Kerry here.
Happy New Year!
So long 2024, hello 2025! love the process of filling out the Year Compass, a free download where you reflect on the past year and look forward to the new year. It’s a cool process and lends itself to great introspection and conversations with loved ones. I’ve shared the link in case you’re interested.
As we start afresh, I’d like to challenge something that seems to come so easily to many of us, which is having guilt and regret about our parenting. We are surrounded by images online of parents supposedly doing everything right. But it’s an illusion of sorts. Everyone is good at some things; no one is great at everything. People share pictures and videos of themselves doing what they’re good at. But with ourselves, we see it all… our strengths and weaknesses, with extra focus on our weaknesses. This makes it easy to think others are better at parenting than we are. What if we aim for a more balanced assessment of ourselves moving forward?
How about at the start of 2025, we take a moment for this little process:
- Write down the parts of your parenting in 2024 that you regret. From there, decide if there are amends that can be made for your mistakes.
- The next step is to grant yourself grace, with love and kindness, for being imperfect. (See poem below.) We are all imperfect.
- Then, equally importantly, write what you can celebrate about your parenting. What can you acknowledge that you do well?
- And then thank 2024 for its gifts and bid the year farewell.
In the spirit of this new year’s contemplation, I want to share with you a poem to support this exercise. Click on the image below to hear a beautiful version of it with music:
link to Emory Hall – Made of Rivers on YouTube
make peace
with all the women
you once were.
lay flowers
at their feet
offer them incense
and honey
and forgiveness
honor them
and give them your silence
listen
bless them
and let them be
for they are the bones
of the temple
you sit in now
for they are
the rivers
of wisdom
leading you toward
the sea.
— I have been a thousand different women
By Emory Hall
Love to you and all the thousand different women you have been.
Love to your partners and parents and the thousand different versions of themselves they’ve been.
Love to your children and the thousand different versions of themselves they have been and will be.
You don’t have to be perfect to be a great parent.
With love from imperfect, lovable us to imperfect, lovable you,
Kerry and Palmer
