space, and we hadn’t even looked up and seen it.
We began excitedly to talk about this, how when you take away school, the one-size-fits-all education system, and society’s expectations for our life, what you are left with is a wilderness of a week, which we had tried to add schoolish structure to at first. We’d failed at that. But we were actually free to fill that space with whatever we wanted, both of us, with anything we could imagine for ourselves.
We ate cheese pretzels under a tree in the supermarket car park, and the sun came out. People came and went in the spaces near to us, going about their day, and we just sat on the grass enjoying our freedom. For a split second it seemed as if all of life was rushing around us, getting through its task list, and we alone were standing still, watching.
I’d spent years willing and cajoling Wilf into school, but that day for the first time, Wilf’s school refusal felt like a life-altering gift for both of us. I said it out loud. If he was going to school every day, I would be earning money in a job that paid the bills and I wouldn’t be focusing on what soothes me, what brings me to life, shaping our week consciously. It’s possible that the job would be mundane and unfulfilling, because most of the work I did before fell into that category. And I probably wouldn’t have the time and space to be as creative as I wanted to be. Writing is my passion, and our time at home allows me to get up early and write before his day even begins, because there are no packed lunches and school runs and homework. And I’d recently had an idea for this book. I wanted to support my family financially using my creative skills. I wouldn’t have the time and headspace to process our experience if he was at school and we were both coping with that.
He really got it. His face lit up.
And all at once we were looking at our future from a different perspective. What if I wrote a book and he made Lego® animations and ran his cat-sitting business and researched WW2? What if, despite the ridiculously low income, we created the life we wanted to have? What if, instead of not managing to find the next school or fit the System, we were creating a better, more precious existence for both of us, for all of us as a family?
It can be scary to look beyond what is offered and to step off the System’s conveyor belt. It will possibly be met with fear or judgement from your extended family or friends. Some parents do it from the start of their difficulties, way back in primary school. Others need to experience what’s on offer and see if their child can fit into any of it. But eventually there is a (growing) group of families whose children’s needs remain inadequately supported by their learning centre. A mix of conflicting diagnoses and personalities that need such flexibility to succeed that it blows Ofsted’s tiny mind. Any standardized place cannot meet the child where they are AND tick curriculum boxes. And stepping off doesn’t mean that it all becomes easier, because it doesn’t. On the daily, it’s not easy. There are problems: the dysregulation, the family dynamics, people up to their full capacity, not coping. But we would be dealing with those things anyway.
Sometimes, having a neurodiverse child is an amazing opportunity to step out of the System and unconscious conformity and step into a wide open space. If you have come to this point, or can see it within reach, I encourage you to embrace it.