Hi friends,

I’m writing this from urgent care with one of my kids, which — shocker — was not what I had planned for today. Tomorrow I’m supposed to leave for a girls’ weekend in the mountains, one of my favorite weekends of the year. This is the constant choreography of adulthood: tending to what’s in front of us and still making room for what keeps us human. It’s a dance and there’s nothing wrong with you if you feel a constant sense of missing a step.

The holidays are here with all of their pressure to make it meaningful, and also fun, and also restful, and also budget-friendly, and also deeply connecting. You tired yet?
I love the beauty of this season and also, I almost always end up incredibly depleted by the time Christmas Day arrives. I’m ready to try something new this year; I don’t want to feel like a failure at all of it because I couldn’t manage every piece of it.

That’s what I’m working on for myself and for this community this year: not pretending we don’t care, and not pushing past what’s human, but learning how to meet the season with honesty, warmth, and enoughness.

Here’s what’s inside this week’s issue of The Noticing:

• Connections — Parenting Didn’t Go as Planned (Part Five)

• Affiliate Finds — Capacity-Honoring Holiday Edition

• Sunday Garden Round-Up — The slow shift into early November

• If This Resonated — Questions that I hope might be helpful

• Recommendations are on holiday

Connections

This is Part Five of my Parenting Didn’t Go as Planned series, and if you’ve been here since Part One, you know this story isn’t neat. You can read the last four newsletters by clicking on the section of my blog that says The Noticing. We’ve moved from control → grief → rupture → repair; today’s piece is about what happens next and the slow, ongoing, deeply human work of growing up alongside our children, of becoming a safe place for them while also learning how to become one for ourselves. Writing this series has been tender and vulnerable for me and I hope that it has landed where it needed to. Today’s essay is no different.

There have been seasons when motherhood has felt deeply claustrophobic to me. I love my children with every ounce of who I am, and still there are moments when I am struck by the reality that I will always be their mother. I cannot escape it. There is no clocking out or handing the role to someone else. We are tied together by something invisible and lasting, something rooted not only in memory or affection, but in nervous system wiring and the way our bodies learn to recognize safety. I could run away and join a circus in another country and the connection would still be there, some part of me living inside of them, and some part of them living inside of me. It fills me with both joy and terror.

Kelly Corrigan writes, “I am your mother, the first mile of your road…and mothering you is the first thing of consequence that I have ever done.”1 I think about that often. Parenting is a thing of consequence. The work is not simply loving our children or wanting good things for them; it is learning how to become someone their bodies can experience as safe. Attachment isn’t formed through good intentions. It is formed through presence, repair, and the quiet, everyday ways we show ourselves to be steady and available and human.

A bedtime conversation with Cora a few months ago brought this into sharp focus. She couldn’t fall asleep and I could feel, before she said anything, that something was stirring in her. I prompted her, even though I desperately wanted my shift to be over for the day. She said she didn’t want to tell me, that she was afraid it would make me sad. Eventually she told me she was thinking about how old she will be when I die. She had done the math, she was eight, I was 38 when she was born, and she realized she may not be “very old” when she loses me. It is difficult to find words to express how I felt in that moment there in the dark with her: the sadness, the guilt, the immediate compulsion to shut down. No, no, no. I don’t want to think about this! I felt a familiar instinct to dismiss, to say, “No, baby, don’t worry about that,” or “We have so much time.”

But I could feel that what she needed was not dismissal of the fear, but companionship inside it. I desire to be a safe place for their emotions, even the ones that make me feel uncomfortable. So I told her I understood. I told her I have felt that same fear about my own mother, her Gigi. I told her I hope and pray for a long life together, and that I will take care of my body as best I can. I held her while we sat in the sadness together, wishing—as mothers do—that I could protect her from the inevitability of loss, while also knowing that I can’t.

The hard work is going to be such hard work.

This is the part of parenting that no one prepares us for: how our children’s feelings awaken our own. How quickly we want to fix or manage or redirect their discomfort because we don’t quite know what to do with our own. How the patterns we learned long before we ever became parents begin to surface in the heat of everyday life. How their anger or their disrespect or their disobedience awakens something deep within us. I used to think parenting was primarily about shaping my children; now I understand that parenting is also, inevitably, about being shaped by them. Their nervous systems speak to mine. My old stories respond before I am even consciously aware.

I think this is why, in order to do this well, or even just honestly, we have to be willing to do our own work. You can’t send your kid to counseling and hope someone else can just fix them.2 Parts of you will be unearthed by your responses to your children that you never expected; this work is not done in a self-improvement, “be better” way, but in a slow, gentle, deeply-human way that asks: What is happening in me when my child is overwhelmed? What am I reacting to? What part of me is being activated or remembered or reopened? It is unfair to expect our children to regulate emotions that we cannot tolerate in ourselves. And it is unfair to expect our children to shape themselves around our unprocessed pain.

Almost none of us were raised by parents who had engaged their own stories. This doesn’t mean we had bad parents. It means our parents were human, too. Most of us were raised by people who didn’t have the language or support for this kind of work. Some of them truly tried their best with what they had. And some of them were carrying so much of their own unhealed harm, illness, or overwhelm that they simply couldn’t give us what we needed. The work we’re doing now is tender and slow and ongoing. It requires patience, repair, and more compassion than many of us were ever taught to offer ourselves.

