If my ultra-normal hero, Norma Normalstrom, were to read the above statement, she would say, “Duh. That’s a no-brainer! Cancel dinner. Your child’s sick!” For people who grew up like us, it’s so not a no-brainer, it’s a dumbfounder. It’s like, “What do I do? I don’t know. My brain has stopped.” You don’t know [...]
Now, I have lots and lots and lots of thoughts on parenting, and especially on parenting despite a ragged emotional inheritance, so please know that this is just the beginning of an unending river of thoughts over time. That’s a disclaimer, a promise, and a warning! When I think about parenting, and specifically parenting as someone [...]
It's never too late to be a loving parent to yourself, to your children–no matter how darn old you are or might feel. Got it? That means: invest in yourself now, you're worth it. (That's my Assertive Care parenting voice (well, it's meant to be) which I learned from the book.) I found out about Growing [...]
Conditional love is like the word LOVE with the word IF stuffed into it. Lifove. If you do this, I'll love you. Lifove feels bad. I guess I can sort of see how it makes sense in theory, sort of, but my head and heart know it as wrong in practice. The word conditional and [...]
"There is nothing so difficult to arrive at as the nature and personality of one's parents. Death, about which so much mystery is made, is perhaps no mystery at all. But the history of one's parents has to be pieced together from fragments, their motives and character guessed at, and the truth about them deeply [...]
