Hilary Flower, a unschooling mother of three, recently published her second book, Adventures in Gentle Discipline, which is a refreshing break from the many tomes written by Dr. I Told You So. In writing this book, Hilary relied on the successful format she used with Adventures in Tandem Nursing that includes using a "friend to friend" tone, testimonials from real mothers in the trenches, useful quotes and ideas, and first person narratives. I recently interviewed Hilary via email to learn more about the woman behind this much needed addition to the "How To" shelf.
—Stacey Greenberg

Stacey Greenberg: Tell me a little bit about yourself. Your background, your hubby, your kids, how you pass the time...

Hilary Flower: My background is in English Literature (BA) and Geology (MA). My partner Ben is a marine geologist (we met in graduate school), fortunately post-tenure now (PHEW!). My kids are my naturalist Nora Jade (almost 8), free-spirit Miles (almost 5), and baby Ramsay (almost 1). We unschool. I spend my days...making them toast, getting the baby down for a nap, breaking up fights, doing math with my daughter, doing dishes, crafting with them, checking email, and taking my kids to swim lessons, clay class, parks and playdates. I write when Ben has the kids, which tends to be Thursday mornings and a block on the weekend. My writing comes in waves, sometimes I'm obsessed and have to write every chance I get, and sometimes I use those blocks for more family-centered things, like one-on-one time with one of the kids. Then again, even when I'm alone, my writing is itself family-centered. Sometimes I feel like I got swallowed whole by my role as a mother. Sometimes it feels like mothering gave me the life most worth living. Anyway I swing back and forth on the "loving mothering!"—"burned out" continuum, usually closer to the middle. Right now my kids are rowdy and yelling their heads off in the kitchen with (ha ha) their daddy. I guess I'm a little more on the burned out side right now, after a long day, and hopefully I'll swing to the other side soon enough to bail him out. My son just proclaimed, "I'm so angry!" And Ben just said, "I'm glad you told me that you're angry." That swings me in the right direction.

Stacey Greenberg: How is being the mother of three different from being the mother of one (or two)?

Hilary Flower: Baby care is so much easier this time around, because the baby has two eager (and *mostly* appropriate) entertainers always available (since we're unschooling). It's more lively, but in a joie-de-vivre kind of way, not a get-me-outta-here kind of way. But he's still pre-verbal, a rolly polly. It's kind of like having two older kids and a really cute (high maintenance) puppy. I think it's going to get hairy when he is old enough to argue about more ice cream, to have to be taken to his own activities, to irritate his older siblings, etc., real personhood. In a way, we still feel like we're in the penumbra of having two kids, before the real three-kid phenomenon arrives.

We refer to the first three/four years of our kids' lives as an "immersion period" for us, beginning with pregnancy. We duck under and get subsumed by childcare and then at about the three-year mark we come up for air. After the third baby was born, a very deep primordial part of me reared up and said, Hell no! There will be no immersion this time around! It was hormonal somehow.

When my baby was like three or four months old I was extremely restless, unable to sleep at night, getting up at dawn and taking him for long walks to the Bay, and examining every aspect of my life. Everything came up for an overhaul. I started looking at my husband cross-eyed, and we went into couples' therapy, which we're still in, and we're so much closer and stronger for it. But what was emerging was that I simply couldn't go back down under for three more years. I had to keep my head up above the water. I had to keep writing. I had to exercise. I had to spend time with my husband. We started getting much more flexible about things like videos, which our kids had never watched, such purists (ha ha); we started tossing them snacks and videos to get more time to talk alone. Anyway I guess it's hard to explain, but somehow having a third kicked us into a different parenting mode, more prepared to see to our own basic needs while still caring for our kids in the important ways. And I think the family is really thriving for it.

Stacey Greenberg: No videos huh? That is pretty hardcore in this society. I pride myself on the fact that I never bought a jar of baby food. However, now that my boys eat candy and cookies and a variety of other things that I have little control over, I feel a little less smug. Why do we do this to ourselves?

Hilary Flower: I think a lot of our parenting is fear-based. We do things for our children because we are afraid of not doing them, and in parenting the stakes always seem so high. And then if we see other parents feeling free to act less protective, it is very unsettling. Either they are exposing their children to the very harm we are passionately careful to avoid, or we are wrong in thinking it's harmful in the first place. I think a lot of what comes off as judgment of others parenting differently really stems from a fairly innocent place, our very primal need to protect and provide for our children, and a gut level, jarring sensation that we feel when others have such radically different approaches. I imagine that our hunter/gatherer ancestors had a much more agreed-upon set of dangers and necessities, and if someone strayed, the group would (rightly, in most cases) bully or shame them into doing the "right" thing for the baby's survival. In this modern age, each one of us is our own little microculture.

Stacey Greenberg: When did you start writing (or writing about parenting)?

