I have just one question
Stories of parenthood outside of the bookstore parenting section
Welcome to a new feature on A Wonderful Mess—Just One Question. This series will run every other month and feature a different question given to a group of thinkers, writers, podcasters, content creators, readers, and professionals. The questions and respondents will change every time. If you are interested in being considered for a future round, send me a note.
Hey writers! There will be opportunities for guest posts on A Wonderful Mess in the coming months. You can find more information here.
Something new
Months ago I was wanting to create a new series. I imagined sitting around a table with others with a cup of coffee and talking about things, all kinds of things. Most likely things we don’t always get to in our daily conversations. And this idea popped into my head: wouldn’t it be fun to ask a group of great writers, thinkers, professionals, content makers, researchers, and all kinds of people, a juicy question, just one though, and see where it goes? Maybe we could talk about parenthood outside of lists, dos and don’ts, and advice. The question wouldn’t need to move mountains, just move our focus just a hair. That little change just might be something interesting. I emailed some lovely people with this pitch about why they should consider contributing:
By featuring different types of questions, voices, and real life, we rally against the “one right way” fallacy of parenthood, which happens to be a personal pet peeve of mine. And I don’t think I am alone in that. There are many ways to disrupt unhelpful narratives and this is the way I know best. I am a trained therapist at heart and asking questions is something I have some experience in doing. Interesting questions can tell beautiful, messy, and imperfect stories. Plus, no one wants to hear about me all the time. I am just not that interesting.
There were some other logistics and such, but you get the drift.
The question
The question for this round was inspired by my summer connection with the Quimby family, the beloved characters of author Beverly Cleary. I wrote about how our summer soundtrack brought an unexpected perspective on parenthood. There are many less-acknowledged parenting influences out there and I was curious to hear from others about what writing they have connected with about parenthood.
Outside of the bookstore parenting section, some stories connect in unexpected ways to the threads of parenthood. Stories that touch on the wisdom, delight, humor, grief, sadness and so much more within a parenting journey. If you were to pick a non-parenting book or story that has been influential or meaningful in your parenthood, what would it be and why?
Gentle encouragement was given to the respondents that included leaning towards other types of wisdom outside of traditional parenting expertise and that it is unlikely to have one book that captures it all so finding a thread to focus on could help with their answer. I thoroughly appreciated that everyone reported they needed to think about it a little, that is my measuring stick for a good juicy question.
The answers
Not knowing what the first round would be like was certainly part of the fun. I am so pleased to share these thoughtful answers from
, , , , and . I am so grateful they were willing to answer just one question.“Far messier than we imagine”
“In my experience of parenting my two sons, I've often suffered from an intense desire to Get It Right. When they were small it was sleep schedules, both for their brain development and my sanity. Now that they're teens I find myself reaching for precise words on self-care and reasonable decision making (the giving of advice to teenagers is, in a word, fraught). None of this should be surprising to me–though I often refuse to admit it, I'm a perfectionist.
To care about my mothering is wise and appropriate, for the job is consequential and intimate. But there's no possibility of doing it perfectly, and paradoxically, doing it well often looks far messier than we'd imagine. Parenting, like all relationships, is an endless cycle of rupture and repair–sometimes weekly, sometimes hourly.
I've always loved picture books (after all, I'm an elementary school librarian), and Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day* has been a constant in our household. It reminds me that family life is complicated and beautiful, full of joys and misunderstandings. Alexander wants to move to Australia, convinced that it's the solution to all his problems, including his pesky brothers, cavities, and being saddled with boring white tennis shoes instead of the ones he really wanted. There's no fix for his day. My husband, my sons, me: we all understand Alexander. We are all misunderstood and seen, fortunate and unlucky, full of emotion and thoughts and thwarted desire. We're all human.
And we know that after a tough day, there are times where all we can do is lie down at night and try again tomorrow. For, as Alexander's mom puts it, "Some days are like that. Even in Australia."
Julie Chavez is the author of the USA Today bestselling memoir Everyone But Myself. Her writing has been featured in Real Simple magazine, the New York Post, and Zibby Mag. Julie has spent the last eight years as an elementary school librarian, and she lives in Northern California with her husband and two tall teenage sons. At home, she prefers to organize her books by color.
Follow Julie on Instagram, learn more about her memoir, or visit her website here.
“Both seemingly opposing forces matter”
“This poem holds a grounding paradox I feel in my life as a father with two young children.
"Sometimes a man stands up during supper and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking, because of a church that stands somewhere in the East. And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead. And another man, who remains inside his own house, dies there, inside the dishes and in the glasses, so that his children have to go far out into the world toward that same church, which he forgot." – Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by Robert Bly)
The paradox for me is this...
I am bound to my family and the day to day physical needs of ushering to and from school, breaking up fights, washing dishes, requesting toy dinosaurs be picked up off the floor, and taking out the trash. I am also called by a soulful force to be in and of the wider world, to make my ever so gentle mark on the wave of compassion needed across the globe by sharing my voice and creative projects.
