A friend needed to bend my ear last night as she is reaching a critical juncture in motherhood, partnerhood, and selfhood and she cannot figure out her next step. I went out late to meet and talk, when usually I’m bound for bed and I’m glad I did, because oddly enough it could have been my younger self talking to me. The younger self stubbornly clinging to an ideal when reality is dealing you another card.<\/p>\n
I kept thinking all along that age gives you distance from ideals and grounds you in a reality that is way more healthy. Don’t get me wrong, I love ideals, I love youthful energy, and I love to believe that a world exists that you could build oh so perfectly that nothing can harm or change it, not even today or the future – but frankly it doesn’t exist, like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. They’re good for a time, but then poof they’re gone.<\/p>\n
My friend made the comment that she (“how do you say without it sounding negative?”) admired what she saw as my “detachment”, as a parent and I said, it doesn’t exist. I’m not detached, but I do believe Tin needed to learn to sleep by himself, work out his frustrations sometimes by himself, and more than anything I understand my role is to encourage him to grow independent of me. That I know from age, not from detachment, because I know the consequences of my actions as a parent today are about guidance and support, not about creating and forming.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A friend needed to bend my ear last night as she is reaching a critical juncture in motherhood, partnerhood, and selfhood and she cannot figure out her next step. I went out late to meet and talk, when usually I’m bound for bed and I’m glad I did, because oddly enough it could have been my younger self talking to me. The younger self stubbornly clinging to an ideal when reality is dealing you another… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8061","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1kHSD-261","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8061","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8061"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8061\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8069,"href":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8061\/revisions\/8069"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8061"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8061"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8061"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}