Sara El-Sayeh

Blaqube

Hey there,
I don't talk about this enough...

It's almost December and the weather is just cooling down today. I can't really complain about this, I guess. I've been really challenged by parenting lately, my kids are 8 and almost 3 and they make each other yell and cry almost the whole time, it makes me want to pull my hair out, most days.

Today, I received a message from another parent saying my child told hers a really mean thing and I burst to tears with disappointment which made my child cry, too.

These moments of shattering break my heart and I'm hoping they open up a new way for us to relate...

Sometimes the gift isn't what we really think it is...

I'm not saying that my son's mean comment is a gift, but it did bear a gift with it. An opening. A lot of what I write about, what I contemplate and talk about is related to mothering, to belonging and care and lately, I've been finding it really hard to relate to anyone, let alone my own children.

Belonging can be a deeply romanticised notion when it's not something we actively engage with. If we theorize and philosophise something, it often appears neater, better, easier...

But practicing belonging comes with (in my experience)

• A lot of tenderness
• A heap of tension
• A handful of opportunities for repair
• A whole lot of hugs, if we allow ourselves to soften

Softening is hard work (heh...)

The mothering I received was very tough. I'm not the softest mother a lot of the time, I have a lot of rules, hold my kids to high standards when it comes to the quality of food they eat, learning how to be punctual, being better, kinder, and the list goes on...

This in and of itself took me a lot of imagination. I practiced this a lot in my own mind. And lately, I haven't been doing this enough.

So I want to offer a Wonder Lab for Micro-Dreaming on December 21 for 21 days - would you like to join me? It's $14 (I'll share the Telegram link once you sign up)

I know you're being sold a whole ton of stuff this season, it is gifting season after all. And I like to think of the gift as far more than what we can exchange for money. Yes, material gifts can be nice, and there are so many more layers to what the gift truly is. And yet, speaking of gifts, I wanted to share Amelia Hruby's Small Biz Gift Guide which features my very own Imagination for Liberation course that starts in January. ​ small biz gift guide ​ What I've been reading/listening to/writing: ​Memories We Never Had (so beautiful, so haunting) this has been assigned reading in Margeaux Feldman's Partial Accounts course (which is brilliant) ​Capitalism Can Be Composted - a Wild New Work Podcast episode by Megan Leatherman I've been lowkey obsessing over the wander line work by Deligny​ Can I share my own writing on Substack? my latest piece is called Tending to the Garden ​ That's all from me today, as always, I welcome your replies! Any thoughts, links, reflections that you have, please share with me! Sara