If I only lived in the day to day at home world, I would give up something I might call "my purpose for being alive at this time." If I only lived in that wider world, I would lose my heart's connection to my family. Both seemingly opposing forces matter. And rather than pull me apart, how might I let them each play a part in my expansion as a more fully integrated human being?”
Husband, father, integral coach and author of short, illustrated, heart-opening men's fiction for book clubs, men's groups, dad groups, and male studies courses. #menswork #husbandswork #dadswork
https://matthewsloane.com/hiding-inside-a-man/ (book)
https://fatherhood-dojo.com/ (blog)
“Greater than the sum of its parts”
“What a great question! I could go in so many directions about books that have influenced my parenting, but here's where I landed: I write about working parenthood from a perspective that merges science and Eastern philosophy. The basic way that I think about it is that traditional Western thinking views conflict between opposing forces as a problem to be solved. When we feel tension between work and parenting, it's a zero sum game with a winner and a loser. But, according to Taoist thinking, opposing forces, like yin and yang, can be seen as helping to hold one another in balance, to nurture each other, and to create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. My first introduction to some of these concepts was in the delightful book, The Tao of Pooh* by Benjamin Hoff. It's the sweetest, funniest, most life affirming book, but also will shift your worldview in ways that are not only helpful, but consistent with a lot of laboratory science. Plus, it's one that you can share with your children!”
Yael Schonbrun is a clinical psychologist, professor at Brown University, author of Work, Parent, Thrive: 12 Science-Backed Strategies to Ditch Guilt, Manage Overwhelm, and Grow Connection (When Everything Feels Like too Much), and mom of three. She also writes a weekly Substack about the artful science of relationships between people and roles which you can check out here.
“So viscerally true to me”
“One of my favorite parenting writers is not a parenting writer at all by any traditional measure. The bestselling novelist Fredrik Backman is a Swedish author who writes contemporary fiction and a common thread across many of his books, and the Beartown trilogy in particular, is parenting. Within the nuanced stories about a hockey-loving small town deep in the forests of Sweden, you'll find these hidden gems about parenting and what it means to be a parent. I find it exhilarating that a person living halfway across the planet in a very different culture writes about parenting and fatherhood in a way that feels so viscerally true to me and my personal experience as a father.”
Beartown trilogy by Fredrick Backman: Beartown, Us Against You, and The Winners.
Andrew Knott is a stay-at-home dad, the editor of a parenting humor publication called Frazzled, and a writer of essays, humor, and fiction. You can subscribe to his Substack for updates. His debut novel Love’s a Disaster, which happens to contain a lot of thoughts about parenting, is available now.
“Tells an unvarnished truth”
“I read Jenny Offil's Dept. of Speculation somewhere in the first year of my first son's life, so my memory of it is tinged with the bleary exhausted haze of that time. But there are two moments that struck me at the time and have really stuck with me since: when the narrator, a new mother, overhears someone using the phrase "sleeping like a baby" and says she wants to lay down next to her and scream all night, to show her how babies actually sleep, and when she recounts people asking if her baby is a "good baby" and she answers no. (These moments turn out to be just a few pages apart, very early in the book, according to google books, though I fear that looking it up has smudged the magic of the book a bit for me. But here's the exact quote: "Is she a good baby? People would ask me. Well, no, I'd say.")
I think those moments were so powerful for me, spare as they are, because it was the first time I came across a mother telling a truth about the impossibilities of caring for a very new baby without apologizing or softening. The statement didn't start with "I love her so much but--" or end by saying "but of course it's all worth it." Those straightforward depictions of a new mother refusing to go along with the kind of simple and saccharine ways we often describe babies made me feel less alone, less crazy in those months that I was truly unhinged by hormones and sleep deprivation and the life-changing love I felt for this tiny stranger. (And also: good baby? what on earth could it mean to be a "good baby," or a "bad" one? that line of questioning is part of what inspired my next book, The Good Mother Myth--that maybe if it's wrongheaded to think of babies as good or bad, we shouldn't evaluate ourselves that way, either.) I really believe that every time one of us tells an unvarnished truth about our life, we're all more free.”
Nancy Reddy is a writer and writer teacher who's especially interested in the intersection of caregiving and creative practice. Her recent books include the poetry collection Pocket Universe and the anthology The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood, and her next book, The Good Mother Myth, will be out in January 2025. She writes the newsletter Write More, Be Less Careful, about why writing is hard and how to do it anyway.
Loved reading all the different responses! Nancy’s definitely resonated with me most because telling an unvarnished truth feels so lonely. There are so many times I’ve said the unvarnished truth out loud and been horrified when an awkward silence descends. Almost as if you’ve gone against the very grain of motherhood by acknowledging it. I wish we gave parents more space to hold unvarnished truth without all the qualifiers.
Those responses were all wonderful in their own ways. It's not a parenting book, but a peopleing book, "The Gifts of Imperfection" by Brene Brown helped me accept my imperfections as a mother, that I can't do it all, but I do the best I can, and that's enough.