But then there is also virtue signaling–the act of curating and projecting an image of who we are, whether or not we are, indeed, that person. Virtue signaling can be obnoxious because it’s a bit of a “holier-than-thou” vibe, and unless it is backed up by authentic action it’s not a good look. As they say, don’t talk the talk if you can’t walk the walk.

What I’ve learned about virtue signaling, however, is that it’s a lot about belonging. It’s putting pride flags or political signs or bumper stickers to say to the world: hey, this is who I am, are you like this too? Let’s belong to one another. It can also be a way of drawing lines in the sand. If you disagree with me, let’s be clear, we are NOT the same: keep out.

I’ll be honest, I’ve been wrestling with virtue signaling lately. Although I do not put up flags or bumper stickers, I am a writer. I’ve experienced the power of drawing together a community with my words, as well as keep people away. I’ve become reticent in putting my ideas out on paper, or as in the modern case, the forever internet, because I question my own motives: am I simply sharing my thoughts with integrity, or am I virtue signaling? Is it even possible to do the former, and is the latter such a bad thing?

I am interested in living in alignment with my values that are somewhat consistent between my public self and my sleep-at-night self. Some of the ways I do this is by checking with myself whether what I’m saying is what I want to say and not what I’m expected to say, or what I’m supposed to say. To be sure, those boundaries can get blurry because I don’t actually believe there is a pure self apart from the influences of outside forces. The best I can do is to be as honest as I can, while being aware I’m not above being persuaded by my family genetic makeup, historical influences, and the ever changing environment.

I think alignment with our values also means making space for evolution and for growth. As our values change and shift through the seasons of life, our alignment with those values, both with ourselves and publicly, will inevitably be a wonky process. I remember during my deconstruction years, I was spouting the doctrines I was raised in for years after I had already solidly changed my mind. I was afraid to speak the truth out loud, even to myself. I wasn’t trying to deceive anyone, I was only doing the best that I could to keep up with my own evolution.

However, a voice that flip flops, that makes room for fluidity and change, doesn’t always project a distinct message. Real life is simply messier than branding copy. This is a problem for those of us who would like to communicate clearly in order to galvanize for a cause; whether for religious reasons, or political activism, or on a smaller scale, for raising children with certain values in a family.

Words that are spoken become static while the person who speaks it does not.

I don’t have an answer, except that we can only speak the truth as clearly as we can with as much information as we know, and be humble enough to change as we know better. And hope that the receivers of our message have enough grace to accept that we are all humans fumbling our way through.

The reason I don’t have a lot of friends is because I have never been a big group person, or a “friend group” person. I much prefer a coffee date with one friend than a party with a crowd. It’s frustrating to me to see a lot of people’s faces but not get to know any of them after a few hours together. So my relative friendless-ness comes down to a numbers game. When you devote a lot of time on one person, you don’t end up with as many.

The second, sadder reason I haven’t kept a lot of friends is due to the main severing event of my life: religious deconstruction. I recently returned to my alma mater, a conservative Christian college, and was reminded of how difficult it has been to try to maintain friendships from that era because the common ground for our friendship (God) is no longer relevant. This has been true for the subsequent years following college: seminary, missions work, and other Christian ministry activities. The brutal reality is this: I have lost a lot of friendships–that was a price I paid for my own emotional safety and to pursue a life outside of religion.

Photo by Helena Lopes on Unsplash

When I tell people I don’t have a lot of friends, I’m not really asking for sympathy, I’m just stating facts. Because the truth is I’m not in distress over it. I have an abundance mindset when it comes to friendships. It’s a big world full of beautiful people and I like the idea that my best friend might still be yet to come when I’m in my 60s, 70s or beyond. Making friends gets more interesting the older we get; there’s more content, a richer treasure trove of stories to exchange.

Also, I don’t need friends. I don’t mean to be snobby or stand-off-ish, but to say that friends are not necessary to survive. Friends don’t help pay the bills, they don’t share long term life planning–friendships are extremely fragile; one geographical move away and it could dissolve. There’s no contract, no legal commitment, you can walk away from a friendship at any time and that’s true on both sides.

But the unnecessity and frivolity of friendship is what makes it crucial. Friendship is unnecessary for survival, but wholly necessary for us to thrive. It’s the icing on the cake, the poetry and song of our existence, the splash of color on the streets that serve no functional purpose but to bring whimsy to those who pass by. It’s not important and so important at the same time.

I don’t believe in making friends and being “intentional” or whatever. Honestly, life is too hard for us to add to-do lists to what ought to be the easiest breeziest part of life: our friends. Sure, there is an organic flow of energy if you reach out and plan trips and share reels, it adds to the texture of your friendship, but there’s no obligation to do it. Friendship should be non obligatory–it’s always a free choice with low stakes.

And because it’s free, when connection does occur–when the out of town friend comes through and asks to meet up, when childhood friends randomly DMs to see you, or the neighbor down the street invites you to a party–it’s unexpected and delightful. They didn’t HAVE to, they WANTED to.

Maybe I’m once again pushing back on the narrative of my religious upbringing, when we belted the lyrics to Michael W. Smith’s “Friends are Friends Forever,” while signing LYLAS in each other’s yearbooks. Friends don’t have to be friends forever, I can cherish my friends who last for as long as we want it to last. Free, with low stakes, always. That low barrier of exit makes for similarly low barrier of entry. Everyone is welcome to be my friend and everyone is free to go.

I may not have a tight knit group of friends who are RIDE OR DIE, but I quite enjoy my flexible loyalty plan of friendship. To me, anything (friend) is possible and the best is yet to come.

One of the first and most practical reasons is that I’m cheap, lol. I’m very intentional about how I spend my money and it was hard for me to justify the expense. But the real truth is that I would easily spend the money for therapy sessions for my loved ones, and I have, because I believe it’s good and important. So why haven’t I spent it on myself? Could it be that I don’t think I deserve to be loved as much as I love others? Hmmm… sounds like someone needs therapy to work through that.

Another real reason is that as a mixed identity person, it’s hard to fathom finding a therapist that could possibly come close to relating to my place in society. I’m a Taiwanese who speaks English as my “heart” language, who still lives in Taiwan, who married a white American who raised mixed race kids and yeah. Like, who’s going to be able to sort me out? Therapists in my local area serve in Mandarin, a language I don’t have total mastery of despite it being my mother tongue. How could I do therapy without an accessible language? The other option is for me to do online therapy with an English speaking therapist but to see a therapist who doesn’t live in the same geographical locale feels too disembodied for my comfort. I want local, face to face connection with my therapist.

A third, admittedly arrogant reason is that I feel I have a lot of resources on my own. I have religious trauma, which I treated by hosting my own religious trauma support group, through writing to my own audience, and I can honestly say I have healed so much in recent years without ever actually seeing a therapist. So it is hard to pull the trigger to hire additional help when it seems to me like I do okay on my own.

