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Summary

In this conversation, Akilah discusses the often-ignored topic of grief, particularly in relation to unschooling and parenting. She emphasizes the importance of recognizing untended grief in our lives and how it can manifest in various forms, not just through the death of loved ones. The discussion explores how societal norms and expectations can hinder our ability to process grief, and the need for more open conversations about it. Akilah shares her journey of integrating grief literacy into her life and how it has transformed her relationships and understanding of herself and others. In this conversation, Akilah and Adrienne delve into the complexities of grief, personal healing, and the philosophy of unschooling. They explore how grief can be a liberating force, allowing individuals to reconnect with their true selves and their past. The discussion emphasizes the importance of trust and tenderness in parenting, particularly in the context of unschooling, where children are given the freedom to explore their interests without the constraints of traditional education. The speakers highlight the need for emotional intelligence and the recognition of diverse experiences in the journey of self-discovery and community building.

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Read the Transcript:

Adrienne (00:00)
Well, thank you, Akilah, for being here. I’m so happy to have you on and have this conversation.

Akilah Safiah (00:05)
My pleasure. Thank you for the invite, Adrienne.

Adrienne (00:07)
Yeah, I know that you’ve been on endless podcasts about unschooling and which is wonderful and your work is out there and it’s so amazing. That’s how I, how I originally know you, right? Is from your book and your former podcast. And I kind of want to move into what you’ve transitioned into. I’m really fascinated with this new space around grief and your, what I let die podcast, which I love that wild is the acronym for it. And that it’s just, it’s just.

What a great, great name.

Akilah Safiah (00:37)
Thank

you. love that too. When I realized that that’s what it was, was like, yes, my God. It just felt like another confirmation of let’s do this because this is a wild ride for real.

Adrienne (00:45)
You

Well, and

I’m curious to know like, grief. One, I think so many people are afraid of grief. We don’t talk about grief. We shy away from grief. It’s something that you have to feel if you have to, but you’re really not trying to. And it has a really negative connotation, I feel like in in our culture and in society. And we really don’t

dive into its usefulness or its necessary part of humanity and any positives around it. feel like it’s really framed as this thing we’re trying to avoid at all costs and you have to do it if someone has died or you have some big traumatic things. So I wanna talk to you about why you transitioned into that, how that came about and what…

what you’re trying to get after with it. Well, sorry, no, that’s the wrong phrasing.

Akilah Safiah (01:46)

I actually like that. I like that because I absolutely have an agenda. Yeah.

Adrienne (01:54)
Okay, great, great.

Akilah Safiah (02:13)

Yeah. I appreciate the question and I am myself so fascinated and intrigued and curious about it, you know, as a lifelong unschooler, curiosity and de-schooling. So especially curiosity around the

the things that were unlearning or the things we notice might need unlearning, you know, cause a lot of this, and at least for me as a non-schooler, wasn’t, I think because I had this podcast for so long in the book, sometimes there’s this impression or maybe that’s how I’m seeing it, where people think like, you know, you, because you’ve, you’re, you’re so like contrary and this is what you’re doing and this must be more, and it’s like, no, most of this is, integrated over time, you notice something and you pause one behavior. So then it gives you room to notice something else. And then something else, you know, it can feel very subtle and also very sudden. And the parts of it that are like, this is connected to this and this is that. For me, those feel very like haphazard and, you know, something it’s like, as opposed to, am in a better relationship with my children and therefore, know, so, right? So grief is that all day, every day. It is like the absence of a level of certainty and a level of like trustworthy understanding. Okay, I get it in this form. So that’s what it’s always gonna be. In so many ways, I feel like my unschooling journey with my family, absolutely led me to grief literacy work because Adrienne so much of what I can now see in hindsight, so much of what I was called into myself, in my family and personally, and also in the people who invited me in in a variety of ways through just listening to the podcast or me going there to speak to that group of people or just friends that I’ve made over the years from this journey. It’s less of a, much of what they were managing and what I was managing was untended grief.

