Kia Ora y’all

Biiiiiiig week for this geek, had three days of lectures @ university, lucky to have a willing and able parent to step into grandparenting.  My dad.  My kids.  My heart is full.

In all honesty, all that was helped along by my having packed nutritious lunchboxes the night before, and by loading the crock pot with healthy goodness the morning of.  It’s that invisible stuff that goes unnoticed all too often, and this is why I am giving my trumpet a minor toot.

The invisible stuff of parenting is what I yearn to make visible – this is a big reason for my public adoration of Naomi Stadlen and her ‘mothers talking’ work.  If you’ve never read What Mothers Do or How Mothers Love I just reckon you oughta.

But then there is an aspect of parenting made visible that clearly rankles … the insistence from mothers of grown children that any acknowledgement of the struggles of daily life with young children is something resembling failure.  Last year I linked y’all to this great blog post on Momastery,  and just this past week my pal shared this similar sentiment from the Boganette blog.

For onlookers to rush to the “your babies are blessings now just be grateful” angle is MOST unhelpful.  It denies the validity of mama’s emotions in the here and now.  It denies the reality of life in the here and now (parenting can be bloody hard!  AND it flies in the face of what we understand from the worlds of neurobiology, psychotherapy and decent humanity … accept what someone is feeling.  Just let them have that feeling.  Toddler, friend, adolescent, man, woman, whoever.  Feeling something.  So there.  OH!  How timely …  This is one of the gifts from my university experience last week – brief Youtube clip about empathy that I reckon you’ll love.

Quick link dump then I gotta go cos offspring are plotting rebellion (in party hats).  This is from the Washington Post about the culture of caesarian in the USA, here is a paper about infant circumcision and human rights (which I’m not sure I agree with), and I wrote this a while back but had cause to find it again last week and I reckon it’s still relevant.

If the weather cooperates, we’ll be off to see Te Matatini kapa haka festival tomorrow. See you there. Smooch!