Parenting
In Human Parts. More on Medium.
You’re older and more mature. But your parents are just older.
This essay is part of Medium’s Mind the Gap: Generational Differences series.
My parents are two of my best friends. Please do not tell 15-year-old me that, in 30 years, Mom and Dad are going to be two of his best friends. He will find that fact depressing. But it’s true. I’m proud of it.
The Leitch parents moved from rural Illinois to Winterville, Georgia about four years ago, after they retired, so they could be near my two young sons, their only grandchildren. After missing most of the boys’ first two years, they get to watch them grow up…
This Is Us
On having faith, and giving permission to let go
“How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again.”
— Henry Scott Holland
Dear Mom,
The light is different here. If you saw how this place shines, I think you’d stop worrying about me. The light connects the landscape to every part of itself. It moves. It sparkles.
It links the souls together like pearls knotted in an endless strand. You know how pearls hold iridescence inside all those layers of shell? Well, if you look into the center of a pearl, you’ll get a taste of the light that surrounds me. Go do that now…
With our son out of the house, my husband and I provide our own teenage ambience
My son, completely at wits’ end with Zoom education, left for boarding school last month, so my husband and I became, a few years ahead of schedule, empty nesters. I had not yet given this phase of my life much thought; my son is in 10th grade, so I had assumed I had three more years of hands-on parenting. …
This Is Us
How I’m working to parent beyond ego and expectation
“Did you know my Shanna is making straight A’s again this year? And that she made captain of the cross-country team and the speech team? She’s my pride and joy.”
Growing up, my mother never missed an opportunity to brag about my accomplishments to relatives, coworkers, and grocery store clerks. My accomplishments were her accomplishments. She would preen herself on my achievements while I stood by feeling like a show pony.
Sometimes, I let her boasting feed my ego. Other times, I felt awkward and ashamed. “Is this all I am to her?” I’d wonder to myself.
I thought my…
This Is Us
The old me is gone, and I’m learning to let the light back in
No, no, there is no going back.
Less and less you are
that possibility you were.
— Wendell Berry
A long time ago, I didn’t have the patience to sit and watch birds. I was a busy self-employed mother of two little girls. I had painfully specific goals that I wanted to achieve.
I recall (hazily and from a distance) the constant sense of urgency and frustration, the touch of desperation, the need for respite, and the willingness to give every ounce of free time to that former version of myself. Maybe I was trying to create the perfect…
This Is Us
On the twee language of pregnancy and motherhood
Like many areas of life, pregnancy has its own jargon. In corporate America, we think outside the box. In the tech world, we’re all about seamless integration. In pregnancy, we inquire about Baby. Not the baby. Not your baby. Just Baby, like this is Dirty Dancing. We might ask who else is preggers, or if there are any other preggos in the house. We request bump pics. We provide encouragement with Mama, you got this!
It’s embarrassing to admit, but one of the things that always put me off the idea of becoming pregnant was the language. I felt the…
This Is Us
The quiet, crushing weight of Alzheimer's
For the first 12 years of my life, the idea of a “dad” was pretty esoteric. I knew I technically had one, but I’d often go years without seeing him. He was off-limits, “broken.” He had something called “alcoholism” probably because of his experiences in a place called “Vietnam”—neither of which I really understood at age five. All I knew by age 12 was that I’d given up on him. I’d spent too many afternoons sitting on the front porch waiting for him and now understood he just wasn’t coming.
During those years, my mom raised six of us kids…
This Is Us
Four years later, it brings me joy to imagine the young woman Ana would be now
My daughter Ana was tiny, partly because of genetics and partly because she got sick right before she hit puberty. She stood just over five feet tall and weighed between 105 and 110 pounds. Her bones were small and birdlike, her features delicate. She reminded me of a porcelain doll.
Little girls, especially shy ones, can sometimes disappear in a world filled with bigger, louder people.
But Ana was determined to be seen and heard. …
Wherein I, a childless woman, answer actual questions of actual children and possibly traumatize them for life
Q: “Do bees have lips?”
A: An excellent question, dear child. Bees do not have lips in the same sense that humans do, rather, they have something called a labial palp that are situated on either side of the proboscis. Here is a picture. I am told children enjoy those:
A series in which I answer the inane questions your children ask, but with a side of existential dread
Q: Why are trees different? A: Trees are different because of the evolution of plants, dating back to the dinosaurs. Trees were actually sporous plants, much like giant ferns, and they were purple as they had not yet developed chlorophyll. Eventually the taller plants began crowding out the big fern plants, and they choked the life out of them by blocking the sun. Now we have deciduous trees and coniferous trees — deciduous trees marking young growth, where there is a lot of space and less competition for sunlight. Once the conifer trees infiltrate, though, they grow taller and blot…