That’s what I see now. And specifically, not just grief around the death of a person, but the grief of the shattered expectations about what it would mean to become a parent or what their child would be like or what the student that their child has become would be like. There’s so much of that. And when that does not happen, there’s grief.

but we’re not because we’re in a death phobic society, any type of death, especially the kind that you can’t hold a funeral for and be like, uncle such and such died. he is, he died. So we’ll mourn for four days and we’ll keep a moving. If we’re not tending to that, we have even less of a chance of paying attention to, I thought I had a vivacious eight year old or who was this and this and this.

And now they’re 11 and they wear headphones all the time and they don’t give a shit what I think. They’re not trying to make me happy or go to the park. Grief. That’s grief, even though it looks like something else. Not to mention as people raising free people, trying to feel into this thing that you may not have any reference point for because you came across it as a result of a lot of pain and grief that you endured as a young person or as a teacher, right? So that’s kind of broadly, Adrienne, how they’re connected for me. And I didn’t fricking plan to focus, you know, I was in seminary, which is something that I had been interested in for a very long time, but couldn’t find one that wasn’t like either high key or low key religious dogma right, because I’m not a religious person. And so I just really struggled and I finally found a space that was a really good fit, it seemed. And I was there for a year and a summer and it was beautiful in many ways. And my own school or self was very present. I got called into Dean’s offices all the time because I’m like.

Akilah Safiah (06:04)
how you gonna tell me what kind of homework I’m supposed to do and I’m the person in the thing. Like all the unschooler teams. And then eventually I think it was like both a spiritual, I’m gonna say point of access. Like I was so surrendered to the experience.
And I really had this expectation of leaving it, you know, and being able to be an ordained minister and being able to bring my subversive elements of these things into places that could bring me in under the premise of churchy stuff. But really we were doing what we were doing, right? That was kind of one of my main motivators. But then I realized, one, there was an abrupt kind of pause because the scholarship that I thought was going to last for the whole seminary experience actually was only for the first year in the summer. Okay, that was wild. And so I first was like, okay, well, I guess that’s over. I’ve met some beautiful people. I’ve learned a lot, blah, blah. Then I remembered the Thanatology classes we took and Thanatology is the study of death, dying and loss. And I was like, maybe I could just take some more classes there. And it turns out that there was a collaboration with them in the Art of Dying Institute, and I could just zoom in for about six months on death, dying, loss, grief, bereavement. And Adrienne, was… That’s exactly where I needed to be. It changed my life. It helped me to integrate so many things. It helped me to see my daughters’ grief and right to grieve very differently than I had before. And I believe it’s changed my relationship probably with everybody that I’m in relationship with because I now see everywhere untended grief opportunities. And I see people as grief tenders in addition to everything else that we are, which is softer and different and doesn’t need as much explaining. yeah.

Adrienne (07:58)
Well, and it’s, it’s a universal human experience, whether we talk about it or not, or acknowledge it or not, everyone at some point has felt grief. So it’s something we can all relate to.

Akilah Safiah (08:09)
Yes. Exactly

Adrienne (08:22)

And what’s coming up for me, as you were speaking was with unschooling, I think we tend to kind of go into it with, okay, this is going to be an educational method of how I raise my kids differently. And you get really hyper fixated on what your kids are doing or not doing until you really deep dive into unschooling and start realizing, this is actually more about me. And then things come up that you never could have imagined as with parenting, right? Like triggers come up and you’re, forced to confront things that

Akilah Safiah (08:44)
Yes.

