Where Rewilding Childhood Begins
If childhood is the potential of the seed, motherhood is the dark fertile soil.
In working with the mythic and reimagining the landscape of faith, identity, and belonging (my day job), I wondered about my own day-to-day experience of homeschooling my son, Reagan.
Reagan is 12 years old and a beautiful little Care Bear of a boy whom I pulled out of public school in 2020 after years of the system failing him. He’s diagnosed with mild/mod “Autism Spectrum Disorder” — though I don’t call it a disorder ever. Other labels he’s been given include having a learning disability and verbal delay. When he was diagnosed at 3 years old they said he’d probably never speak. In this space, I’ll share how while I understand the challenges he has, there is another way to look at special needs children — and how that informs other special needs parents and how it enriches the environment for learning for all children.
For example, sure he struggles to learn in the ways and at the pace of neurotypical children — but how is he learning in ways that are far more advanced? What gifts do these children offer us that can enrich the world? And sure, he has a verbal delay but he is fluent in another kind of language — the language of symbology. Sure, I am his teacher but in every way possible, my autistic son is my guide, shaping how I re-imagine the world, how I see more deeply, and how to become fluent in a language beyond words.
Autistic or not, every single child holds the same gift.
We just have to be able to SEE.
“My autistic son is my guide, shaping how I re-imagine the world, how I see more deeply, and how to become fluent in a language beyond words.”
— Shireen Qudosi
I’ve been homeschooling Reagan since the Covid-19 pandemic and learning so much about him and about our relationship as a family — while also navigating what has been the scariest part of my life. At the same time that I started homeschooling him (because there was no choice given the education system fallout), I’ve also been overcoming physical disability and challenges, having my career crash and burn, struggling with work in a culture that still doesn’t actually accept motherhood, struggling with bandwidth and capacity, while also having to overcome my own plummeting sense of worth which took a giant plunge because of all these things.
I thought deeply about all this while doing it, and I came out of it with insights that I’m here to offer others. Hopefully, it helps you because no one should have to go through this alone.
When Everything Starts Falling Apart…So Things Can Start Falling Into Place
The third year of homeschooling — that’s when things finally started falling into place. I began exploring, “What if I looked at him and his education in the same way I was looking at complex issues in the broader world?”
My career in counter-extremism where I challenged religious fanaticism crashed at the same time as the education system in a post-2020 world. I took the pieces and created something new out of it that is more beautiful and more promising (and more effective) than anything I was doing before. I came up with a new vision for countering Islamic extremism. For the past 22 years, I was fighting Islamic extremism, but when everything fell apart I was finally given the spaciousness I needed to go within. When I did, I found that instead of fighting the old paradigm, I discovered something more beautiful than the war zone of fighting bad ideas. Instead of fighting bad ideas, I created something new.
At the same time, the same thing was happening with the education system.
After years of fighting the public school system’s failure and being exhausted from it just to start again every new school year…I found something new, something more beautiful, more effective, and something older that gave us the ground we needed to build a foundation for belonging. It’s rewilding childhood through intuitive presence that needs a rich, fertile feminine landscape to take root in.
I was tilling the soil here, looking to see how I could pull the weeds and plant new seeds that help Reagan flourish. There’s so much to say here, which is why I created the Rewilding Childhood community — and ultimately it starts with this:
We can’t really have a conversation about homeschooling until we have a conversation about us. We have to have a conversation about us as mothers, as women, first.
In my day job commenting on global issues like the 2022 Iranian protests over women’s rights, I pushed through the noise of all the opinions of “women’s rights” and intuitively felt called to speak to women’s rites and the ritual of cord-cutting. The practice of cord-cutting is as old as human spirituality and it speaks to severing an energetic tether that binds us in some way. I compared the global protest of women cutting their hair to the sacred women’s rite of cord-cutting, of severing what no longer belonged to us.
The opposite needs to happen here. More and more we’re culturally being pushed and exploited into giving up on connection to our children. I’ll discuss this plenty more in the future, but for now:
In order to give our children the education they deserve, it’s so important to repair the cord that connects a mother to her child.
We need to repair the energetic cord that connects us to our children intuitively. Sensing what our children need is an instinct every mother has, but it is also a skill. You are all here as part of this Rewilding Childhood community because you are listening to the song of your heart; you know homeschooling, unschooling, and/or wildschooling is the environment your child thrives in. You are already rewilding.
Just like learning how to find our voice in a song or knowing how to play a chord in the language of music, the cord connecting us to our child is like a root. The entire root system is a chorus that is always singing, always feeling through the soil.
Finding ways to repair that cord — those chords — is what I do here. I take my experience as a mother who has successfully worked with her son to overcome challenges…I take my intuitive gifts feeling for the song between things…and I bring that to you in ways that rewild both root and earth.
Thank you for being here, for your time, your friendship, and your trust.
Welcome to the Rewilding Childhood community.
About Rewilding Childhood
Welcome to our collective, a place for homeschooling families devoted to wildschooling, unschooling, and nourishing the kaleidoscopic reality of children with Autism.
Every Tuesday from 9 am to 10 am PDT, we have a one-hour coffee and chat with our Rewilding Childhood Facebook Group. This is a space where we can come together so this journey of homeschooling feels a little less alone.
If you’d like to learn more about my work, books, guides, and other range of offers, please click here.