And this is where I want to close this series, not with a conclusion, because there isn’t one, but with a kind of acknowledgement. This is not work that resolves. There is no finish line. Parenting is a lifelong relationship, not a project. The goal has never been to do it perfectly or to avoid mistakes, but to stay present to our children and to ourselves with as much honesty and gentleness as we can manage.

This is officially the end of the parenting series I’ve been writing here, but it is not the end of these conversations. This is the work I return to over and over again—in my writing, in my mothering, in the ways I accompany other women in their stories. The themes of attachment, repair, nervous system tenderness, and growing up alongside our children are woven into everything I do. So while this is the final “Part” in the formal sense, it is not a goodbye to this subject. It is simply a pause, a breath, and an acknowledgment that we are still learning.

And we will keep learning. Together.

Affiliate Finds: Capacity-Honoring Holidays Edition

Before we get into links, I want to say this out loud: what makes a home feel like the holidays is different for everyone. For some people, it’s baking cookies with their kids and doing all the seasonal crafts and hosting the neighborhood gathering. For others, it’s a single candle lit at 5pm, classical music on, and a quiet house where everyone is home and safe. For some, it’s pulling out eight bins of decor. For others, it’s one wreath and a bowl of grocery store clementines on the counter. There is not a prescription for the correct way to have a capacity-honoring holiday season.

For me, a holiday home feels like:

• cozy (blankets, warm light)

• smell (a candle or simmer pot, nothing fancy)

• a little color (pinks, rainbows)

• our advent candle wreath lit slowly and quietly

• Christmas cards displayed because those faces matter to me

What doesn’t feel like holiday magic to me?

• Baking 14 things (I’m simply not built for that)

• Elaborate tablescapes

• Filling every surface with decor I have to put away later

• Constant events

I love beauty. I love meaning. But I know that too much stuff or too many steps tips me into overwhelm fast.
So this year, I’m thinking in pairs:

✨ What’s one thing I want to add because it genuinely brings me joy?
🍂 What’s one thing I can let go of because it stresses me out or drains my capacity?

And those answers will look different for all of us.

So these are not holiday must-haves.
They are simply a few gentle things that help my home feel warm and lived-in and soft around the edges. Take what feels good. Leave what doesn’t.

• Electric Tea Kettle: This makes it easy to make hot chocolate or tea on a chilly afternoon. A warm drink immediately tells your body that it can settle.

• Electric Blanket / Heated Throw: The best way to feel cozy when it’s dark at 4:30pm. This one is on major sale right now.

• Four (or Five) Candle Advent Holder: You don’t have to overthink this. We like to do a reading and light one candle each Sunday of Advent. You could also do a really simple one like this and put greenery around it.

• Advent Candle Set: Soft colors or the traditional purple/rose. I have done both.

• Flickering Battery-Operated Candles: For when you want ambiance but do not want fire safety stress or melted wax everywhere. (Especially good for bedrooms and bookshelves.)

• Felt Wool Garland: I have tried to be a neutral decorator but I am always drawn back to color. I bought similar ones to these years ago and put them on my tree every year! You could also do more traditional colors that are still cute and fun.

• Doormat: I love focusing on my porch and entryway and this colorful combo is fun.

• Seasonal Throw Pillows / Pillow Covers: Easiest way to shift the vibe without buying or storing more than necessary. (Covers > whole pillows.) Pink and mint green? Traditional color scheme?

Recommendations

None this week; I haven’t had the bandwidth to read or watch much of anything. I can’t wait to be able to recommend things to you again soon. (I did watch the first few episodes of Nobody Wants This while editing last week and it was cute. I actually really liked the Dr. Andy/Morgan story line.)

Sunday Garden Round-Up

This is one of the ways I pay attention. Simple phone photos, the moments that made me pause in my every day life. I’m always looking for the way the light hits or a shade of a color that I haven’t noticed before. It is a sacred practice for me.

If This Resonated…

• When your child (or anyone you love) is overwhelmed, what rises in you first—anger, fear, panic, shutdown? What might that reaction be trying to protect in you?

• How do you respond when your child is disrespectful or angry toward you? What story does your body tell you in that moment: I’m being rejected? I’m losing control? I’m failing? Where did that story begin?

• What did you learn growing up about how to handle big feelings—yours or someone else’s? How is that story still shaping you now?

• What is one tiny act of repair you could offer today—to your child or to yourself? (A softened tone, a slower breath, circling back to say: “Hey, that was hard. I’m here.”)

A gentle invitation:
If this work is stirring something in you, or if you’re realizing there are places in your story that want tending, I walk with women through exactly this kind of slow, embodied, compassionate story work.

There’s no fixing. No formulas. Just room to tell the truth about your story and begin to understand the why beneath the why.

Okay friends, I am officially off to get ready for my college girls’ weekend, which currently looks like: writing down everyone’s schedules and sending it to the adults helping to hold down the fort, making sure we have enough cat food in the bin and Lunchables in the fridge, and repeating to my anxious self on loop: But what if it all works out?

I’m deeply glad you’re here.
Take a breath. Be gentle. I’ll try to do the same.

Love,
Erin

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