Adrienne (08:48)
seems seemingly like so unrelated to unschooling because you’re like, well, this is an educational philosophy or it’s how I teach my kids naturally. Like it’s all these things, which is great. That is a part of it. But what has come up for me in the last, I’ve been doing it for 12 years now, things around like growing up Mormon and I had to, I have left, but I had to completely grieve how I was raised, completely grieve stuff unrelated to my kids entirely, but just all around my life, right? Grieving the mother wound, the parenting that I didn’t receive and having to move from, you know, resentment and anger and well, awareness and first and then resentment and anger and all of that. Yeah, through grief and realize that nothing heals until you actually like are ready to feel it and you just let this wave of everything that you’re feeling come with it without shame, right? Like you have to get to a point where you’re like, I’m going to be really angry at my mom. And I know I’m not supposed to be angry because it’s this ugly emotion and grieving all of that grieving how you were treated at school, grieving, you know, bullying, grieving the teachers experience that you had with them or whatever it is that will all come up, which you know, we don’t talk about it. Unschooling is kind of this, we’re out in nature and we do field trips and we do this and that’s the, I don’t know, the tip of the iceberg part. But once you like really dive in, yeah.

Akilah Safiah (10:16)
Yes, exactly. Right. Not going into the… Yeah, I agree. And even with… I’ve had a very different experience about why people go into unschooling. And I know some of that is because I’m primarily in Black communities and diversity of Blackness in communities. for so many of us, doesn’t start out like an educational pathway. It starts out like the shit is not working for my kid in the school and that’s unsafe. So it’s like a pause point. And so much of unschooling, as you’ve probably heard me say or read me say, is liberation work because we really are talking about raising free people. And so much of what you mentioned that comes up and feels unrelated is often as a result of spending time with people who are more free than you have ever been, which is our children.
Right? so to it’s, and it, cause it’s not just cognitive, it’s what happens in the body. You know, when we see our kid sit and do nothing and just exist for hours or do something that we think is not enough somehow. And to have enough space, because you’re not doing all the things with your kid to notice how that’s landing in your body. Right? So when we, when folks are listening to this and are hearing you say you had to grieve those things.
That’s what I want us to be thinking about. When we say grieving something, it means so many things. And that is an important conversation to have. That’s where we start. What the hell do you even mean by grieving it? And when you said in order to heal, that’s another thing in my de-schooling that I’ve really been unlearning, which is I think an idea that everything can heal and that is a goal, and that is a goal that I should have oftentimes just speaking for myself. It’s a lot less about healing that has surprised me many times. it’s like, maybe some of these things can heal, but way before that, to tend to them, to give them attention is to give them the space to do or be like whatever that’s gonna do or be. And it may cause rupture instead of healing. It may mean that I will go no contact with this person and it feels like it makes everything fricking worse logistically, emotionally, but that’s what I’m doing.

So I bring that up because I want us to think about grief tending not necessarily as a pathway to healing, but as a pathway to what hasn’t had space to be, whatever truth that is, which may be temporary or not. I think one of the things that it does address, which can feel like a type of healing maybe, is the suffering, right? Because as we’ve heard from so many wise people over decades and decades, centuries and centuries, that, you know, oftentimes suffering is optional. Pain is not. Shit is going to hurt physically, emotionally, but the suffering doesn’t have to be extended. There’s everything from internal ways of managing pain to medication when that is needed, to all these other ways to move through it and also the release of expectations, right? That’s a very effective means of being able to move through the idea that something is different than what I wanted, expected, intended, preferred can deal with. And that hurts and it may never not hurt ever.

But if I tend to it, it may not hurt in the same way, right? Grief is a partner. It’s a lifelong partner that we maybe didn’t choose, but when we consent to that relationship, for many of us, it does ease the suffering. It does ease the suffering, Adrienne. And even when you said at the top of it, how we don’t talk about death and made me think about how we, so many people have been part of so many grief circles, small ones, big ones, know, doing this hospice volunteer work as well is another layer. And for so many people, there’s this idea that we can, hmm, we can avoid, either we can avoid grief or we must avoid it because who has time to deal with it? It’s like a pain tolerance thing that is a luxury for rich white people who do retreats on pretty boats and shit or go to the jungle to do plant medicine. It can feel so much like that. And so that’s why I liked when you said, what am I after? Because it’s like, what am I after is for a normalized idea that we think about grief as a lifelong partner and that we are having conversations on a regular ass basis, not just about the grief attached with the death of a person, but also about non-body death grief. That is about expectations, identity, roles, versions of the self. Can we use language like eulogizing and funeralizing for when a friendship dies, you know, when we get a divorce when a child is so very different than what we expected or hoped or wanted. When my hair starts to fall out, when I get a peri-menopause belly, I was trying to think of the term peri-belly, mental belly, ⁓ whatever, know, like anything, the little stuff, the big stuff, but not just what happens when someone dies. ⁓