So why have I finally decided to book my first therapy session? The way I think of it is that I have finally decided to treat myself. In my empty nest era, I find I have the extra bandwidth to focus on my own mental health without expending so much energy to others and I’m telling myself that I deserve it. I’ve had to spend some money on a physical therapist in the past year for my frozen shoulder so it’s whet my appetite on spending money to love myself. It feels great and I want more.

The issue of my complicated identity and finding a good therapist that will relate to my unique social location, well, I’m trusting that good therapy overcomes these challenges. As much as I want to honor my own complex identity, I also acknowledge my universal needs as a human being to be loved, to draw boundaries, and to heal. If there are to be some language and cultural barriers between me and my therapist, I think I’m ready to embrace the imperfect journey to try and perhaps even find some delightful surprises along the way.

And lastly, I want to give my own resources a break and let a professional therapist in to help. My husband, who is one of the wisest people I know, is a tremendous resource to me in life. He deserves a break from being one of my biggest support systems. He deserves a wife who gets help from other people besides him so that I can be a healthy partner. I’ve taken a step back from writing in recent years so writing as therapy is a resource that is no longer quite as accessible to me. I can continue to white-knuckle it when the stress of living life inevitably hits; I do have my meditation exercises, self care practices, and the many tools I’ve learned from self help books and IG reels. But it is time to get some help and embrace a softer life.

I can’t wait.

Should we examine our motives for having children and not just blindly follow tradition or society’s “shoulds”? Yes. But judging all parents as selfish? Come on, do so much better.

I have always been an advocate for a child-free life, and in fact, I think it can be very pro-child to choose not to have children. For so long, the cultural narrative is to prescribe the good life as getting married, having children, growing a family, that it was necessary to introduce a different way of living a good life that is just as valid: child-free. And I celebrate that there are many who have embraced this, the single cat ladies, the DINKs, and more ways of forming partnerships and unions that lay outside of conventional norms. These people are part of me and my children’s lives and we are better for it.

But I’m just gonna say it: it’s gone too far. If child-free people are coming after parents and calling us selfish, I’m not going to take it lying down.

Not all parents, of course, but for me and the parents in my community, we have gone through way too much sleeplessness, loss of bodily autonomy through childbirth and breastfeeding, minimal “me time” in order to give to our children, and MOST IMPORTANTLY, the heart wrenching emotional toil to fucking break the toxic cycles from our families of origin to give our children better mental health for you to call us selfish. For god’s sake. Stop being cruel.

We are also not going to deny the unquantifiable joy, the inexplicable sensations of fulfillment and satisfaction, the overwhelming gratitude we feel from having children. Having kids is an incredible life experience. Being a parent has made me more responsible, capable, and resilient in ways that my child-free counterparts cannot be. I say this without apology because there are lessons learned from sacrificially giving of yourselves for 18 and more years to other human beings that you simply can’t learn without parenting. Yes, we have less money. Yes, our bodies are more beaten up from pregnancy, childbirth, and the physical labor of parenting. Yes, we can’t have the dream life of sleeping in until whenever, having leisurely coffees, and taking as many vacations. But we have our children, and for many of us, as much as defies logic and rationale, we feel it’s worth it, just for the delight of their presence in our lives. To get to love another person that hard is a privilege.

I completely respect, advocate, and celebrate your choice to remain child free. But be so for real, it does not make you better than parents and it certainly doesn’t make you more selfless. It is simply a different choice for the life you want to live.

For folks who are thinking about whether to start a family, please know you have a choice. You have the right to make whatever choice you want. To remain childless you would have more time and resources to devote to your career, your relationships, and your own well being. You can live a fulfilling, fantastic life. To have children you would have to give up some of those resources, take on a huge responsibility to raise human beings, but you’d get to enjoy a joy that’s for the stuff of poetry it’s so beautiful. You can live a fulfilling, fantastic life as a parent.

In this age of social media, you have enough information to make your choice, and it is a heavy, sacred and difficult choice. Sometimes it is not more information that will help you. Turn off the noise. In the most recent episode of Shrinking, Paul says to Gabby, “What do I always say about tough choices?” to which Gabby replies, “You don’t know whether your choice is right or wrong until you make it.”

Writing, the kind that I do, of personal reflection, requires mining my own experiences, emotions, basically all the feels. I’ve always been the kind of person who had a lot of feels, like 10 to 20% more than the average bear. A scary movie made me more scared than others, a comedy made me laugh harder, and a sad movie could drive me into a state of melancholy I can’t shake. It was like my body wasn’t a big enough container for my emotions. And perhaps this is why I took up writing: finally, I found a way to channel all those big feelings, to unload them into these art vessels, to ease the burden on my finite, frail body.

It worked beautifully–making art, writing pieces, it was therapeutic and honed a skill and hopefully helped many other people. I felt like all the extra-ness of myself found its purpose. I wasn’t too much, I was just right as long as I found an effective way to direct my energy. But then, writing became my job so now all of a sudden, it was my job to have big feelings, to wield them, and to make art with them. Feelings shouldn’t be on a clock, they should ebb and flow along the natural rhythms of life. But I was on a clock with writing. I wrote every day and published once a week. It was not unusual for me to write myself to tears because that’s what the process of writing was like for me, I felt my feelings and wrote about them.

This is so tricky for me to say because I believe in big feelings. Historically and culturally, women, especially, are told they are too emotional, have too many big feelings and are too much, whereas men are praised for taking up as much of a presence as they can. I don’t want to diminish anyone’s big feelings, including my own. But I also know my own body and at some point, all those big feelings of mine found a name: dysregulation. I learned that it is normal and healthy to feel some ups and downs in life, but when that wave crests too high and crashes too low, that means our nervous system is dysregulated.

Well, shit. I thought I was writing so good but actually I’m just dysfunctional with a keyboard? Cool, cool, cool.

I don’t want to claim that all the amazing, incredible artists we have in our world, those who mine their own human experience to make good art for all of us are fucked up because surely that can’t be true. I can only speak to my own experience, which is that when I did step back from writing, my waves calmed down to a slow roll. (One major factor in this is that I didn’t have to be on social media as much, which was constantly activating my nervous system.)

Don’t worry, I haven’t turned completely boring. I’m still wildly opinionated and believe you me, plenty of men still think I’m “too much.” The question I ask myself these days now is, am I too much for you or am I too much for me? There are a lot of people who cannot handle big feelings–they don’t know how to respond, they are uncomfortable with hard things, and they just want to shut you up to feel better about themselves. That’s when they hurl the insults: you’re too much, tone it down a bit. This is a big world, there will always be enough room for you and all your big feelings, hot takes, and stories. Never believe you are too much for us.

But what I’ve learned is that perhaps there are times when we are too much for ourselves–when we are overwhelmed and dysregulated. These are the times when instead of acting, we are reacting.

When I feel that I am too much for me, I try to go less. Instead of grinding through ten reels in five minutes, I’ll read a book for 30 minutes. Instead of scrolling through 100 posts, I can watch a movie–consume longform rather than short. Instead of running 3 errands in one afternoon, I run no errands, and take a walk instead.

