Nurshable, PO box 279, Great Meadows, NJ (2026)

08/19/2026

Hi.

You. Yeah, you.

Take a breath or five. Feel where you are in the world. The shape of yourself within your body. Everything you can currently feel. The tension in your neck. The width of your shoulders. The tips of your ears if you can feel them. (I can perceive the tops of my ears, but cannot feel where my earlobes are unless I touch them. I can feel where my little toes are easily but my big toes are a mystery unless I wiggle them. I find the practice of recognizing these things to be very grounding.)

Let's talk about misattribution and theory of mind.

Theory of mind is the understanding that people have their own mind full of their own experiences and beliefs and thoughts and motivations.

A good theory of mind contains a degree of uncertainty. We are not mind readers. We can observe the actions of others and we can identify how those actions make us feel and we can observe how those actions impact us and the tangible world around us. We can guess motivations but our guesses typically say a lot about our own thoughts and may or may not align with the experiences of other people.

When we think "I know exactly what you are thinking and what your motivations are" we are not usually demonstrating excellent theory of mind, we are struggling with a skill called perspective taking.

We have all had the experience of someone interacting with us that is misattributing our motivations and who expects us to change something we are doing because of their attributed motivations.

None of us enjoy it. It's very frustrating to have our own preference or motivation or experience and for someone to attribute a different one to us, and for them to expect us to resolve it based on their belief of what our motivations may be.

It's why we're so frustrated as mothers that we want to feed our babies in a way that fits our lives and that we understand the context of and the reasons behind, and someone on the internet knows the real reason we want to feed our babies.

We want to feed our babies for attention! Self gratification. Because we are lazy and are taking an easy way out. We want to feed our babies because they're small masterminds of manipulation. We want to feed our babies because we are virtue signalling.

As new moms we're vulnerable. We are meant to learn from experience that is passed down through generations. Our species is not independently driven by instinct. We do not hatch from eggs and somehow crawl back to water like a turtle does. We do not nstinctively know how to wobble around like baby chickens and find food or water.

We are meant to birth with others that have birthed. We are meant to see others feed their babies and to be surrounded by experience and to see, to watch, to learn and absorb. That IS our instinct. To be open and to be surrounded by influence and example.

Instead we are surrounded by opinionated a*holes.

Sorry for the bleeped expletive. I am now 46 and have birthed five children and my kids are older and older with my y youngest being four and a half.

And my bleeping is the kindest way to refer to all the disconnected people that were highly motivated to change every choice I tried to make as a new mom. It's the kindest way to refer to people that are currently doing that to new parents.

Society is taking the profound beauty of becoming a parent and is turning it into an awful isolated experience of being harshly judged by a bunch of people that have perspective taking deficits and an absolutely abysmal theory of mind.

You know yourself. You know what feels right and you know what feels wrong and you know who you trust and who is close to you. You know your goals for your child and yourself. You know your life.

No one is inside your head except you.
No one is inside your relationship with your child other than you and your child.

Trust yourself. Spend time understanding yourself. Spend time understanding your child as they teach you about who they are.

You're doing great.

08/16/2026

I am in groups of parents navigating divorce and custody. I joined to learn, but the amount of conflict is weird and uncomfortable and people throw themselves all in.

Kids do not get divorced. Parents do.

Kids do not get re-married. Parents do.

Parenthood is a relationship, not a role. Kids thrive when they have healthy relationships with their parents, step-parents, siblings, friends, grandparents, extended family, teachers, neighbors and community members.

Kids thrive when we encourage conflict resolution, understanding, communication and respect.

Kids thrive when they have free access to their past memories, all of their relationships, all of the stories of their childhoods and when those stories are told with love and joy.

They thrive when all the little inherited beauties and quirks and traits are acknowledged and loved.

When there is conflict, they don't need to be involved. Kids should not be choosing sides in adult conflict. If they are, everyone is losing.

We can't just swap out people. People are precious and irreplaceable. Yes, even our ex partners. Kids want relationships with their family.

Kids are on their own side with their own feelings and relationships and needs and desires and to try and win them over to a parent's side is weird and unfair. They have their own boat and we should be stocking it with provisions and teaching them about repair and whatever skills we have for seafaring and hoping for fair winds and following seas.

When there is abuse or neglect that's different. But let's not try to reframe parenting differences into weird giant conflict.

08/08/2026

(thank you for the photos, Larissa. 🥰)

08/08/2026

I am completely and thoroughly and totally burned out mentally and emotionally.

I don't know that it's a bad thing, right now. It means there's nothing left of me to set on fire.

Years ago I learned about a practice called a "prescribed burn" where areas are intentionally burned by the people in charge of preventing/putting out fires. The way it works is by burning off the dead leaves and dry things and all the small invasive bushes and undergrowth and then extinguishing the fire before the forest is harmed.