That’s what I’m after. To make more normal, the idea that you’re like, my God, we haven’t spoken in like four years and I really love them, but it’s just tough and it’s tricky. And then when we get on it’s this and that. And if I made space to grieve that or my father passed and these other sidebar things happened and I haven’t met, are there ways that I cannot wait until December when I’m off from my job to tend to the grief? Is there somebody who will let me talk about this person that’s no longer in my life, even though they’re alive, without trying to fix it or tell me some shit that it’s supposed to make me feel better because we don’t have a language for just letting something be painful without thinking we need to fix it or solve it. That’s what I’m after. That’s what I’m into.

Adrienne (16:34)
Mm-hmm. Okay. I love that.

And I just want to tie in like white supremacy and colonization here because to me, those systems thrive on keeping us all disconnected, right? Disconnected from ourselves, disconnected from each other, our communities, disconnected from nature. And those systems thrive on keeping us so busy, so distracted, so fearful, so productive, just involved that we don’t, as you said, have time for that. We don’t have that space, the freedom, the how can I possibly make time for grief when I can’t even make time for a date night or can’t even, you know, whatever. And so I do want to just name that here as these aren’t

Akilah Safiah (17:03)
Yes.

Yes.

Exactly. Yes.

Adrienne (17:26)
Like if you’re feeling, man, like another thing I need to make time for. I just want to point out that like the society, the culture, the world that we’re in is working so hard against us that it’s going to feel unnatural. It’s going to feel hard. It’s going to be challenging, which is again, the role that I know you try and play. I try and play as well to really dismantle that big vision stuff as well as talking to people on an individual basis and in community and all the things that we need to do, but just acknowledging that there are forces at play that make this incredibly difficult and challenging. And so if you ever feel that this is monumental work, it is because you’re doing it swimming upstream all the time.

Um, unschooling same thing, all these things that are unconventional, all anything that has to do with decolonization is going against systems that have been in power for centuries that we are now trying to dismantle once again, revolt again, once again, all of that.

Akilah Safiah (18:16)
Yeah.

Yep.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And it can feel hard. And it also is important that we remember that the systems are newer than we are. Right? Yes. I am 47 years old and the system is a lot older than I am. But what I am, what you are, that’s ancient. So it’s swimming upstream in terms of the system but for so many of us, it feels like relief. The breakthrough point might feel everything you said, but don’t sleep on the parts of it that feel so good, so organic, so, oh my God, how come I didn’t do this before? Because that feeling is also possible because what you are doing now, what we are used to doing now is going against and swimming upstream against organic, humane way of being and communing. So this is just like school. School is new as shit in comparison to the variety of ways that people have been learning and communing. It’s just this very specific factory-based conveyor belt situation that we find ourselves in. So yes, we’d be swimming against the situation of the system, but in terms of the organic self, you’re not.
So even when it is uncomfortable, like so many other things, you can also find deep relief that you couldn’t cognitively have thought of or planned, or somebody couldn’t have told you, you couldn’t have read it nowhere. You experience it. And just like with unschooling for so many of us, it opens you up to capacities that you didn’t even know you had. Because if you are less attached to the systemic situations in which we find ourselves, then you often do find the time. If you don’t think your house has to be pristine inside and out, then you might find that you have two 10-minute blocks at least a couple of times a week to snorkel your grief reef or one of the other things. I talk about so many different tools and ways on Wild Podcast to offer specific things from like My Stash, my personal stash of grief tending tools and toys, and also ones that I’ve picked up along the way from, you know, being a part of so many grief circles. And my course, I do this, what I let die, I let it die course, the eyelid course that came before the podcast, where we really just let ourselves steep in grief. And so much of what I learned is that for many of us, that initial, my God, do I have the time? Is this going to be too heavy? Is this gonna, am I going to drown in it? That initial thing tends to not last. It tends to feel like, my God, I’m looking forward to spending 10 minutes with all the pictures of my dad and listening to two of his favorite songs and then.

