Over the weekend I hosted three of Tess’s camp friends and their moms for the day. We had such a great day. Toward the end, we decided to bike to the beach as the last activity before everyone had to leave.

We somehow had enough bikes/scooters for everyone. Helmets were on. Miraculously everyone found something that fit them (including Nell and one of the younger sisters also visiting). We were ready to go. And then, as the girls started riding, Tess got upset about something with her bike. The handlebars weren’t straight. The tires needed air.

Maybe it was because she knew it was time to say goodbye, or because it had already been a long day, or because I was preoccupied literally hosting everyone and safely guide a bunch of kids on bikes and scooters (and walk the moms) to the beach. Or maybe the bike was just really annoying TF out of her because she wasn’t even using her usual one - she had graciously given that one to a camp friend. But whatever it was, she got stuck in frustration. Like, leave the bike on the sidewalk and storm back toward the house stuck. Once I saw that she was separating herself from her friends and seemingly unable to move past it, I told Matt to go after her because I had my hands full with everyone else.

Her friends wanted to wait for her, so we waited. Eventually, we saw her coming back toward us. Then she saw us and turned around again. She tried to come back another time. And then she couldn’t. And somewhere in watching her make these attempts to re-enter the group and then retreat again, I could feel something happening inside of me that was much bigger than my reaction to my 8 year old being upset about a bike.

A quick note before I keep going: the rest of this gets more personal and I’m trying to be more thoughtful about where and how I share our stories.

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Maybe it’s because Lindsay Clancy’s journals have been everywhere but recently I can’t stop thinking about how much we expect mothers to figure out. Not only to know what our children need but to know what we need. To somehow have the answers while we’re still figuring out who we are, what makes us feel like ourselves (or our new selves) and, honestly to know what makes us happy.

During Lindsay Clancy’s trial, entries from her journals and notes have been read aloud in court. I’ve posted about one her entries specifically that I couldn’t stop thinking about (post is here) but there was another part of her journal that I keep coming back to when she wrote:

“I’m on the fence about starting a new medication for anxiety/depression. I just want to feel happy. I want to be able to relax and take care of my kids.”

Like, isn’t this just so profoundly human? And kind of so simple sounding but also so impossible sounding at the same time? to want to feel happy. to want to be able to relax and take care of our kids?

I didn’t really question my mind until after becoming a mother and realizing how much I needed and wanted to understand more about how I thought, why I thought the way I did, and how important that was to me to understand, especially as I was raising two other humans.

But I want to say this before I go any further because I mention a lot of different sensitive/controversial (not sure the right word) things here so it’s important that I say this up front. I am not comparing myself to Lindsay Clancy. I am not comparing my mental health to hers. and I am definitely not suggesting that a different medication, no medication, therapy, psychedelics, or any other intervention would have changed what happened to her or her children. I have absolutely no idea.

What I keep coming back to is: what it feels like to be inside your own mind trying to figure out what your mind needs while raising children.

Questions like:

“What will make me feel better?

What will allow me to function?

What will make me feel like myself?”

And maybe the hardest one for me:

Who even is myself?

This is where this gets very personal for me.

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I was a kid with a lot of feelings.

I was labeled shy and sensitive. I was the middle of three girls and grew up in what, from the outside and in many ways from the inside, looked like a pretty picture-perfect childhood. I had loving, warm, generous parents who wanted more than anything for their children to feel happy, secure, smart, beautiful, loved.

And I was. But one of the things I’ve become fascinated by as an adult, and especially as a parent, is the realization that being deeply loved and being prepared for the discomfort of being human aren’t necessarily the same thing.

There was a lot of protecting the sensitive middle child from feeling anything other than okay. And I mean this with tremendous love for my parents: I don’t know that it always prepared me for life on life’s terms. Disappointment. Rejection. Uncertainty. Not being the best.

And my struggle with dealing with a lot of people pleasing tendencies seemed to feel the hardest. Someone being upset with me. Someone I love struggling and my not being able to fix it. Being overly concerned with others and their perception of me.

It has taken me a long time to understand that feeling whole isn’t something another person, even an incredibly loving parent, can create for you. We eventually have to learn how to create that inside ourselves. And when I became a parent, one of the questions that began consuming me was:

How do we help our children do that?

How do I love my children ferociously without making it my job to remove every uncomfortable feeling from their lives? How do I give them security without convincing them they need certainty? How do I let them struggle without making their struggle mean I’ve failed them? How do I raise resilient children when I am still discovering the places where I struggle to be resilient myself?

It turns out I had been interested in these questions long before I had children.