When others feel that I am too much, I swear by baby Jesus I will speak louder and get more in their face and show up in all their spaces.

Because only I get to decide if I am too much.

Why I’m Kinda Writing: I can’t paint, I can’t draw, I can’t bake, I can’t sew. Words are the way I know how to create.

Why I’m Kinda Not Writing: When I look at this world right now and the humans living in it, I see so much hardship. I see people struggling to pay the bills, afford a mortgage, and provide for their families. I see the political landscape as the shitshow that it is because folks are struggling in their daily lives. When I sit down to write, I don’t know how to write in a way that isn’t tone deaf. Everything I am living and learning is drenched with privilege that feels inappropriate to inflict on readers at this current moment.

Why I’m Kinda Writing: Writing gives me clarity of thought. It helps me process my own mind and figure out what I think.

Why I’m Kinda Not Writing: Writing opens myself up to critique. Critique from thoughtful readers challenge and make me a better writer and person. Critique from trolls destroy and shame. I’m not confident that I always know the difference.

Why I’m Kinda Writing: When I’m writing, I feel a happiness that transcends, ironically, words. It feels like coming home to myself.

Why I’m Kinda Not Writing: I had inadvertently built an audience based in America, a specific subset of Americans (white women) that I don’t belong to nor do I identify with. I am a Taiwanese woman who lives in Taiwan. My writing career displaced me in a way that did not feel grounded in my locale. I want to serve my audience, but I don’t want to erase my lived, geographical experience.

Why I’m Kinda Writing: I really do love telling stories and sharing them.

Why I’m Kinda Not Writing: Writing requires ego. It requires that I have strong enough convictions about my ideas to put them to words and send them out into the world, and then the readers who resonate with my ideas reinforce them until I form a “community” which becomes too much of an echo chamber for my comfort. I’m getting to an age where the more I know, the more I realize what I don’t know. I’m uncertain of my ideas and I don’t have the ego to claim authority in my thoughts. And I don’t think the writing landscape the way it is molded by social media makes space for writers and influencers to safely grapple with ideas and evolve without trauma.

Why I’m Kinda Not Writing: I am enjoying a season of listening to new and emerging voices. I know there’s enough room for my voice and theirs, but it feels really good to be quiet and just listen.

Why I’m Kinda Not Writing: I became a small influencer in my writing days and whaddya know, I didn’t love being even a small public figure. It felt preposterous to me that there were people who knew me whom I did not know. I was put on pedestals, I was misunderstood, I was criticized, by people who knew only part of me.

Why I’m Kinda Not Writing: For me, personally, it is not a viable career. I did well in my career when online writing was more text based with blogs and articles. But now, the people who can break through require making video content, reels, and tik tok. Creating reels doesn’t make me feel happiness or the sense of coming home to myself, writing does. But I can’t garner an audience without creating reels. To be clear, I am not complaining about this. I LOVE reels, I consume them with tremendous delight daily. But it does reduce my writing to a hobby rather than a career.

Why I’m Kinda Writing: Kinda writing is an awesome hobby.

This fall, I read Awake, by Jen Hatmaker, who I’ve had the honor of meeting and is just as kind as she appears online. It was beautifully written and she did an amazing job giving language to those of us who grew up with the sexist and authoritarian flavors of evangelicalism in the 90s. But I felt like the biggest takeaway was that we all needed to also read Melody Beattie’s Codependent No More. And since I’ve already self diagnosed with codependency due to the fact I can’t be away from my husband for a single minute, I figured this was the self help book I need.

I picked up the book and began reading the first Part: What’s Codependency and Who’s Got it? It consists of four chapters, which I read, then I put the book down and announced to my husband sitting next to me: wait, I was wildly wrong. To be fair, the author herself admits the definition of codependency is varied and fuzzy, so it’s not entirely clear what is codependency and who is a codependent. But I read enough of the anecdotes to know that I don’t identify with some central characteristics of a codependent. I don’t have a relationship with an addict, for one, I don’t have low self esteem and I have fairly good boundaries. Turns out, I’m not codependent with my husband because I am not obsessed with controlling his behavior, nor do I let his behavior affect me in unhealthy ways. I am merely dependent on my husband. We’ve built a two person household and when one is gone, I have to do it all and I didn’t like it. That’s all. This is not codependency.

While I realized I was wrong about being codependent, I recognize there are whispers of codependent-ish tendencies inside of me that require excavation and discarding. Some of this work I’ve already started. Years ago, I published an article on here titled: A Savior No More, in which I concluded it is not my job to save the world, that the world goes on turning without my help. Growing up evangelical, I was infused with the mandate to save the world which I’ve happily deconstructed. But in Codependent No More, she compels me to examine that perhaps not only can I not save the world, I can’t even save a single person. I can’t save humanity, but I can’t even save the people in my inner circle. In fact, I especially can’t save the people I love the most.

I’m a middle child but I behave like an elder daughter in that I am responsible to a fault. My codependent-ish tendency is to take responsibility for things that are not my responsibility. If my parents, my siblings, my friends, my husband, my children, aka those whom I love the most in the entire world, make decisions that harm themselves even though I knew it would, even if I can try to stop it, even if I beg and plead and cry, I cannot control them. I cannot, I cannot, I cannot. What I can do, is to step back and take control of the only thing I can control, which is my own health and well being.

This summer I said to my college student, “There’s this thing I want you to do but I cannot make you do it. I’ve let you know why I feel this is important but I will never speak of it again.” And reader, with God as my witness, I have not brought it up again. I am Parenting Codependent-ish No More. Please clap. Did they do the thing? No. Am I taking responsibility for it? Not even with the most justifiable position as the Mother of this Child, I am not taking responsibility for it. I can’t even believe how grown up I am.

I knew in my gut, and confirmed through Melodie Beattie’s book, that less is more. The less I intervene in other people’s lives, the better it is for them, for myself, and for all related parties. My child will learn through their own choices, not through my advice, wise as it may be. And that is good, better even.

Nobody ever told me the flip side of the wager. Nobody warned me, what if this short life is all that we get? What if death is as final as it seems? What if we miss out on this one chance, this one ephemeral fragment of time, to live as vibrantly as we can; that when we lose someone, to grieve as fully as we can, to move through the pain instead of bypassing it? What if we don’t cherish our experiences, to savor it and instead spend our lives on projects that serve eternity only to find out there is none? 

The more years I live life after evangelicalism, and I’m so grateful these years are growing, (Gasp! What if one day I get to live more years beyond evangelicalism than the ones I lived in it!) the more I appreciate how the finitude of life is exactly what gives life meaning. I think of the plot of the Good Place, when the characters finally arrived in eternity, given the choice, every one of them still stepped through the door that ends everything. Without a period at the end of the sentence, we cannot make sense of what’s being said. 

