The Parent Panel – Mother’s Day Edition
It feels to me as though there are some particular dates that are especially fraught. I would like to blame it all on marketing, but that’s probably an oversimplification. Maybe it’s a more complex phenomenon that occurs at the very busy and poorly signed intersection of marketing, relationships, history and wishful thinking – a place just waiting for an epic pile up to happen. Mother’s Day strikes me as just such a date. I would like to tell you that I’ve figured out exactly how to navigate that intersection and I’m eager to share the magic, but both reasonable scepticism and the witness of actual people that know me would quickly reveal that to be untrue. So, instead of that, I will have the honor of inviting a panel of people who travel in this space to share some of what it feels like to do so.
This Sunday (an in-person, Full Circle Sunday at 170 Scott Street) will bring us music, Community Time, Kids Table (something special brewing there too, but I can’t say anything more or there will be consequences), and a Talky Bit. The Talky Bit will feature “The Parent Panel – Mother’s Day Edition” – a conversation with several people in our community whose lives include parenting, and in particular an experience of being “moms”. We’ll be exploring what it’s like to navigate the dynamics of influencing / being present to the formation of the beliefs of your kids while simultaneously exploring your own.
An important acknowledgement and caveat – for many people, Mother’s Day is just plain difficult. There are lots of possible reasons for that, of course. For what it’s worth, we’ll do our best together to traverse this ground in as safe and sensitive a manner as we can. Celebration and grief use the same emotional muscles, and my hope is that we can live productively together in the tension of that, celebrating what is joyful while also naming and grieving what is not. We will livestream this conversation, and (if possible) also produce a podcast version of it for those who are unable or who choose not to attend in person.
We’ll get underway at 10:45 a.m. and wrap up around 12:00 noon, just in case you are trying to coordinate this with other plans.
I’ll see you Sunday.