Disclosure
I often think about the circumstances that have led me to where I am at this current stage in my life. I think about the privileges I didn’t earn and those I did, the pure luck and happenstance that led to where and what I’m doing now, and about the choices I made when faced with a split path. Some of these I have shared about in this post. Others I have not disclosed because I wonder if they are interesting enough to merit mentioning and I also feel a bit of guilt when I compare the advantages that I have with others who may not, making me think of myself as some kind of parenting fraud. Is advocacy work solely tied to lived experiences? Is having been a child enough of a lived experience to speak out for children? Do my words mean less because of my proximity to whiteness? What is the line between oversharing and disclosure? Do I have a responsibility to disclose the ways that unschooling is accessible for my family?
Since these are common thoughts in my head, I jumped at the chance to listen to a conversation about this very thing when one of our co-op mamas shared an episode of Fran Libertore’s podcast A Life Unschooled on our Discord. The episode features Adele Jarrett-Kerr, a Trinidadian mother of three and freelance writer, who wrote an article on Substack called “Homeschool mum hustle culture is giving MLM vibes. Or, we need to talk about childcare and money.” In the article, Adele shares: All this homeschool, self-employed “live your dream” stuff feels a bit hustle culture except now it’s being served up with lashings of “sisterhood” and “sacred rest”. On the podcast episode they unpack this sentiment a bit more thoroughly. One of the conclusions they reach is that perhaps their should be a responsibility by homeschooling influencers to disclose the details about how they manage to create content and practice said sacred rest. Like the help, money, and time that goes into being able to carve out space for such activities in the first place.
Now, I am not an influencer by any stretch of the word. I do not have a large following, I do not get paid to post content,I don’t advertise or push people to buy or try products, and I really don’t spend much time creating content. However, I do have an agenda and that agenda is liberation, children’s rights and their autonomy. And I focus on my life as an unschooling family. Even if only a handful of people feel motivated by what I share, then maybe I do have a responsibility to that handful of people to disclose more about how I am able to live a life as a stay-at-home-parent that unschools so that people who really wish they could but don’t aren’t left feeling guilty or ashamed.
The last thing I want is to aim to “empower” families and end up making them feel less than. So, in this post
I will focus on the things I do and have that make it possible for me to a) home educate and b) not lose my shit while home educating.
I think the first and most important thing to disclose because it makes all the other things possible is that I am married to a man that is an attorney and gets paid enough for me to not need to work a paying job to help sustain our family.
My husband and I have been married for nearly fifteen years and together longer than that. We have supported each other emotionally and financially since 2009 when he moved in with my sister and I in Austin after we spent nearly a year in a long distance relationship. When we decided to move to Miami together for three years as he attended law school, I worked as a public school teacher while he was a full-time student.
By that point I knew he would make a good life-long partner with whom I could have children because he had shown me years of patience and dedication and I knew we would be financially secure as a family with him in it. Yes, I chose who to marry based on love and socioeconomics and I’m not ashamed to admit that.
I honestly believe that my mom made the same choice when she decided to marry my dad and eventually leave Colombia. But I can’t just admit that and not also the fact that they are both white men and their whiteness has afforded them both privileges that make attending post-graduate schools and earning degrees that lead to jobs with financial security more available to them. I have benefited from this proximity to whiteness my whole life.
As a child growing up in Colombia and then Miami, I wasn’t aware of this unearned upper hand until my family moved to the Rio Grande Valley(RGV) in South Texas the summer I turned fourteen. There, the difference between the Brown kids and white kids was stark. The RGV has a majority Latino (predominantly Mexican) demographic, making up almost 90% of the population. But the 10% of white people living there probably have 90% of the wealth (this is not a verified fact, this is my opinion based off my living there for ten years). Wikipedia states that “ It is home to some of the poorest cities in the nation, as well as many unincorporated, persistent poverty communities called colonias.” The disparity between the Brown majority having less than the white minority is when I first noticed my family’s white privilege.
