Parenting Grief Provisions
A little something for the road.
You look over and see a little station beside a long road.
There's water on the table, something to eat, and a stack of cool rags just long enough for the back and sides of somebody’s neck. You can hear that the person at the station is talking about grief, so you lean in a little closer.
Then you make out a word: parenting.
Maybe you are parenting a young child or caring for an aging parent.
Your child may be grown and building a life you no longer get a vote in, while you are still sorting through how you were parented.
Then the person at the station says that parenting grief is what we carry as parents and what we carry from being parented.
Well, damn.
Even if you never parent anyone, you have lived inside a parent-child relationship. So you lean your body closer again.
That little station is mine.
I am preparing for a two-hour live Parenting Grief seminar in November. It is for people who are parenting now and adults making sense of how they were parented. There will be no recording, and I am limiting the room to 25 people, because that's the number I feel I can safely hold/support/sit right next to.
I shared my intentions around the seminar with my Make It Happen family first, and 11 seats have already been claimed. Before I invite more people into it, I want to slow-walk toward it with folks who are interested in what I am noticing about parenting and grief.
I had been planning to write three essays about the link between parenting, conflict, and untended grief (something in those realms, anyway). But the more I sit with the people I am writing for, the more those essays started feeling like an invitation to another marathon.
You already have a marathon going (life, to-do's, to-tends). I do not want to stand beside the road waving a 2000-word essay at you. I want to meet you at this little station with something that can support you without asking you to follow my many wordie-words. This time, anyway.
Parenting Grief Provisions will work like this:
Every other day, I will send one small piece of language connected to what we carry as parents and what we carry from being parented. Each Provision will be no more than three sentences. There will be twenty altogether.
The Provisions begin September 10 and continue through October 18. If you arrive after we’ve started, you’ll receive the next Provision by email and can visit the Provision Station (linked to each post I send you) to gather the ones you missed.
This is not a support blanket. It's the cool rag for the back of your neck. A little provision for wherever you are when it reaches you.
If this speaks to something you are living with, come get your provisions, fam.
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