Adrienne (21:15)
Mm-hmm.

Akilah Safiah (21:24)
putting that away and letting that be enough and then spending another 10 minutes with how complicated the relationship was because I didn’t like him. I loved him, but I did not like him. And I don’t think he liked me. And I’m going to spend 10 more minutes with that. And I’ll have that time because I’m not so stuck on the right curriculum for my kid or, you know, posturing my whatever the hell. So it starts to feel organic, it starts to feel like, oh my God, I can do this.

Adrienne (21:55)
I’m home.

Akilah Safiah:

Yes, exactly. Not only I can do this, it’s like, I do this. My body knows this. My soul wanted to open up, put a little bit of light in that area. That light felt really good, even though it also hurt.

Adrienne:

And nothing honestly feels more liberatory, I would say, because you’re one, like going back home, going back to matriarchy, you can feel the pull from the earth, from ancestors, from you can feel that for sure, that when you move away from anything to do with colonization, and start to de-school, start to decolonize, start to feel your way through that nothing is more liberating. Last week was birth mother’s day and as a birth mother for years, it was so much about, well, I gave up this baby and everyone told me I’d feel really good about it because of the sacrifice that I made and I made this other couple really happy and it really wasn’t until a few years ago where I started to feel all the anger that I had been suppressing for so long and feeling the grief and feeling the, you know what, we might never actually have the relationship that I thought we were going to have or whatever, feeling through that and pushing through that to be like, I feel so much better now that I’m not trying to make it this thing that I wanted it to be or make it this thing that other people told me it was going to be. then you’re just like, okay, off. Yeah.

Akilah Safiah (23:18)

Exactly. You got it, Adrienne. That is it. That is it. And it is a thing you can mix in with anything else, any other relationship. you start to do it for yourself and more and more as yourself, then you recognize all the other areas where it’s like, not just noticing how other people are grieving versions of you, you know, as you grow and evolve and like maybe your family of origin, it’s like, they may be grieving this idea of who you were supposed to be. So again, and it isn’t to excuse any behaviors that were not safe, but it was to be like, that thing happened. And there are parts of me that felt like it was easier when I was a seven day Adventist Christian and I had my rituals for these specific things that my grandma was so proud of me and I wanted her to be proud of me. And I’m in a country where there’s like nine bazillion churches everywhere, right? and you feel so counter, counter, counter, counter. But then you do it and it allows you to have a sort of tenderness even for the different versions of yourself. The one that was angry about how it didn’t happen, you don’t have to shut her down. You just tend to her. Oh my God, I get why you’re angry. You were so young or so whatever, so different and you made the best decision you could. And if you were to do it today, maybe these things would be different or they didn’t explain this thing, you’re giving it some light. And so that version of you that’s like, yo, ain’t nobody checking for me is like, now somebody’s checking for me. I don’t have to wall out to get Adrienne’s attention because I know she’s gonna come back. So I talk a lot in my coaching practices where it started, but now it’s just in everything about the community of one, right? again, it’s like most things, it just started with my own personal practices, where there’s the version of Akilah that is out there and known. And then there’s like at least seven other that I have direct access to who influence my relationships and my thoughts and my decisions. And those versions of me do not respond to bullying.
They don’t give a shit about what’s happening, right? So when we get to know, or when I got to know, and the folks who invite me into their lives, when we get to know members of the community of one, what you’re just talking about of like the angry, the one who was so, it’s like you just get an opportunity to see that person and to tend to them and say, yeah, you have every right to feel like that.
You are not going to be the primary influencer of my decisions because you don’t need to be, because you don’t need to yell and shout and have a tantrum. I got you. I got you on Wednesdays from two to two 10.

Adrienne (26:05)

Ten minutes. Well, and you see them, you give them a voice, you give them, right, you’re validating, which is what every human child, we all just want to be seen and to be heard.