This is not to glorify death or to take away from how we crave more of life. We recently lost a family friend who died of cancer at age 68, a few months shy of the birth of his first grandchild. We lost him too soon. We wanted more years for him–more life, more memories, more joy. My hope is that everyone gets to live a long, full, meaningful life. But post evangelicalism, I now believe that can only be possible if we accept the finality of death. 

“He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep, to gain what he cannot lose.” My Bible study leader in eighth grade drilled this into us, the implication of which is that what is eternal is sacred, and worth sacrificing temporary pleasures for. People who placed bets on Pascal’s wager are giving everything - their desires, their careers, their money, their relationships, in order to gain what they cannot lose on the other side of this life. But what if there’s nothing? Then you gave it all away for nothing? I genuinely want to ask my evangelical friends if they understand the risks of this all-or-nothing bet. 

The way I see it now, people are giving these things away and ceding control of their lives to the whims and agendas of religious people in power, who have much to gain by controlling these lives. And they’re not waiting until eternity to cash in on what they’re gaining. 

But I think people keep being fools for God (aka lining the pockets of rich religious leaders) because in some ways it is easier to be prescribed that blueprint for life - to be given a sense of purpose without having to search for it. It is hard work to have to figure out what we value, what we desire, how best to do with the short time we have on earth. And it looks different from everyone else, so there’s not even helpful hints because literally not a single soul can tell us what is most meaningful to us. I’m convinced that sense of isolation and “geez I gotta make this up for myself” frustration is what keeps people in cults, or drives people there. 

I live in this tension now. I’m just making things up, living my life the way I want to, without a blueprint, just figuring things out one day at a time. It’s kind of bananas how much autonomy I have after so many years of captivity in my youth. I wake up and think, I can just DO this? I’m allowed? 

I really do. I get to live my little blip of time on earth in ways that are most meaningful to me. Spending time with people I love. Creating stories and sharing them with anyone who wants to hear them. Enjoying my favorite foods and desserts and live in constant search of new favorites. Traveling to my favorite cities. Coming home to the rhythms of domestic life. Engaging the world with curiosity and delight. I’m betting on the opposite of the wager now–all in on this side of life. 

When I think about my own parenting, there have been many examples when our family dynamic wasn’t gentle, and I parented with fierceness and ferocity. As an enneagram 8 and a mama bear, I would fight anyone who tried to hurt my child, but what if the person who is hurting my child is another child of mine? Growing up, my older child, being a child themselves, would often wield their power over the younger one. The younger one wanted to play and spend time with them, and the older one knew it and often rejected them, leaving hurt feelings and sometimes of course, retaliation. It’s your average run of the mill sibling rivalry. But I often challenged my older child to not use her older age, bigger stature, larger vocabulary, and more years under their belt to bully the younger one. I’m always reminding myself that as the adult in the family, to honor the younger ones’ autonomy and dignity, I wanted to relay those values to my kids. Each family has limits of what is acceptable and unacceptable, and this was one area that felt unacceptable to me and I was firm to draw this boundary here.

As a family, we also disrupted the status quo for causes we believed in. I quit my job at my kids' school because I was reprimanded for being vocally gay affirming. There was nothing gentle about that fissure we caused in our community. We marched in the streets, attended boycotts, and argued passionately over things that matter most to our hearts. I was raising revolutionaries, after all. But our dissent and passion was not chaotic; it was heated, targeted, and purposeful. Our parenting was wild, but not out of control.

We were often accused of being too soft on our kids. Too protective, too helicopter-y. We did things for them that they could and should do for themselves, like certain chores, or bringing lunch out to our kids when they forgot it at home. But what others may not see is that our kids have mental health struggles. What may appear to be easy is actually doing some very hard things. One of our kids went through a season of life when going out to eat in public was enough to induce anxiety attacks. So it may appear to the outside like we were soft on them, but for their individual circumstance, we actually challenged our kids to do some very hard things…for them. We did exposure therapy for this kid’s anxiety, which is exposing them to the things that are hard for them to train their brain to know they can survive it. Again, there was nothing gentle about this process–it was brutal and harsh but we walked alongside them to overcome it.

I don’t mind the term gentle parenting because I do believe in gentleness, and I would rather err on the side of gentleness than hardness. But when I look at the instances in my own parenting when I veered away from gentleness, even while gentle parenting; I can see that it’s always when my values compelled me to say “NO” to bullying, to rise up and speak up and take to the streets, to insist that we can overcome challenges. My values contain my gentle parenting from devolving into chaos.

If you want guidance and support on figuring out what your values are as you’re parenting your kids, I invite you to join the Rooted in Values journey for parents - which is FREE thanks to a grant from the John Templeton Foundation - it’s 8 weeks of 60 minute sessions done over zoom. You’ll find clarity and purpose and hopefully make some lasting friendships. Join HERE. The next cohort begins May 5. Don’t miss it!!

But I get that it is a practical life issue we face when we’re raising families. We all only have 24 hours in a day and so much energy to give–having a framework of how to distribute those resources that helps us raise healthy families is important.

Instead of a hierarchy of who or what is more important, the parents or the children, the marriage or the children, I much prefer thinking of trying to meet everyone’s needs. When the kids are little, their needs are intense, so naturally the family’s attention and time weighs heavily on their needs. The parent’s needs and the marriage might suffer a season of neglect, it’s not ideal, but I think parents-to-be should be prepared that young children are high need and if your expectations are in check, then your marriage should be able to weather that season. Sooner than you think, those kiddos grow up, and then you can begin to shift the calculus of meeting the needs of everyone in the family. The parents’ careers, the children’s schooling, the nurturing of marriage, the family together time, these are all important needs of everyone involved, and it’s not so much about prioritizing one over the other, but filling all the buckets of needs, which everyone deserves equally as human beings worthy of dignity.

As much as I love to tout my liberal values of EVERYONE IS EQUAL, I know it is inevitable that sometimes we do have to make some value judgments of whose needs are most important to tend to at the moment, and so I can’t get away from ultimately still submitting to some kind of hierarchy in the family. But instead of the god-awful umbrella structure, I believe in the hierarchy of vulnerability. Whoever is most vulnerable gets priority. For most of childhood, children are more vulnerable. As parents who are humans, of course we also have needs we deserve to have met, the need for comfort, love, alone time, hugs, etc. But we have more resources as adults. We know how to articulate our needs, we have the financial means to find therapy, we have a more established support system, we have developed prefrontal cortexes and the legal means to drive and access to services. Our children don’t have any of those things, and in their vulnerability, we should prioritize meeting their needs. Some exceptions may occur such as if a parent becomes ill or disabled, in which case they may become more vulnerable than a child.

Of course we have to take into account that meeting children’s needs sometimes means we have to prioritize our own needs first. Because what they need are happy and whole parents. Which is why it’s so silly to build hierarchy into families, because our liberation is always bound together. Our thriving is interconnected.

