October 14, 2026

Trust Fall

I’m at a crossroads in a bunch of different ways, thinking about how I might be sharing aspects of my life on the internet going forward as social media spaces keep on changing for the worse. Although one thing that’s been clear to me for a while is how impossible it is to write about being a parent once your children are people of their own, because their stories no longer belong to us and they can speak for themselves (and they do!). I think of how much I valued honest conversations about parenthood when my children were very small, conversations that let me know I wasn’t alone in the struggles and anxieties, and how I miss being able to have such conversations in online spaces now*, because the alternative is posting photos that may as well be captioned, “Look at us over here! We’re killing it!” When, of course, we’re only killing it some of the time, and the rest is the usual heartache, frustrations, fears, and tears, which is harder to bear when it seems like nobody else is ever going through any of it and everybody else’s kids are perpetually shiny.

*Obviously, I’m still having these conversations. That’s what group chats are for.

Parenthood is the most wondrous agony, which is something I’ve been thinking a lot about as we’re less than a year away from launching our eldest child into the world, and this is everything I want for her, but also, how! And why? And no!! The most wondrous agony for which I’d sign up again and again, but that doesn’t make it any easier. Maybe the most blatant demonstration of how ease and lack of friction aren’t what any of us are here for in this thing called life. I don’t train for marathons, but I do have kids, and the agony is similarly baked in, but also—oh my goodness—nothing compares to the highs. These wondrous creatures who are the very best people I’ve ever met in my life. (And I made them!)

I take credit for very little when it comes to my kids (except I swear by the results of having asked them, “Tell me what you think first,” whenever they asked me anything at all) and know how much it all really comes down to pure luck. As we all learned in playschool, you get what you get, and you don’t get upset, and neither do you decide that anything about your children was the result of your superior parenting skills.

Although IF anyone was asking me how to get kids to read, I’d say that modelling reading yourself sure goes a long way, and I’ve done my fair share of that, and then some, and so maybe that’s part of how we got to here.

To where I get to meet my kid at the bookstore on the day a new release by her favourite author drops so I can buy her the book she’s been waiting for. Truly, this is the dream! We’re killing it!

Or at least we were that day.