Introducing My Other Blog
Hahahahahaha! I made a special blog for the summer. Because I am treating this summer as an art project. This summer I’m spending with my kids. It officially starts in June but pieces are being woven in already, as I prepare.
Sometimes I think, I don’t want to bother people who don’t have kids with my writing about having kids. Other times I think, it’s all the same — it’s relationships! So it’s both. It’s not the same and it’s the same. I am taking off this summer from my astrology readings work and dropping in deep to my mother work. I feel a relief in that, the relief of just being able to completely do one thing. Not that it is one thing — it is a million things hahahaha. But the focus of my energy, it feels relieving. And it also feels stressful — will my already small business fade away? Those thoughts arise. And then I come back to this sense of what I can feel as the most spacious alive truth, and it’s a sense that this is the direction to go for now. Who the heck knows where it will lead. I have come to trust that my business and my life asks me to leap into the void over and over, and when I ignore it, the tension I feel is worse than whatever difficulty arises from leaping. (Does that make sense?) What a mystery!
I will probably send newsletters less frequently. If you know the parenting writing is not for you, you can just delete the emails. Or you can unsubscribe and then resubscribe. Hahahaha you can do what you want — isn’t it great?!
Usually when I say I’m going to write “parenting writing” or any kind of writing, it immediately appears that something else wants to be written. And that “parenting writing” is writing about everything. So there you go. (Venus in Gemini.)
I’m pretty sure this will be the last piece of writing on this blog for a bit, because my energy is pulling over toward the summer project. But the thing I want to say about it here does relate to doubt, actually.
I have this incredible friend who still sends me paper letters all the time. Magic! In one of her letters, she mentioned that sometimes she just doesn’t sign up her kids for any camps. She has older kids than me, and this hadn’t really occurred to me as an option. I’m still so surprised how normcore my life looks these days, and how radical it feels to do something so not radical, re not putting my kids in camps. I can’t get over how easy it feels to drop into a parenting trend, or community trend, and kind of go with it without feeling into if it’s really for me/us. I’ve encountered so many of these questions in my parenting, and doubt has been such a big feature.
Doubt that I’ll do a “good job” as a parent, make the “right decision” for my kids, doubt that I could know what the right thing to do is even if it feels weird or unpopular. And now there’s this very complex thing where “radical” can creep into feeling extremely close to MAGA?! Like, am I a trad wife?! It feels even more confusing to know what the thing to do is!
Or it has. I realized a lot of why it has felt so confusing is because I having been looking for some kind of outside empirical answer for all of these questions, with this underlying premise that there is a way to get it right, and one of the ways I would know I’m getting it right is if people aren’t judging me, or are judging me positively. All of this mind-noise really gets in the way of the information that is for me — what works for us, here and now.
I find one of the most beautiful, unexpected gifts my children offer me is that their needs ask me to do things I didn’t think I would, or should. Their needs ask me to confront my fears about what people will think of me. And every situation is another opportunity to decide if I’m going to listen to what my fear tells me to do, or to listen to what fits in this moment, with these humans, in this actual family, not an idea of what I thought they (or I) would be or need.
So, this incredible summer many things conspired on so many levels to support me in letting go of doubt enough to commit to an experiment and see what happens! That experiment is to be with my kids.
Some of the values I’m enacting through this experiment are:
unstructured time is where and how creativity arises, creativity as a practice is a family value
that we can make our own culture, our own entertainment, and invite others to co-create it with us, for very little money or for free
if my time with my children is precious and short, spending a summer whole-heartedly with them is a way to steep in that time from within
a trust that we have the tools and/or can find the tools we need to work through the difficulties that arise
Probably plenty more but those are a few that arise.
Something I’m realizing in this writing is that doubt is produced by an imaginary fixed perfect outcome. Without that unconscious outcome looming, doubt loses its power. If there’s no right outcome, the fear that underlies doubt becomes inert.
That doesn’t mean that I have no goals. I’m building a loose structure and some ideas of things I want us to do / be within. But that’s so different from the energy of “getting it right” in my parenting, which only disconnects me from myself and my kids. Crucially, it does not lead to me actually getting it right.
So! Thank you if you’ve been here for this experiment I’ve been in writing since last September. And welcome to my new summer writing if you’re interested! May any of this be of use to you in your own relationship to doubt and fear and awakening to the miracle that is your life.