Self care strategy 1

One outcome of my diary of a week of parenting was realising I needed to look after myself a bit better. I'll tell you more about that some other spare ten minutes, but as I was pondering how to do this a social worker friend invited me to join a trial parenting group she is running for the first time. So I did. She's using this model called Hand in Hand Parenting which seems nice, if eerily like co-counselling. Did everyone else go through a co-counselling stage? Or is it a hippie thing?

I won't bother explaining it too much - everyone else seems to be such instinctively good parents so it's probably what you would do anyway (unlike me, who needs to research everything and actually think about what to do - I would very rarely trust a gut reaction. On crying, for example, my impulse when they were first born was to put them outside in the pram and let them go at it. I never did this as I believe it is Bad For Babies but I followed my cognitive processes & extensive research, not my 'instincts'. Interestingly, the baby-outside thing was what my parents did for us, that being the parenting wisdom of the day, although of course I have no memory of it. )

Oh bugger there's a baby.

Gotta go.

Later:

I realised a couple of things during the first workshop. One is that I feel like we have to be a 'perfect' family to justify lesbians having kids. The standard of good parenting feels so much higher, in order to prove that we are not disadvantaging our kids in any way for the dreadful lack of heteronormativity in their lives. It's not enough to be within the normal range of okay families - we have to be fabulous. Never any disagreements between L & I, never any moments of feeling like parenting is all too hard. It's like I'm looking for permission -

Oh bugger there's a baby.

Gotta go.