Akilah Safiah (26:14)

Yes, we can do it. And we can do it. It is so much of what liberation work offers us is the space to see what is self-generated that we mistook for something we needed to get from out there. Right? And out there can affirm and not everything. There are absolutely some things as humans that we need from other humans and from our more than human kin. And when we grieve, we allow those things to show up. We stop trying to pretend that we are given life and not death. And so what does that look like in its diversity of forms, like the little D deaths, like a relationship, you know, with somebody you met six months ago that you really thought y’all were going to end up being friends, but turns out she’s fucking weird. So it’s not going to happen.

That deserves grieving because that might also be tied to your idea about how friendship happens for you or doesn’t happen for you. That was tied to what your teacher told you in the second grade about how you weren’t nice and so nobody was going to be your friend. So that little version of you now gets to hear you say, girl, that was bullshit. The teacher probably was dealing with her own stuff and you didn’t like this person and you don’t have to like them because that’s not what friendship means then that version is like, oh my God, true shit, true shit. Okay, so what was it I was looking for? Connection. Oh, okay, where do I find that in these variety of ways? I’m curious. Let me spend a little bit of time, because since I’m not spending the time trying to be homegirl’s friend when I don’t even like her like that, now I have some time to be like, oh, I like stamp collections and roses. who knew?

Adrienne (28:00)
Yeah, it’s giving yourself that time and that space to… And that’s what I think unschooling is though, is giving everyone, yourself, your kids, that time, that space and freedom to just be and to just experience and not everything has to be good or bad or this or that. Like it also just is, right? Emotions are, experiences are, and we can feel in and out of them for whatever they are.

Akilah Safiah (28:28)
Yeah, and that’s trustworthy and it’s valuable and it is rich, deep wisdom and education. So many of the types of effective busyness is that thinking that we have to simulate or even stimulate these experiences when really being present, being alive allows for so many things that you don’t need to plan and you don’t have to just lay there and react to everything. We’re talking about a type of liberatory practice that is giving you the freedom to be in connection with non-capitalistic white supremacist mythology ideas of how we need to be and show up. And so therefore our ideas about community, including and specifically the community of one also shifts.
Because if you have 15 different pain points and you do, if you haven’t tended to your grief, of course everything is very fricking ouchy. And it’s easy for you to be like, what did he say? And if you’re tending, then you know who’s responding like, what did he say? You already had a conversation with her and she know you’re gonna have a conversation with her again to be like, girl, what? I know you are big mad. I get it. Yes, girl. What do we need to do? Are we gonna dance?
Are we gonna, you what is the thing somatically and spiritually that we’re gonna do to make sure you know that I felt that you felt that. And that’s an old thing that’s coming up and it is no longer, it also is appropriately in its place. Meaning it’s not right here. was like, well, Adrienne, what did you say? Because I didn’t even realize that I’m still tender from this thing. That’s why I like the term grief tending. Cause it’s like, I’m tender. There’s so many tender spots that I now have the opportunity to tend to. And I can do it. I can call in songs and movements and podcasts and books and people and nature. I can call in so many resources for free to tend to my tenderness so that I’m not walking around super defensive, understandably, about my tender spots and then acting like everybody should know what’s going on. And I’m also noticing that other people, whether I can see it or not, I know because they’re alive, they also have their tender spots. Am I mistaking a moment of their grief tending as something else? Can I add that into the equation? And then how differently might I move with people if that’s so present to me, even if just for myself, even if I don’t care about nobody else yet?

Adrienne (30:45)
which is really tapping in, I feel, to that this feminine, soft energy, that gentleness that really isn’t valued in white supremacy at all, right? We need this masculine, aggressive energy. We don’t tend to those things. We move through it. We build resilient children who are tough, who can handle the world, who are gonna move forward and let things slide off their back.

Akilah Safiah (31:19)

That is it. That is it. And we are all traumatized by these isms in so many ways. I know in so many black communities, the history and the genetic memory of if you are not busy or not looking busy, you are in danger. That’s a very real experience that lives in the genetic body and self. So it’s another layer.