Having come from Miami, a city known as a “melting pot” of diversity, where our community, like our family, was a mix of races and ethnicities that were all solidly “middle-class” I had never experienced so intimately the differences in socioeconomic classes. While my parents worked the same jobs they’done in Miami (my father as a research scientist with the USDA and my mother as a phlebotomist) the move to South Texas changed our class status (and my worldview).
I remember, awkwardly, in high school when a good friend absentmindedly referred to me as “rich”. I was dumbfounded. Rich? I drove a used Honda Del Sol. I bought clothing from the second-hand stores where I dug through bins to find cute tees. I worked as a hostess at Applebees. But the more I thought about it the more I became aware of all that my family had compared to so many others in the RGV. We lived in a ranch style four bedroom home with a pool, a man made lake just a few dozen feet away where we would paddle around in our red canoe. We went on vacations, not to the Hamptons or anything fancy like that, but to theme parks and historical sites. We had health insurance and dental insurance and I had braces. We had a housekeeper. We had savings accounts and my parents sent money to family on a regular basis. We weren’t luxury rich with designer anything, but we had more than we needed for a family of five to survive. We had spending money and leisure money. We truly were middle-class, but being middle-class in the RGV put us more in common with the white folks than the Brown ones.
Fast forward twenty years and I find myself in a similar scenario, now in Southern California. Very recently, my oldest shared with me that one of his neighborhood friends told him that we were the “rich family on the block”. This is coming from an eight-year-old child so bear that in mind, but, again, I find myself pausing to reflect on this perspective. Do other people think of us as rich? When I think of a rich person I picture mansions decked in swirls of marble with infinity pools glistening under the sun; garages hiding shiny Porsches and Ferraris; bedroom sized closets full of Louboutin heels, Gucci dresses, and Birkin bags. I picture impossibly thin waists, BBLs, Botox, and nose jobs. Ears heavy under the weight of expensive jewelry, diamonds shimmering on manicured ring fingers. I picture private chefs, full-time nannies, drivers, and personal trainers inside state-of-the-art home gyms. First-class flights to Martha’s Vineyard and family vacations at luxury resorts in Paris. I don’t relate to any of these rich-people things.
But maybe these rich-people things are really just Reality TV things and I’ve been distracted, comparing myself to celebrities and the ultra rich so that I can’t see just how much we actually do have? We are definitely not the 1%, not even top 10%. According to the income calculator from the Pew Research Center, a family of our size with our yearly income falls squarely under middle class in San Diego but would qualify as upper class in a city like Birmingham, Alabama. There is major socioeconomic difference depending on where one lives. Per the website:
Our latest analysis shows that the estimated share of adults who live in middle-income households varies widely across the 254 metropolitan areas we examined, from 42% in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, California, to 66% in Olympia-Lacey-Tumwater, Washington. The share of adults who live in lower-income households ranges from 16% in Bismarck, North Dakota, * to 46% in Laredo, Texas. The share living in upper-income households is smallest in Muskegon-Norton Shores, Michigan (8%), and greatest in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, California (41%).
* emphasis mine to point out that Laredo, Texas is part of the Rio Grande Valley
Why is there this big disparity between our class status in San Diego versus if we lived in Birmingham? It’s because of white supremacy culture. In San Diego, where we are categorized as middle class, the racial majority is white. In 2022, there were 3 times more white residents in San Diego County, CA than any other race or ethnicity. Whereas in Birmingham, where my family would qualify as upper class, the racial majority is Black, nearly 70%, according to the 2020 Census. And if we lived in Laredo, Texas, where the 95.15% Latino (mostly Mexican) population is one of the highest proportion of Latinos of any city in the United States outside of Puerto Rico, we would qualify as being in the top 10%. No wonder my childhood friend thought we were rich. Because, in Laredo, we were.
