Becoming Selene: We Can Do Hard Things
Remember how I said I relied on mom bloggers to learn about parenting when my children were young?
One of the most impactful posts I ever encountered was from Glennon Doyle. I still read it from time to time and I regularly share it with others. It’s called “Quit Pointing Your Avocado at Me,” and if you have not read it before, do that now.
It felt like a full circle moment, then, when I popped in my earbuds at the gym and turned on the “We Can Do Hard Things” podcast featuring Glennon, her wife Abby Wambach and her sister Amanda Doyle. The topic? “What We Don’t Talk About: Raising Older Kids.”
Boom.
Their conversation mirrors what I hope to create in this space.
I’d love for you to read the transcript or listen to the pod. But here are a few gems:
Glennon leads off by admitting, “I have been stunned by how difficult this time period is for me.”
Same, G. Same.
And then she nails the reason I want to be in dialogue with you all here:
“Because parenting young kids is so hard, but there’s such a community around it. I think before they get real personalities and lives, you just feel like it’s fair game to talk about them.
And then there comes a point where it’s just not. Like their lives are their own and it’s just not your story anymore to tell. And so that it ends up being very lonely raising older kids, because you don’t know how to talk to other people about it without revealing too much about your kids. So as I talk about this, I’m just going to try so hard to stay in my experience. Which actually isn’t too hard, because it’s so clearly not about them right now.”
(The emphasis added was mine.)
This one was a kick-in-the-gut and a nod-of-the-head comment: “I want them to watch a million videos of every day of their lives and me loving them so much. I want to go through pictures so that they can remember all of our days. I just want to remind them. I just feel like suddenly everyone has amnesia and I just want to cover my house in pictures of everything, which I’ve never had. I have never had this nostalgia feeling that has risen up in me like I’ve never experienced.”
(Okay, so unlike Glennon I am nostalgic pretty much all the time. But the rest of it — yes.)
Abby and Glennon compare their shift in identity to what Abby experienced after retiring from soccer. Leading “Sister,” a/k/a Amanda to say, “We’ve got two eight-year-old girls in this house trying to figure out who the fuck they are.”
Love it.
If Glennon, Abby and Amanda strike a chord with you, please jot it down. We’re not looking for elegant prose. We just want to hear your story. Submit here.