On the individual personalities of children and a liberating piece of parenting advice
Plus some potentially controversial thoughts on being a young parent...
I held my first live get-together here on Substack last week (video to be uploaded in a few days); I chose motherhood as the topic, and it was a real relief to be able to share, openly and frankly, with a group of you, some of the hard stuff of being a mum.
I’m definitely going to do more of these on line meet-ups, and might choose different themes, which are generally things I am concerned about that week - so I would definitely do more parenting chat (that’s always a theme that’s bothering me tbh!!) but also grief, creativity, writing, possibly midlife?
Let me know in the comments what you’d be interested to chat about - we talked together for 35 minutes, the time went incredibly fast and it was really nice to see and hear from YOU, and I certainly left feeling a bit better about some of the things that had been stressing my out about motherhood last week.
One of the themes that came up during this chat was how to parent our kids as individuals. I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, especially since I’ve been away from my younger kids, while I was in England last week launching The Giant on the Skyline.
That perspective of physical distance apart is always a bit scary - the entire Atlantic was between them and me, which feels like a stretch - but the distance also helped me to breathe a bit and get a better sense of the long view, which is something that’s hard to see when you’re shoved right up beside the lost shoes, undone homework and discarded pasta (why is is always, always, always pasta I return to when I think of feeding my kids?) I’m away again next week in England, for Bath and Hay literary festival, and various book events which will take me away from them for ten days, so more distance, more anxiety, more perspective. (You can find out about my events here , and if you could come to one of them, I’d really love to see you and make that long trip from DC to England worthwhile!)
That perspective of distance, and the chat we shared on here last week, has helped me think more clearly about what my responsibility towards them is, and how I can, or cannot, influence or shape their lives. And I wanted to share with you a realisation about parenting which I’ve known for a long time, but am only just starting to really feel, but which is helping liberate me from some anxieties relating to parenting.
This realisation was triggered by a throwaway comment another parent made on a WhatsApp group I’m part of, made up entirely of mothers, relating to another parent’s anxiety about supporting her teenage daughter through exam revision. Her comment, which I’ll share with you here, is one of the best pieces of parenting advice I’ve ever heard, and has helped me see, more clearly, what I can, and cannot do, as a mother to shape or influence my children’s lives. I think I knew this already, but seeing it said aloud by someone else helped solidify my understanding, and not just hear it, but feel it - to feel more confident about enacting it.