It’s hard. When you are one person, meeting your own needs is already a full time job. Add in marriage and you have the needs of two people, AND the additional needs of the partnered relationship. Add in children and you have the needs of multiple people AND the needs of the parenting relationship, the need for each individual child’s relationship with the parent and the needs of the siblings’ relationship. I think that’s why we have to embrace imperfection, that not every bucket can be filled at all times, but also embrace that just as needs multiply, so does the potential for joy.

There was one stand up comedy I watched that made me laugh but also made me cry. Like, had to pause the show and bawl kind of cry. It was Mae Martin, another one of my favorite comedians who has been on a gender journey to identifying as trans. They star in an autobiographical comedy series starring Lisa Kudrow (!!), Feel Good, that documents some of that journey. In their Netflix special, Sap, they talk about going on a low dose of testosterone and since then having the best year of their life at 35 year old. They said, “And it’s not like it made me that happy. It’s just that there is an absence of agony.”

This was the line made me pause the show and cry my crocodile ally tears. All trans people are asking for is just an absence of agony. “It’s a low bar, really, and who are we to deny that,” says Mae.

Of course, as we know, the Trump administration is moving to deny just that. They are instituting laws that ban gender affirming care for the most vulnerable young people. It is cruel and unconscionable. I don’t have it within me to be outraged anymore, the first Trump administration took it out of me. These days, I limit political social media consumption, keep up with some of the headlines, just enough to know what and how I can help do the little bit of good that I can.

As someone who has for years advocated for the rights of children, I think this is the moment to stand up and fight for trans kids’ lives. To clear the lowest bar that there is, to give them the dignity of the “absence of agony.” I’ve already donated to a family with trans youth to cover travel expenses in search of gender affirming care. And I’d love to invite you all to join me.

The Campaign for Southern Equality Project has started a Trans Youth Emergency Project that does this work, and I’d love to direct your attention and donations to it. There are also links to get informed about the crisis. If you don’t have the means to help out financially, you can send a message of support and love to trans youth.

My guiding star in how to live life and do justice is to look for the most vulnerable and I believe trans kids occupy that place at this moment. They are young and still developing their beautiful hearts and brains and bodies, they need our protection to give them the best chance to grow into adulthood without agony. Please join me.

So now I know what it’s like to not live in a space where I’m misaligned, but the living aligned part is feeling a bit vague. For those who have watched the Good Place, the show illustrates how complicated it is to live ethically, when the systems of our world are all interconnected, to live in our world is to inevitably entangle ourselves in shady stuff.

What does it mean to live in alignment with our values? What does it mean for us individually, and relevant to parenting, what does it mean to raise a family who live in accordance with the values of the family?

Spoiler alert: I don’t know. I’m still figuring it out and I’d love your input in the comment section. But I do have a few lessons I’ve learned that I can share.

First of all, I don’t think living in alignment with our values means there is zero dissonance. Like the lesson from the Good Place, our world is far more complicated and we have to sustain some dissonance otherwise our psyche would be in constant disarray. For example, even though I know flying is awful for the planet and worsens climate change, my kids live halfway around the world, and I fly to see them and fly them to see me. My values clash between my love for my kids and my love for the planet (which my kids also live on.) There is no winning scenario, we can only choose a way and accept our complicity or live with some dissonance pretending there is no conflict.

But I do think there is a degree of dissonance that demands integration. For me, living in the evangelical world was too much dissonance. Continuing to consume Harry Potter literature in light of the fact that J.K. Rowling bullies and harms the trans community is too much dissonance.

So somewhere between flying despite damage to the planet (ok) and reading Harry Potter (not ok) is my zone of alignment.

Which leads me to my second point which is that the zone of alignment isn’t fixed across time and space. That zone shifts. If J.K. Rowling comes out and apologizes for her behavior, makes a good faith effort to make amends, I would shift my zone. As circumstances change and my personal evolution continues, that zone adjusts accordingly. There is a season for everything.

Thirdly, I think living in alignment with our values carries a lot of privilege. For example, some people boycott Amazon because of some of its predatory practices, specifically disappearing small and local businesses. But some people can’t afford NOT to shop at Amazon because of its lower prices. Being able to live in alignment with this particular value requires some financial privileges. Perhaps for some, protesting in the streets is in alignment with their values but we all know certain bodies can protest with less danger than others, i.e. white men vs. black women.

Sometimes, safety needs to be prioritized over living out our values. For a season of my life I advocated loudly and publicly on behalf of marginalized groups, but it led to a season of quiet, of rest, of prioritizing regulating my nervous system. Perhaps this falls under the category of shifting values, as my values shifted from public advocacy to quiet regulation. But I think we need to take a broader view of what it means to live a good life, and there are many factors beyond living in alignment with our values, like our safety, our energy levels, and managing the values of those in our family and community.

I have a fantastic resource to point you to if you’d like to learn more about sharing your core values with your children. Join the 8 week course called Rooted in Values where you can meet like minded parents who are similarly wanting intentionality in their family lives. This course is FREE, thanks to the support of the John Templeton Foundation, so please don’t miss out on this opportunity!! Click HERE to register.

Pleasure over productivity

I’ve been through a season of prioritizing pleasure over productivity for the past several years, I would say since 2020. On the surface, it’s basically just having more fun, doing less work. But, I see it as a much more profound project of falling into my body, listening to her desires and rhythms, and living in the present instead of reaching forward to goals.

This is going to sound silly, but I’ve been able to achieve something that nobody is going to give me an award for, but benefits me in an extraordinary way. I used to bite my tongue, cheek, or lip, constantly. It was awful, I always had painful sores in my mouth because I would accidentally bite it. I started to think maybe it was because I need orthodontic work because my teeth are crooked. Somehow I just knew that my mouth didn’t work right because of the incessant biting.

Then I noticed this year that I hardly ever bit myself. I didn’t try to stop, it wasn’t an intentional goal. But I now know it is because I was always in a hurry to eat, to choke down my food so I can speak, or to get to the next task I needed to check off the list. And if my body (my lip, cheek, tongue) was in the way, f*ck it, I didn’t care.

When I shifted my relationship to my body, this was the most fortunate byproduct. I learned to savor my food, to take my time eating, to live in the present, and I learned to love my body more. She deserved my tender love and care, and in nourishing her, I wasn’t going to hurt her in the process.

This has been a successful experiment, but moving into 2025, I’d love to increase productivity a bit. Projects give me life and hopefully I can engage in some projects this year that doesn’t sacrifice my mental or bodily well being, so that I can continue to work while keeping my priorities in check.

Boundaries don’t protect us from pain

As you can imagine, learning to draw boundaries has been a huge part of my deconstruction and healing from religious trauma. But the painful lesson I’ve learned in 2024 is that having boundaries doesn’t mean freedom from pain. To love is to be vulnerable and I hate that this is true. I learned to put up strong boundaries against toxic people so that they don’t hurt me like they already have, but I make myself healthy and strong in order that I can love those I choose to love. But the people I love are also capable of hurting me and there’s nothing (much) I can do about that. It is the way of relationships, of love, of humanity.

