Top 5 Examined Family posts of 2023

Hey y’all starting with a very exciting announcement: The poster that Wendy MacNaughton and I collaborated on which culls the wisdom of the guests on the first season of The Wise Unknown is here! And you can get it!

I’m guessing a lot of you recognize little pieces of wisdom from your listening in there. What a season. What a collabo. I think this might make an awesome holiday gift for people you love, maybe even your mother? Buy here. And thank you SO much for listening and supporting this labor of so much love.

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Okay on to the main event: These are the posts you loved best this year. Or missed, in which case, here’s your chance to read what your Examined Family family liked best:

The art of care mostly disappears

Care is like ephemeral art—an Andy Goldsworthy sculpture of mac and cheese and baby wipes and no tears shampoo and socks that never match and chore charts that never work and all that just gets blown away with the winds of time. And like art that isn’t static, isn’t permanent, can’t be put up on a wall and admired in a museum—care is devalued. We stumble on it sometimes in the wild and it takes our breath away, a momentary glimpse of the tenderness with which we hold and protect and nourish and delight in our loved ones; just like one of Goldsworthy’s mandalas, there’s a divine structure to it, a feeling of inevitability. It’s as ordinary as dirt and as sacred as the kind found at Chimayo. It’s here, there, and everywhere, so kind of nowhere.

I can quit you, baby

I am trying to disabuse myself of the false notion that I can anticipate everyone’s needs and, thereby, prevent suffering…

I’m realizing that I formed this delusion as a daughter, but I’ve supercharged it as a mother. Occupational hazard I guess. My role, my right role, is to witness, attune to, and love up on my daughters, to protect them from harm, to delight in getting to know them in all their weird glory. But I also aspire to accompany them through life’s inevitable suffering, not prevent it. In order to nourish them for real life, I can’t spend their childhoods body blocking any pain that I see coming their way.

I also want to model what it looks like for a grown ass woman to identify and articulate her needs clearly and consistently for them. How can that sentence sound so simple when I re-read it and yet so challenging when I try to live into it? The alternative isn’t pretty—martyrdom, resentment, an unlived life that they have to negotiate alongside their own. I don’t want that for them. And, more urgently, I don’t want that for me.

Name less. Move more.

Stella is usually verbal. Hilariously and precociously so. She’ll learn an adult phrase and wear it out. Her recent favorite: How dare you! Hand her the pepper instead of the salt. How dare you! Call her by the cat’s name. How dare you! Remind her it is time to go to bed. How dare you!

So her salon silence was a surprise and her body’s expression a pure joy. Not everything that is felt can be described. That’s part of what makes it magical—the absence of words pinning it down. Name less. Move more.

When Stella and I were snuggling in her racecar bed Sunday night I decided to try a little experiment. Maybe a few days after the salon she’d have more language. I asked, “How does your new haircut make you feel?”

“Powerful,” she said immediately. And then added: “And next, I’d like to dye my hair purple. And get a leather jacket.”

You’re magical. It’s true.

Dear Momma…

Happy birthday, you rascal you.

Did you know that—now that I’m 43 and you’re 75—I even love the things about you that used to drive me crazy? I love that you refuse to use a crosswalk or get your hair dyed by a professional. I love that you let my kids watch videos of deer falling into pools on YouTube and that you’ve never written a short email. I love that you find the post office intimidating to the point of absolute avoidance and that you keep more cash stuck in random drawers than the most tipped waitress in history.

I love that you are the most curious person I know—constantly researching—whether it’s about the latest release from a director you love, or a disease you’ve decided is misunderstood by mainstream medicine, or a tree you’ve been wondering about (and probably talking to). Is this the reason you are always way ahead of any cultural curve? I remember when you started using coconut oil like a decade before the rest of California. How did you know?

*This one became an episode of Kelly Corrigan Wonders.*

She’s mid-childhood. I’m midlife.

I could have never, not in a million years, prepared for any of it. It’s been a moment by moment meeting. Meeting her. Meeting my mother self and re-meeting my self self. Re-meeting her dad. Meeting her again as she stretches and thrashes and sings into new versions of who she can and wants to be. And it’s gone so fast, just like they say. And some days have been so slow—in both delicious and terrible ways. And lately, they all feel a little bit sacred as I see the long horizon laid out before us.

She’s mid-childhood. I’m midlife. We’re moving through this threshold together, hand in hand, hair always on the edge of tangle, hearts beating in rhythm even if our brains are very different instruments, welcoming the moment with appropriate gratitude, terror, and mutual admiration.

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Pretty special, huh? Turns out you like when I reflect on the most intimate of milestones, which consistently surprises and delights me. I guess the way into the universal really is through the sensory and sacred specific. Keep that in mind as you make your art and send it out into the world. We love the real bits.