Hilary Flower: I started writing when my first baby was a few months old, "The Nora News," a family newsletter about her various enthralling developments (my poor second and third babies, so undocumented). Then when my next baby was born, I started writing essays, starting with an ever-evolving one about my experience tandem nursing.

I submitted it to Mothering, and they passed. I submitted it to La Leche League's New Beginnings, and they responded by asking me to write a book proposal on tandem nursing. It was funny because at that point I had still never been published, and hoped to "one day" write a book. I know it's a sappy new age concept but it sure does seem like the universe flings doors open for us when we are bold enough to start opening them.

Stacey Greenberg: Talk about being in the right place at the right time! Tell me about how you got your proposal together and how you decided to write the book the way you did.

Hilary Flower: To get the proposal together I began by checking every book out of the library I could that had anything to say about breastfeeding during pregnancy, usually no more than a page or two. And I found what websites were saying. Comparing that to my own experiences, I identified the major gaps (like maternal ambivalence) and the areas of disagreement (like safety). I wanted to really chart the territory, and it was exciting (and daunting) to get to be the first one to really try to draw up a complete map.

That gave me a basic outline. I defined the tone I wanted to use, a friend-to-friend type tone, and I knew I wanted to have cartoons, to keep it feeling light and creative, because if you go into tandem nursing with a rigid mindset you're really sunk! The truth is that I didn't know what was in a real proposal, but I just tried to convey my vision for the book.

Eventually I submitted it, not because it was fully polished, but because the more I thought about it and tinkered with it, the more I was really beginning to do the real work of researching/crafting/writing it. And I was not prepared to do that without a contract. A lot of areas in the outline were ones that I was eager to fill in, the headings were really questions for me to pursue. I was so excited to jump in.

Stacey Greenberg: I really liked the friend-to-friend tone of it and was glad to see that in your latest endeavor, Adventures in Gentle Discipline, you used the same format. It was just really refreshing to read a book written and researched by an unschooling mom of three rather than from Dr. I Told You So who has been hogging so much shelf space.

Hilary Flower: To me it's a matter of respect and mutual self-empowerment. The Dr. Person who acts like they have the answers, no matter how great their answers, sends a dangerous between-the-lines message: "You do not have what it takes to sort this out on your own." Anything that undermines the parent's sense of personal insight, creativity, and expertise on her own parenting is counter-productive in the parenting-self-help type genre. I wanted to write books that make the parents the experts, acknowledge the complexity and ambiguity out there in terms of the problems we face and the solutions that we craft.

Stacey Greenberg: When I read Adventures in Gentle Discipline I was (pleasantly) surprised to see a chapter devoted to parental anger. It is a hard thing to admit, but sometimes my kids make me mad! Whether my three year old is biting my one year old or my one-year old is begging to be held when I have five different things that I need to get done, sometimes I feel on the verge. It was so great to realize that all parents get mad and that it is pretty normal and then get so many great ideas on how to deal with it. What made you decide to include this chapter?

Hilary Flower: That chapter is pretty much the reason I wanted to write the book. I think that having "gentle discipline skills" is all well and good, and I certainly need more, but my worst parenting moments are not so much when I lack a skill, it's when I can't access it because my parental anger has gotten in the way. I really wanted to hear from other parents about how they work with it, partly to reassure myself that other parents struggling with it (we usually don't see other parents angry) and partly to see how they are working with it. I think few of us have good role models for dealing with anger. So we're making it up as we go along, and liable to feel like failures when we lose our temper. I wanted to normalize it. Parenting is so messy, by nature, and our (very human) anger is a big reason why. I can think of no better legacy to leave my children than to somehow model a way of being angry without either attacking the other person or internalizing it. It's a work in progress. In the meantime I can model something else nearly as valuable: accepting your own imperfections, making amends for your mistakes, forgiving yourself, and moving on.

Stacey Greenberg: What sort of promotion are you doing for the book?

Hilary Flower: Promotion? Oh god. None. Wait, does this interview count? I did give a presentation and some signings at La Leche League's International conference when the book made its debut in July, and I have done (and will do) regional conferences. I love public speaking and workshopping. I have so little time for my projects that I am prioritizing writing new stuff rather than publicity. I am sure that is all "wrong" by industry standards, but life is short. I am hoping that La Leche League's promotion to its members will get me a boost and then word-of-mouth may take over from there?

Stacey Greenberg: What's your next big project?

Hilary Flower: When Adventures in Gentle Discipline first came out this summer I was all gung-ho to return to my fledgling freelance career. I was on fire and had a great time writing. But a few essays that I loved did not get immediately snapped up by magazines (imagine!), and I took a step back. I think that when I get back to writing after the holidays I want to really focus in on the topics that I'm ruminating on, and really put publication out of my mind, just write. And go from there.