Moving into 2025, I want to embrace this reality with a firmer grasp. Love hurts, it always has and it always will. It’s not true that only toxic relationships cause pain, the most healthy, robust relationships also cause pain. It is the cost of love and not a single one of us can escape it.

Intentionality doesn’t lead to perfection

There’s often rhetoric surrounding the New Years of intentionality–setting intentions, coming up with a word of the year (my word for 2025: Charitable), becoming more aware of this or that. I get that it’s helpful for many, but for me personally, I almost need the opposite. I need de-intentionality because I am already intentional about everything. Everything I do or say or spend or choose, I know why I’m doing it, when I want to do it, what the purpose is, and how I want to change. If that sounds exhausting to you, it is. It really is, I’m too aware. And the point of being more intentional is to live a better life, less wasteful, more purposeful–and I have benefitted from my intentionality. But, I also look around and see people who live without intentions, who just do whatever the f*ck they want, and honestly, I envy that kind of freedom and sometimes, I don’t see that my life is that much better?

The lesson I’ve learned in 2024 is that intentionality doesn’t lead to perfection. I’m not abandoning my intentionality because frankly, I can’t really help who I am. But I feel like I am chasing an unattainable goal, which is that with intentionality comes perfection. Or at least a well adjusted, balanced life. And well, maybe life is better when it’s a bit wonky.

In 2025, I want to let go of becoming the best version of myself and let things go sideways every once in a while.

I want to tell you all about an exciting new program for parents who are spiritual but not religious, who want to find a support group for parents who want to raise their children with core values. It is an 8 week program done via zoom and it is FREE. It begins in February but there are info sessions you can sign up for to learn more. Click HERE.

Unfortunately, power systems do not let go of their members without punishment. My straying from the status quo resulted in consequences that left me with religious trauma. This threw another wrench into the holiday season as the religious rituals, songs and traditions so tightly woven into the time of the year triggered undesirable bodily reactions. When I tell you I deleted entire playlists from my Christmas repertoire, I did it with vengeance. It was a time of brutal pruning. Along with the gifts under the tree, I also received bitterness, resentment and rage. Magic, with fire. 

Once again, time and intentional work with trauma informed therapists, I began to heal. Incredibly, now I can once again listen to religious Christmas songs without feeling triggered. I’ve learned to deal with the pain of my own past, both my own complicity in the toxic system and the ways the toxicity burned me, with a measured amount of wistfulness and nostalgia that feels healthy for now. 

Now what? Back to religious rituals? Back to church? Eh…no thanks. Not even for Christmas. Now is the time to explore new spiritual landscapes. I’ve mentioned magic several times now in reference to the holiday season. Isn’t magic an inherently spiritual term? What does it mean for Christmas to be magical? I think it’s that wow factor. A white Christmas is magical because fresh flakes of snow blanketing the earth, temporarily silencing the noise of our busy lives; it helps us breathe deep and connects us to the beauty of nature. Anything that inspires poetry transcends the superficiality of our human lives–such that we can only utter short phrases, a staccato of wonder. 

I’m a city girl so I love Christmas decorations in cities. The flip side of the beauty of nature is the ingenuity of our human imagination and skill. Architects and engineers who create festive cityscapes also inspire the wow factor. I will be in a city during Christmas this year and I’m ready for the magic. 

Perhaps the most powerful ingredient of magic is story. Jesus wasn’t even born on December 25th, after all, it was a story someone made up, a common narrative that created this Christmas industrial complex.

Now what? After fundamentalism and deconstruction and religious trauma and healing, what’s my story now? What’s my story of Christmas now? My kids have just left the nest but are still in college which means, lucky for us, we still get Christmas breaks. They’ll both be home for Christmas, after being gone all of Fall, so the story of Christmas for our family right now is certainly reunion and family togetherness. The magic will be organic. Instead of church and hymns, our rituals will be family movie nights and trips to see the lights in the city. 

Liberation from fundamentalism doesn’t mean life is now perfect. It’s better, free-er, yes. But life is still hard–full of disappointments and plans that don’t work out, elections that don’t go our way, sick family members and dreams squashed by the realities of capitalism. For now, the story of Christmas is a small respite of peace. A candle lit that emits a warm glow. A favorite festive drink for some sips of joy. Music that regulates the nervous system, helping me relax my shoulders and breathe more deeply–a hug for the body. 

Parenting the holidays after religious trauma is to tell our story. It doesn’t have to be a grand, universal narrative. It can just be the story of this year, this month, this week. What’s your Christmas story? And how can we infuse some magic into it? 

If you’re wanting to explore our Christmas stories and traditions in community with other like minded folks, I invite you to join me on zoom, we’ll gather for a respite of peace (my Christmas story this year). My dear friend and bestselling author, Matthew Paul Turner will be doing a reading of his Christmas children’s book, we’ll share ideas of each of our holiday traditions and stories, hopefully to inspire one another. This will be on December 3rd, 7:30pm EST. Join us!! 

It turns out, folks, that the kids weren’t alright.

I think this is a wake up call for us to remember that children are not blank slates. Just as we push back against the idea that children are born sinners, wicked at the core, we should similarly reject the notion that children are born angels, prone towards love and goodness by default. No, children are like the rest of us humans, actively engaging with the world around them with their individual unique personalities and inclinations. A kid is never a good kid or a bad kid; they are kids with distinctive biological makeup, environmental influences, capable of making choices that lead them down paths of destruction or light. And resilient to repair and redemption. And vulnerable to toxicity and downfall. 

I don’t love the polarizing language of good and evil, it’s too reminiscent of my religious childhood, but I embrace pro social, progressive values of inclusivity, care for the marginalized, interconnectedness of our human life with nature, and equality for all. I am reminded that these values require hard work, advocacy, and a constant vigilance (hopefully shared among community) to push forward, that it never happens by default. The allure of authoritarianism and power is too strong. 

We gotta be smart and not ignore the Andrew Tates and Jordan Petersons, these misogynous poisons filling the air our boys breathe. We can’t be naive that our precious little boys could never. 

Having said that, I do still believe, despite evidence of the contrary, that love wins. Rather than spending our time and energy sheltering our kids from the toxicity in the air, we focus on building a family and societal culture of love and inclusivity. The best way to raise children who are feminists, who champion the rights of all, is to honor them while they are marginalized–while they are kids. 

I have been quite alarmed by the way feminists in my community rant viciously against men. I get it, and I don’t want to police women’s valid reactions, but many times I have to remind them, these men you rail against, are your sons. They are your boys and they deserve to be loved and treated with kindness and respect. It is our best chance at raising boys who respect women. 

I’m not saying we give boys and young men a pass for misogynist behavior, even if they are just parroting their influencers. But the way we hold men accountable is different when they are 24 years old, 19 years old, and 13 year old. They are young, with prefrontal cortexes that are malleable and not yet formed. We have to be that positive influence for them and trust that they will make choices that reflect better values. 