I fell hard for psychology in college, particularly the question of how our earliest experiences shape who we become. I went on to get my Master’s in Psychology and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, and originally thought I would pursue a PhD. Instead, in the middle of what I can now recognize as a quarter-life crisis I was forced to step out of my life. (this will be it’s own substack post because it’s A LOT) but… the TLDR is that on the other side of that crisis I found a job on Craigslist teaching English to Mandarin-speaking toddlers in Chinatown.

And that changed everything.

I spent eight hours a day with children between 18 and 24 months old, many of whom didn’t share a spoken language with me. We still understood one another. We still created the most special relationships. Through play. Care. Observation. Connection. I became obsessed with how much children were communicating before they had the words to tell us any of it.

I stayed at that school for eight years, eventually overseeing educators and classrooms of infants and toddlers. I taught early childhood education at the college level. Later, I helped build another early childhood center from the ground up.

And along the way, I discovered RIE^® and the Educaring Approach. It changed the way I saw children. Actually, it changed the way I saw people.

The idea that even the youngest child deserves to be treated as a whole person. That behavior is communication. That our job isn’t to constantly distract children from discomfort or fix everything for them. That observation can sometimes tell us more than intervention.

I couldn’t get enough. And then, after spending years helping other people understand their children, I had a daughter of my own.

And I still had no idea what I was doing.

Getting there hadn’t been easy. There were IUIs, medicated cycles, a hysteroscopy, a failed embryo transfer and eventually, in the spring of 2017, a second frozen embryo transfer that worked.

During my pregnancy I started an Instagram account. It was called Mo Mommies. The tagline was actually Mo Mommies, Less Problems (I’m mortified saying that but it’s true)! I knew how much more we could be if we mothered together.

At the time, social media still felt largely like a collection of beautiful pictures and aspirational lives. I wanted somewhere I could talk honestly about what it actually looked and felt like to become a mother while also sharing everything I had learned from years of working with very young children.

My first post was a picture of my pregnant stomach covered in bruises from the hormone and blood thinner injections sustaining my pregnancy.

Which, in retrospect, was my coming out. In a million different ways. It was like the start of my healing. Of my still needing to be seen externally, but the start of me being ok being seen for the actual, real me.

Then I had my first child, my daughter, Tess Monness.

Despite all of my education, all of my experience with babies, all of the families I had worked with, I was completely unprepared for the discrepancy between what I thought motherhood would feel like and what it actually felt like.

So I talked about it. Like, a lot.

I talked about the rawness of new motherhood. The blowout diapers. The fights with our husbands. The things we were ashamed to admit. The things nobody had warned us about.

And people started talking back. That’s the part of this story that matters most. The DMs. The connections. The me toos. The magic of telling the truth about an experience and having someone else say, Wait. You too?

What started as an Instagram account began to feel like one enormous mom group. A lot of people have asked me how I can have such respect for children and be sharing my own - and this is why (also a topic for another substack post on the journey of sharing my kids on social media and where I am now, and where I am headed)

Eventually, I started actual mom groups in real life and one of the moms in one of my RIE parent-infant groups asked me to come see a play space her company had opened on East 18th Street. I walked into that building in June 2018 thinking we were going to talk about my hosting some classes there. Instead, one of the owners asked me what my dream was (something I have since asked other people who have walked into my life for help with their careers because honestly that’s where it all comes from!)

I went home that night and wrote them down.

I wanted a physical home for young children and the people raising them. A place where we could bring the online community I had watched form into real life. A place where parents and caregivers didn’t have to do this alone.

That dream became Union Square Play.

And over the years, as Union Square Play grew and my online community grew with it, something never really changed: I still wanted the conversation. I still wanted the DMs. I still wanted to know what happened after someone tried something differently with their child. I wanted to hear about the fight with their husband and the thing their mother-in-law said and the moment their five-year-old completely leveled them with a single sentence. I wanted to talk about the things that didn’t have neat answers.

It’s what inspired my podcast, We Didn’t Turn Out Ok… And increasingly, those are the things I want to write more about.

Which is why I’m here.

There is so much out there telling us how to live. How to parent. How not to parent. What our parents did wrong. What we’re doing wrong. What our children need. What our triggers mean. What we need to heal. What we need to implement.

What we should absolutely never say to our children lest we ruin them forever.

It’s exhausting. I’ve spent more than twenty years working with children and families. I’ve studied child development and psychology. I’ve built parenting programs and communities. I’ve spent years thinking about how our earliest relationships shape us. And then I became a mother and realized how much I still didn’t know!

More recently, I realized something even bigger:

I didn’t fully understand how much of the way I parent, love, work, react, control, protect, worry and relate to other people is connected to my own story.

The last year and a half has cracked that open for me in ways I could never have anticipated.

