Parents are people. That might seem like a rather stupid thing to say. But I think it’s easy to forget when you play such a huge role in the life of a dependent person with extensive, pressing and often loudly expressed needs, that you too are a human with needs. Those oft-cited advisements to put on your own oxygen mask first, or fill your own cup, are typically followed by the rationale that doing so makes you better able to serve others. But many have pushed back against this reading, saying it skips over the notion that it was also always a good idea to attend to yourself, simply because you’re a human worth tending to.

I often try to imagine what parenting advice looked like a few generations ago, when it could only come from a few sources: relatives, friends, neighbours, maybe a few books. But that was about it.

And when I compare it to the firehose to the face that is the internet, where parenting advice is rampant, insistent and often contradictory, I can’t help but envy those days of yore. Sure, they came with their own stressors, but pressure to optimize every facet of existence wasn’t one of them. Teasing parents that there’s some code they could crack to solve parenting only adds to their overwhelm. And it's dishonest as hell.

I’ve often described the Christmas holidays as time spent entertaining a vague suspicion that you’re supposed to be feeling differently than you do. It’s painful to have feelings you’re not supposed to have, but that rarely makes them go away. Better, of course, to normalize them.

Maternal ambivalence as a feeling can be pretty awkward. Cause whether we admit it or not, we have strong beliefs about how mothers should feel about being mothers. As if judging them on what they do and how they do it weren’t enough, we also have thoughts on how mothers should experience those actions of mothering from the inside. As though we warrant access to even their private psyches. Spoiler alert: we don’t.

Intro to season 2!

I’m old enough to know that New Year’s Resolutions are for suckers. Sure, blank slates offer motivation, but never as much as we hope. We’re lazy and it’s cold. And that’s fair. But I have been trying each Jan. 1 to pick a bit of a north star for the year. Just a kind of experience that I want to say yes to. I don’t rush to change any habits; I just keep this thing in mind.

This year I found that north star in the basement of an Irish pub. A kind of experience made up of three ingredients – third places, loose ties and third things – which I’ve come to see as a holy trinity of good times for humans.

I ruminate quite a bit over our hyper-digitized lives. But I also think a lot about gender. I can’t help it. I’m a 48-year-old woman, a separated mother of two boys, ages 11 and 8. And I’ve joked before that if you tried to draw a Venn diagram illustrating the overlapping interests of middle-aged women and school-aged boys, you wouldn’t have a Venn diagram.

But I’ve come to see a connection my boys and I share through a basic aspect of being who we are in the world that we’re in: it’s a lack of representation, of positive images of what it can look like and mean to grow up in their case, and to age in mine.

There are limits to the usefulness of naming things. Especially when it involves shiny new coinages fueled by the hungry ghost of the internet. When words get too sticky and our use of them sloppy, we become incurious and, worse, self-righteous, convinced that we understand things just cause we can pin words on them.

There’s a lot to be said about being able to feel that something is done. Finished. Over. Last call. Go home.

In Oliver Burkeman’s newsletter “The Imperfectionist,” he recently touted the importance of being able to call it a day. There’s real comfort in knowing your day is done; and the fact that feelings of finitude seem so elusive to us now, doesn’t mean we need them any less.

In the absence of imposed endings, I must explain to myself why I’m choosing to stop. And as a friend of mine liked to quote Harry Dean Stanton saying in Fire Walk With Me well, that’s “just like… more shit I gotta do now”