With all of this wealth and racial disparity throughout the country, plus the fact that income inequality is skyrocketing along with the cost of essentials, such as child care, higher education, health care, and housing, we are all in different stages of survival, let alone, thrival. And because of luck, some choices I’ve made, and mostly white privilege, my family is surviving just fine. All of our needs are met - we have secure housing, our fridge is stocked with food and when it’s not, we buy more. When we are thirsty, we use the water filter connected to our refrigerator that shoots out cold, fresh water. We live near the Pacific Coast and there are no factories, mines, or power plants nearby so the air we breathe is good. We have health insurance and can see a doctor when we need to. Mental health aside, we are also thriving. And as someone that unschools my children and facilitates a family cooperative, it is irresponsible of me to not disclose how absolutely privileged I am and how that privilege has made it possible for me to home educate and focus on anti-oppression work.
Beyond the basic needs of survival, I am able to thrive mainly because of unearned privileges. I am married to a white man with a secure job and income as an attorney. I am the daughter of a retired white man that had a secure job and income as a scientist with the USDA. My mother, a Colombian mestiza, is also able to thrive because of white privilege. Although her first job in the USA was as a cafeteria worker in Texas and then in Miami at KFC, when she got her certification as a phlebotomist she earned a higher wage working in laboratories in the U.S than she would have had we stayed in Colombia. We are not millionaires, not obscenely wealthy, but we have more than enough.
Having more than enough means I am able to raise my two kids without having to work a job outside of the home. It means we can pay housekeepers to help us maintain a reasonable level of cleanliness in a house with children. It means we can afford a nanny fourteen hours a week to care for my youngest while the oldest and I attend appointments and classes and meet-ups. It means I have several hours every week just to myself so I can read, write, do loads of laundry, and even get the occasional facial or massage. It means I can afford to pay a personal trainer to come to my house twice a week or sign up for Pilates classes or a gym membership. It means we have two vehicles and can keep the gas tanks in both of them full. It means when we don’t feel like cooking we can have hot meals delivered to our door. It means we can take vacations and camp inside a camper or travel on a plane and that we have the luxury of time off to do both.
Having more than enough to survive does not imply that life is automatically fun and full of joy. But it does make it easier. Take the housekeeping: I am at times a highly anxious person that has a hard time functioning in messy environments. I spend significant time each day tidying up and cleaning. But I don’t want my kids to remember me as the stressed out mom always busy doing something. I want to be able to ignore the fingerprints on the windows and mirrors, the sticky floor under my bare feet. Having people clean our house on a deeper level than I can manage is an absolute blessing that I don’t take for granted. And that is an example of how having more than enough doesn’t take away my anxiety and swap it for joy, but it does make it easier for me to manage it. It should go without saying that this is not the case for the parents in this country that are barely surviving. So many parents have two or more jobs to make ends meet. They likely have anxiety, too. Perhaps they are also uncomfortable in disheveled homes. Are they going to pay for someone else to clean it for them, though? Probably not since working class jobs do not paying living wages. Is it fair for this parent to stumble on my Instagram or come to my house and wonder, “how the hell does she do it?”, and then go home and feel guilty for not being able to do more? No, it’s not.
It’s like shaming myself for not dropping the baby weight after seeing some celebrity’s rapid post-partum weight loss, but then peeling back the layers to find out they have personal chefs, dietitians, a home gym, daily personal trainers, full-time day and night nannies, plus throw in some ozempic and plastic surgery. Or how people obsess over DIY homesteaders like Hannah from Ballerina Farms who says she and her family are “city folk turned ranchers” and leaves out the fact that her husband’s father is a billionaire that founded Jet Blue, that their “little” farm is a multi-million dollar property of over 300 acres, or that the Aga stove she uses to bake all her homemade bread costs $30,000. It doesn’t seem fair to me to portray an image of idyllic, simple living when the truth is they are Mormon fundamentalists with a net worth of nearly a billion dollars. I know many women that live on little farms, roll out balls of dough, milk goats, and gather eggs in their aprons - they are Indigenous Lenca women living in the mountains of Honduras and no one in the U.S knows or cares about them so spare me the bullshit.
Ultimately this is what disclosure comes down to - sparing the bullshit. And that is what I hope I was able to get across here in this writing that took me over three weeks to complete, done in 30-minute-to-1-hour increments while the kids were either with their dad, the nanny, or playing Roblox. No, you can’t have it all and influencers really need to stop pretending you can.