That’s a story for another post. But it’s a big part of why I’m here. I’ve found myself wanting more and more space for the conversations that don’t fit neatly into an Instagram post. The stories I’m not completely sure what to make of yet. The moments when I catch myself reacting and think, Whoa. Where did THAT come from?The parenting moments where the advice isn’t do this but maybe look at this differently. The things you tell me that make me wish I could sit next to you and say, Okay. Start from the beginning.

I don’t want this to be another place telling you exactly how to raise your children or exactly how to heal yourself. I want it to be a place where we get even more curious. Because sometimes the thing we think we’re reacting to isn’t actually the thing we’re reacting to at all.

And when that happens?

Well.

There’s probably so much to unpack here.

“It’s not an emergency.”

“Let’s start from the beginning.”

“Two things can be true.”

And then about a year ago another one starting slipping in there:

“There’s so much to unpack here.”

I remember the first time I said the phrase. It was an ah ha moment but I didn’t know why. As a Generator in Human Design, I now know that the feeling I got was my body telling me that this phrase was meant for me somehow.

I’d heard it before, obviously, but in this particular moment it came out of my mouth almost reflexively.

I was with a group of friends when one of them showed me a message she’d gotten. It was one of those messages where the words themselves were almost beside the point. There was hurt underneath it. Maybe some resentment. A friendship dynamic. Expectations that clearly hadn’t been communicated. Probably several different versions of what had happened depending on who was telling the story.

I read it, looked at my friend and said, “There is so much to unpack here.”

And there really was.

Not because the person who sent it was wrong for feeling hurt. But because there was so much underneath the way that hurt was being expressed. I felt for my friend receiving the text. But I also felt for the person sending it.

Because underneath what sounded like anger was something else entirely. Hurt. Not feeling included. Maybe not feeling enough. Wanting the validation of an invitation so badly that her daughter’s playdate had somehow become leverage in making someone else feel guilty.

There was so much I wanted to say but instead, what came out was:

“There’s so much to unpack here.”

And almost immediately afterward, I texted my branding guy and asked him to make me something with those words on it. An image of it.

I didn’t know exactly what I was going to do with it yet.

Then I started to use it more. At first I mostly said it jokingly to close friends (or honestly, to myself). Usually after one of those moments where everyone seemed convinced the story was about one thing and I knew it was actually about something else. Or it came after a situation that didn’t have simple explanations or was too complicated to reduce to “who was right” and “who was wrong.”

It became my way of saying “Hmmmm, I think there’s something else going on here.”

Then I started thinking it all the time.

I am just endlessly interested in what is happening underneath what is happening.

Like the way I react after something one of my girls does and my internal reaction catches me completely off guard. The feeling that comes up in my body when a certain person’s name appears on my phone or a comment someone leaves on Instagram. Sometimes it’s a seemingly inconsequential interaction between a parent and child that makes me want to reach through my phone and say, Wait. Can we talk about what might actually be happening here?

And using a recent example, sometimes it was the panic I would feel when I couldn’t find Tess in any sleepaway camp photos on the camp app, as if I’m stalking an ex boyfriend and somehow convincing myself that if I could just find one picture of her, I’d finally relax.

and sometimes in those moments I can see my reaction…

And I catch myself.

Wait.

That wasn’t about that.

That was about something else…

Those are the conversations I want to have here. The conversations that can’t be reduced to a quick takeaway or an IG caption.

For years my work has been helping parents understand their children….

I’ve always seen myself as a “child advocate.”

But more recently I see that almost every parenting conversation and challenge eventually becomes a conversation about us.

The stories we tell ourselves, our nervous systems, our upbringing….

I stopped looking for the perfect answers and started asking better questions.

I started to unpack.

Questions like

“Why did I have such a visceral reaction?

What am I actually reacting to?

Why did I feel that so deeply?

Why did it feel familiar?

I started noticing it everywhere.

I’d spend hours writing an Instagram caption and realize what I actually wanted to say wouldn’t fit.

I’d record a podcast episode and leave wanting another hour because I felt like we’d only scratched the surface.

I’d answer one DM or comment and see that there were twenty more questions underneath it.

The more I paid attention, the more I realized I wasn’t craving another platform or endeavor, I was really craving more space.

I needed somewhere ideas didn’t have to end just because the caption limit did.

So that’s what I hope this space can be. Take those conversations that start on Instagram and finally have the rest of them. If you’ve ever read one of my captions and thought “wait tell me more,” this is where I’ll do that.

Some weeks we’ll talk about children.

Some weeks we’ll talk about us.

Most weeks we’ll realize they were never really separate conversations.

And almost all of them will end up asking the same question:

What’s really going on here?

This feels like the place where I finally get to finish my thoughts.

I’m so happy you’re here. Now let’s unpack together!