Embracing the Present: The Pain of Parenting Reflection

Only when it’s over will we realize it. Only when it’s all been stripped away will we be able to see.

How not present we were. How much we took it for granted. How often we prioritized the wrong thing. How needlessly strict or harsh we were.

For Joan Didion, whose beautiful (but haunting) books A Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, we have been learning from and talking about, this came when she lost her husband and her adult daughter in short order. The books she wrote were about grief sure, but not just grief at what had disappeared but also grief at the unavoidable realizations that came from that loss.


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