I was really grateful to have child-free models in my life. My grandma has two sisters, and she has a sister that never married, never had children, and then my mom also has a sister who never married, never had children. So I was pretty fortunate to have two generations of cool women, like my great aunt is a seamstress in Wisconsin. She’s never owned a car – she just bikes everywhere in Kenosha. And when she travels, she only wears black turtlenecks and cute carpenter jeans and she’s so cute. She’s in her seventies. So anyway, I feel like her and I’m planning a trip to visit her this next summer, which it’s been a minute. So I feel like that’s a little bit related to this in some ways – that I’m like, let me check in on you in this season. But yeah, just really a lot of gratitude for those models. And I think it’s just another piece worth saying, like all of us in this room get to be those models for other young people.
Whether or not your career or music or art or things that you’re, like, stewarding a good world and adding beauty to the world that don’t have to do with throwing a thousand diapers into a landfill. And my sister just had a baby and I was visiting with them, but to strip away the judgment pieces, it’s like there’s so many ways to add beauty to the world.
I think some of the great compliments that I’ve received in my life – what kind of lights me up internally – are compliments on my art or my creativity or even, to some degree, being strong or athletic. Like those are things that I can feel power from in my body. And some of that is physical, like I do like movement. But all that’s to say, like in my brain, there lives this artist and athlete kind of ideal. Maybe if you have a child that’s just not what you’re focused on anymore. But I still just think what is life without art?
The other piece that I wrote about that I did wanna share is, and not to get political, but I just don’t wanna be fighting with somebody about a phone or video games or technology for like, the next couple of decades. Like, I don’t wanna try to have to talk you into why reading a book is cool. Like I don’t wanna. There’s something about 2025 parenting where it’s like… I could maybe in 1970, I might be a little bit more, I mean, again, as a cis white woman, the seventies are landing okay. But it’s like, you know, again, there are problems along the way.
Or yeah, if I married a millionaire and we lived on some remote island and there’s this community of cool other people and we were just raising… So there’s some path that I could go to in my head, but fighting a kid over Nintendo switches and who gets to have Netflix is just a little, it just doesn’t do much for me.
So, you know, and as a Montessori teacher, we were just like, here’s some twigs, figure it out. Like I had experiences of, you know, children are creative and cool. And I do trust that humanity has some nuggets of genuine love for books that may come with us into the future generations.
But, yeah. Those are my thoughts.