Expand our definitions of masculinity: boys can like sports and video games AND crocheting and cooking. Boys can be angry and tough, and they can be vulnerable and soft. Young men can be horny and love romance. Free our boys from the constraints of societal standards for masculinity and be boys who are human, boys who are fully themselves. And surround them with wholesome men, men who are vulnerable and respectful and curious. 

Ultimately our children will form their own values and make their own choices and we can’t fully be held responsible for the paths they choose. But we have a chance while we have them in our care to give the world the healthiest version of who they can be. We have to give it our best shot. 

Photo by Luke Brugger on Unsplash

Saying goodbye to our baby was brutal. Coming home without him was brutal. I was shocked by how much it hurt. Every item in the home that we shared, every errand run triggered the grief of ending that chapter of our parenting lives. I thought I was ready, and I am, but the pain of the actual event was still acute. Some things in life you simply can’t prepare for. 

“How are you doing?” people keep asking us re: emptying nesting. Even our own kids asked us how we’re doing without them around. As if it’s a bigger event than it feels, because life is still just life and although things are very different, it also feels just the same. We have more flexibility in our schedule and more time now. But that has been a gradual process as the kids moved into teen years and were self-sufficient. We had already been slowly reclaiming our own time. It’s easier getting used to easier things than it is getting used to hard things. Having more time, more space, more freedom took an instant to get used to. I remember the sleepless nights of raising newborns and suddenly being deprived of bodily autonomy and time–that was much, much harder. 

Life feels the same also in that we are still parents. We are still parenting. We don’t see our kids everyday anymore, but we still worry about them, still take care of them, still buy things for them, still, still, still. Empty nesting has not been as much of a severing as I feel the world has made it out to be? 

One thing I am conscious of, however, is how much our children are evolving outside of our purview now. The early adult years are almost as malleable and transformative as when they went from helpless infants to walking, talking human beings. Perhaps the changes are less visible, and because they are less visible, I want to be sure I remind myself those changes are real. They grow leaps and bounds and because we’re not there to witness it every day, each time we reconnect with them, it’s almost like getting to know new people who are our children. 

It can be jarring at times but mostly so wonderful. Because as it turns out, even though they change–their maturity level, their life experiences, their perspectives, their personalities, their interests–the love we have for them is the constant. Keeping up with who they are becoming is hard, loving them for these newer versions is not. 

I want my kids to know I miss them, but I don’t want to make them responsible for our well being. I want them to fly the nest with freedom. This is tricky, because sometimes I feel like I overcompensate and never share with them the moments I wish they were around, and maybe I should. I hope they know that it’s both: I miss them and I am glad they are where they are supposed to be, even if it’s away from us. 

As for our life back as a couple, I think we’re still forging what it will look like. But there’s no anxiety about it. I think we get to do what we want to do–try out new hobbies, learn new skills, start new projects, but we’re not in a hurry to do any of it, because one thing we have more of these days is time. 

I was growing more and more frustrated with these think pieces until I heard the term from Ezra Klein’s podcast, “the Ferility Election.” His article on this subject helped me contextualize these arguments, which are firmly couched in the rhetoric of this election cycle. JD Vance’s insulting comments against childless cat ladies and the bigger idea behind this sentiment that people who choose to not have kids are not as invested in the well being of the nation as other citizens, is fueling the Left (aka my algorithms) to churn out these critiques in defense of the choice to remain childless. 

Image by Oleksandr Pidvalnyi from Pixabay

As someone who champions Raising Children Unfundamentalist, I want to be pro family and pro choice. I want to advocate for family friendly policies as well as defend the right to abortion. I don’t love how the Right is baiting the Left to bash families and children, or at least to write articles without nuance in their justification of being childless. Instead of mocking parents who don’t get enough sleep, can’t afford childcare, don’t get enough maternity/paternity leave for making the choice to have children, we should be advocating for policies to provide social support to parents so that children can thrive in healthy families.

And this does not have to be antithetical to the stance to remain childless. I want to propose two ways to defend the childless cat lady in a way that is not anti child, and is in fact, very pro life and pro children. 

First, I care about children too much to have them. 

Ideally children thrive with parents who are in loving, supportive relationships, who are financially responsible and stable, who are mentally healthy; who are trauma informed, sex positive, and have the tools to stay emotionally regulated. This sounds like a pipe dream and it seems to be asking too much of potential parents to achieve in order to start a family. And it is. We can’t be perfect, but for the sake of the children we cannot deny those are the ingredients to raise children in the ways they deserve. We should at least strive to be in fairly good working order, relationally, physically, mentally, and financially. And if we carry too much baggage and know that it is too much of a challenge to be in that stable space, we can choose to not have children knowing they will suffer because of our issues. To me, that’s a really good, pro child reason, to not have them. It’s a loving thing to do. For the folks who have made this the reason to not have them, I hope you will be surrounded by your nieces and nephews and niblings, by your students, or by the children of your community who will provide you the joy that children bring to parents. You deserve it. 

Second, I care too much about the child in me to have them. 

Some people choose to not have children because they want to focus on their own career, or they feel their relationship to their partner(s) feels full, or they simply want the money and time and space to travel or to live their life without the responsibilities of parenting. Instead of framing this as, I don’t want kids because they’re annoying and a burden, we can frame it as that we want what’s best for the child that’s inside of us. I firmly believe that when we love ourselves well, that’s when we can best love others, including children. If you want what’s best for you, you’d want what’s best for children as well. 

I want my children to be surrounded by people who have made the choice to love themselves, to choose what’s best for their life, including the choice to not have children. 

To me childless cat lady friends, I support your choice and I love having you in my children’s lives. I hope you love yourselves as well as the children in your life. Regardless of whether we choose to start families or not, I hope, and want to work towards a society where we cherish every child. 

Your 15 year old wants to wear a crop top to school, is that even allowed?

Your 17 year old wants to wear a crop top to family gatherings where your grandpa will be around, what will they think? 

Nothing seems to be triggering the religious trauma of modesty culture like the crop top. I think because it is the ubiquitous style among young people at this fashion moment, our kids want to wear crop tops and we don’t know how to feel about it. 

The vibe I am getting from parents who are parenting after modesty culture is that, we don’t ascribe to modesty culture, we don’t want to police our children’s clothing, but we still feel uncomfortable…somehow. 

I want to suggest that deconstructing modesty culture is simply hard. Like so many other areas of unlearning, it’s peeling back layers like an onion, we think we’ve shed an entire shell but there’s just another layer underneath. We worry that if our girls are out in the world baring their midriffs that it somehow increases the chances of sexual assault. This enduring cultural myth that the behavior and dress of a rape victim provokes the assault is all that it is, a myth. Sexual assault happens because of the choices of the rapist, not because of what the victim is wearing. We can know this with our rational brains, but our fears reside in a different area of our brain and it sometimes takes the wheel. To demand our girls cover up, change into a different top, is after all, a fairly easy thing to do. Parenting is hard enough, if there’s something easy to keep our children safe, we’d do it. 