You know, when we first started with unschooling and I got called into speaking in spaces, oftentimes it was either not white people or white people who were like, can you come in here so that we can have the conversation about this not only being about my kid being free to do whatever they want to do? Because so many of us recognize the impact of these other isms. If I feel like my child’s safety is attached to their capacity to look busy and occupied. I can’t, none of what you’re saying about trusting kids, that’s like, where is it gonna go before I address what is happening there? And so unschooling is very much grief tending because it allows you to see what is in the way of you trusting that young person and making space for the agency and autonomy that is their right as a human no matter what age they are, right? If you don’t feel safe and you can’t make them safe, you don’t give a shit about that.

Adrienne (32:56)
Yeah. Well, and black kid freedom and white kid freedom is not the same because right, white unschoolers are like, we just let our it’s about being wild and feral. Black kids don’t have that same freedom. That’s right.

Akilah Safiah (33:00)

That’s my whole point. That’s my whole point. That’s what they call me in to be like, why isn’t anyone, because people know it and they feel it, but no one’s talking about it. It’s like, no, freedom and responsibility are two sides of the same coin. we, we, it’s not just like throw everything out. That’s why when people talk about a luxury of unschooling, I’m like, you don’t even know. It actually would be easier sometimes to be like, you know, go to the place or because I said so or whatever.

But we’re talking about trust. We are talking about tenderness. We are talking about uncharted territory. We’re talking about ancient knowings that we are conjuring and calling back up in the middle of systemic violence of all kinds. So it’s not light work, but it is light work. Yeah.

Adrienne (33:48)
it’s both. Okay, well, I know you have to go. I will let’s let’s leave it there. I love love this conversation so much. And I will link your podcast and your courses and your cards and all of it in the show notes. Thank you for taking the time. I really, really appreciate it. And your wisdom and heading into your your menopausal matriarchal wisdom era. I love it.

Akilah Safiah (34:01)
Me too.

Yes.

Adrienne (34:17)
I’m here for that. How old are your girls now?

Akilah Safiah (34:20)
They are 21 and 19. I know. I know.

Adrienne (34:22)
⁓ my gosh, my gosh, because

when I read your book they’re so young still. wow. ⁓

Akilah Safiah (34:29)
I know they are just like tall, adultish people.

And I’m like, wow. I’m, I know, and I’m so, so grateful. This is why I continue to like do interviews and be in different spaces and be in community in a variety of ways, because what I am seeing and learning now as a result of spending those years and investing in that way that Chris and I did is so affirming. I mean, we, they are strong personalities and incredible people and we work well together. Like they trust me and I trust them and that’s a direct result of our unschooling practice.

Adrienne (35:07)
Yeah, which people need to see because I think so often they’re like, well, they’re fine now. You can unschool when they’re three and five because three and five year olds can play. But what about when they’re older? It’s totally going to mess them up. So I love that we have this. So, okay. Well, thank you so much.

Akilah Safiah (35:16)
That’s right. Yes.

Yes, it reminds me, one more quick thing connected to this, because I want to make sure people have this resource. And because you just brought it up, what you said, the Alliance for Self-Directed Education, ASDE, they have this thing out called the compendium with a bunch of different offerings in there from folks. Marlee, who’s my 21 year old, she wrote a piece in there about her life now as a college student and how unschooling has affected.
So yeah, so check that out at the compendium and I read it and I was like, Marley girl, you went in. It’s so much of what we’re talking about. Like people need to see this. Yeah. Thank you, Adrienne.

Adrienne (35:47)
I love it. Okay.

Good. Yeah, yeah. I wrote a consent and parenting piece for that compendium. So I’m gonna have to go look at Marley’s. So that’s great. I love that.

Akilah Safiah (36:04)

Awesome. I’m glad you offered that to the space because we can’t talk enough about consent. You’re welcome.

Adrienne (36:08)
Yeah. Thank you so much.

Bye bye.