There’s also the element of “what will the grandparents think?” Will my parenting be judged by the attire of my children? This extends to other, more seemingly benign concerns we have about crop tops, is it appropriate for this context? Is it appropriate to wear crop tops to school, to church, to the grandparents for lunch? I think these are legitimate concerns and we have parental responsibilities to help our kids navigate this. But again, I think sometimes we mask our deeply embedded modesty culture with these more palatable concerns. We say we want our kids to be socially appropriate when at the root we are still reenacting the cycle of oppression. We had to cover up so surely our kids can’t be walking around with all that freedom. 

But what if they can? What if the anxieties we have about how the world responds to their dress is not the world’s, but our own? What if the way we were treated when we were girls is not the way our girls are treated in this generation? What if the risk of them getting punished by the world is much lower than the risk of us punishing them before they go out into the world? 

We have to remember that our kids are not our precious little robots that we can control and keep safe. They are human, capable of experiencing pain and rejection and learning from their mistakes. We can recommend that they don’t wear crop tops to formal occasions, but it probably will only take one time that they do so for them to discover themselves that they might not want to do it again. We can suggest that they might get sunburned if they expose their skin, but their own bodies feel heat and pain.

If we neglect to warn them of all the consequences of wearing a crop top, they might experience some social rejection, some body shaming comments from boomers who they shouldn’t care about anyway, or they might get a little burnt from exposure to the elements. That is a risk.

However, if we police the way they dress the consequences are far greater. We rob them of the freedom and space to develop their personal expression and style. And this is about so much more than fashion–it’s about trusting their own instincts, developing their relationship with their peers and colleagues and their wider social circles. It empowers them to know who they are, who they want to be, and how they want to move about in life.

I commented in my FB group, Raising Children Unfundamentalist, that one day the crop top trend will likely fade, and the kids will look back at their photos of crop tops and “cringe” at their dated style. And shouldn’t they get to participate in this kind of collective nostalgia and shared fashion history? They deserve the freedom to make mishaps, to learn and grow and laugh at their own choices. 

When we tell our girls to hide their midriff, we’re inadvertently asking them to hide so much more than those inches of skin. We’re asking them to erase a part of themselves during formative years where the personhood that they can potentially cultivate will be lost. And speaking from experience, the years and labor it takes to recover that sense of self is a formidable cost indeed. 

I think it’s clear that my opinion on the crop top is heavily biased towards: let them wear it. I’ll end with perhaps not my most powerful argument: They are super cute. 

I had to pause the show at that point, overcome with emotion. It’s just very sweet, isn’t it? I’ve never been able to watch a birth scene on TV/movies and I’ve been fortunate enough to witness some in real life as well, without being deeply moved. A baby’s arrival can herald so much hope and redemption; a chance to break toxic cycles, a being to expand our love, a person for whom we fight for a better world. 

But I thought back to when I had my babies and I did not have that “there you are” experience. I had my babies young, got pregnant on the first tries with my fertile eggs, and my inexperience in life led to more trepidation than excitement upon meeting my kids. It was wonderful, don’t get me wrong, but it was not a starstruck, lights shone from heaven, “there you are” moment. 

I started searching my memory bank for whether I’ve ever had a moment like that. My romance with my husband is a beautiful one, a best friend turned lover journey, but again, not love at first sight. I’ve lived in many places in the world and although I’ve fallen in love with many places, there’s not one that stands out to me as wow, this is it. I remember holding the first book I published in my hands, and if I remember correctly, my kids were more excited about it than I was! 

Where is my “there you are” moment? I’m so inspired by the people who report their experience of it. Is it just that I’m not wired to be starstruck? Come to think of it, I have crossed paths with some stars and not ever been starstruck. Or perhaps that moment is still to come. I don’t feel like I’m looking for anything in particular, so perhaps that thing will find me and I’ll be like, oh, “there you are.” Could it be at my deathbed?! Morbid, but also potentially beautiful? What if death is more beautiful than I imagined it would be? 

Anyway, I’m kind of obsessed with this. I want to glean stories from other people and hear their experiences of that moment. I find it fascinating. But I think what makes it profound is that it cannot be manufactured. So as much as I might desire to have my moment, I know forging the circumstances for it would be counterproductive, it would diminish its power. 

In other words, I would rather never have my moment than to try to make it happen. I’ve lived enough years and have a firm enough grasp of the finitude of my life to know that I can’t have it all. I can’t live everything. But the magic of our human imagination and empathy is that I can live vicariously. 

So if and until my “there you are” moment comes, I’m perfectly content enjoying other’s accounting of their moment.

I do have a few concerns: because the Gen Z’s grew up with social media, I worry it is harder for them to recognize the polarization that corrals people into echo chambers. I love that it’s easier than ever to find people with your niche interests but harder to connect with those beyond your niche. I am also a bit alarmed at the way Gen Z’s spend money. They account for the biggest growth in luxury spending, splurging on expensive items at younger and younger ages. I just want to sit them all down and show them a graph of compounding interest. Each dollar they’re spending is robbing their future selves of multiple x that dollar. 

I know some of these generational stereotypes are just that–we are unique snowflakes who don’t need to involve ourselves in generational wars. But it is still fascinating to me to see the ways our historical and cultural contexts shape our psyche and let’s face it, the memes that hark back to nostalgic items and music for our generations are fun. 

In the end, we are all human. I’m a big proponent of intergenerational living, where our relationships are not confined by age groups. As a parent, I certainly hope to become friends with my Gen Z children as they come into adulthood, and not let little things like weird music come between us. I think we should fight against ageism and strive for a world where we don’t condescend young people nor do we erase the existence of older folks. 

But there remains one generation gap that I can’t figure out how we can bridge: our perception of time. I remember when I was young, in high school and college, where each year stretched before me, and graduation felt like the end of a long journey. Now, as parents of college aged kids? Four years feels like a blip. It makes sense, as we age, the years that pass become a smaller and smaller percentage of our lifespan, so they feel shorter and faster even if we all get the same 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. 

Our perception of time impacts the way we live our lives. When you’re young, you at once feel like you have all the time in the world to explore and experiment, and yet make decisions with a sense of urgency as if there’s no time at all to wait. The character Rue Bennett in Euphoria says, “When you’re younger, everything feels so permanent.” As we age, we feel as though time is starting to run out and yet we’re willing to hold out for the things or people that we know matter to us. These organic human sentiments are all well and good, there’s a time and a season for every kind of perception of time and how we live. But when we have to engage with people of different ages, parent them, work with them, marry them, start families with them, it can present challenges. The three year old who wants this RIGHT NOW has to be told, not yet. The older person who is still trying to save money refuses to go on the family vacation their children want to splurge on. This is the Generation Gap that I feel requires the most negotiation, as our differences in perception of time creates conflicts of interest. 

I don’t have a solution except a reminder, that we can remember how we view time differently. And perhaps that understanding will lead us to live with people of all ages with an additional dose of empathy.