I feel as though the past many years have been a lot of amazing growth and experiences and like everything was set on fire and as though I have been managing it like a prescribed burn as best as I can.

I didn't set the fires. Some fires I grieve. Some I am finding myself increasingly grateful for, as they have made the meaning of loss and what has been lost a lot more clear. Some losses you grieve. Others allow you a beautiful understanding of things.

Now I am rock and dirt and ashes and old growth with deep roots and everything smells like the biggest campfire and nothing much is going to grow for a while. At least not on the surface. Just down below the ground as my roots continue to expand, and up in the canopy as branches reach.

I have seen tiny humans melt down on sidewalks over profound frustration, and have learned to understand that it is part of learning that after the storm passes, we have survived. I have said that I understand how hard it is, because it is the biggest thing we have ever dealt with and it feels so overwhelming.

But then it's over and we are still standing and that big huge frustration did not win.

And our lives in those early years have so many of those moments.

So does adulthood, really. The navigation of friendships, relationships, medical emergencies, loss and death, fights and disagreements. Of frustrating systems that are like "we know you just got glasses so no new glasses for you for two years. BUT! We know nothing about you having tried this migraine medication that failed so we are going to bury you in paperwork while your head kersplodes and refuse to cover what works." (I am 4/5ths of the way through the process and am currently trying the last thing I have to try and fail. Because nothing makes caregiving easier like a migraine that is not completely resolved by the treatment.

It is just past 5AM as I press "next" and submit this post. Today I work a while, then I load up the car with everything for kayaking (including yeeting two fourteen foot 58 pound kayaks overhead onto my minivan roof rack) and we go to the lake we have kayaked on so many times before, and I figure out how to get my paraplegic husband into and out of the kayak using a variety of skills, what I have learned about body mechanics, what he has learned, probably a lot of laughter, and random ideas that I have collected. I ask him sometimes how we're going to do things and he hasn't a clue. So I say my "how about.." and I show him an idea and when we find one that we both think might work, we go with that one with an abundance of caution and enthusiasm.

Because life continues through chaos, because I need joy, because he wants more of himself back, because the summer is rapidly disappearing, because I miss my mama who I still have not managed to grieve and she always wanted me to be happy, and because when illusions and stories and make believe what-ifs show themselves to be what they really are, you let all that old tangled underbrush burn itself off.

Then you choose joy.

I choose joy. Reclamation.

Have I been awake for hours sifting through old paperwork and getting it as organized as possible? Yes. Will I be a zombie? Also yes. Will I fall over in the water? Probably yes. Would I like the mental and physical and emotional space to deal with life without the add-ons of speculation and creative storytelling of people that find such things to be good social bonding exercises? Possibly. But if people enjoy chitterchatting, they can chatter away. It's fine. If they're right, they're right. If they're wrong, they're wrong. And they're growing more fully into who they are as people, too. It's a beautiful thing.

(As my mama's sweet body wound down one of the phrases she liked to repeat was that everyone and everything were so beautiful. And she meant it with her whole soul.)

I can't fully imagine today before it happens.

Will I laugh? Absolutely. Because life is beautiful and complex and short and a whirlwind and at the end of my life, in the last minutes of holding all my memories, I want to look back on everything I have lived and find it to have been a breathtakingly satisfying use of time in all the ways.

How does any of this line up with being burned out? It's a giant expenditure of energy.

But my "me time" has always been about the things that make my soul sing.

Will we actually manage to do anything in the kayaks today? Who knows. But it's one step forward, again.

I know:
I will be able to keep myself and him safe throughout the entire plan and its attempted ex*****on.

I will be able to manage everything I am taking on independently with his involvement and no other help needed. Which is also a goal of today. To know at which point the plan is not working and to work our way backwards and back into the car. 😂

08/05/2026

Self reflection.

Boundaries.

Equilibrium.

The acceptance of difficult truths instead of avoiding them.

Not over-simplifying things. And not over-complicating them.

I tell my kids that accountability feels good long-term because it builds relationships even if we take a hit to our self esteem shorter term by admitting we have made a mistake, hurt someone, behaved poorly, or didn't understand what was happening at the time.

I use an example of when I made a mistake at work and it was assumed that someone else had made the mistake and the person my mistake had impacted talked to me about the mistake and I immediately clarified that it was absolutely me that had done the thing and that I didn't realize it would cause the problem that it caused and it wasn't the other person. At the time it didn't feel great because I did not know the coworker well and their experience of me up until that point was just that I had made their job a lot harder.

For a few weeks I felt bad and wrong and like I should have known better. The coworker was understanding but I also understood the extra work I had made for him. The way that I coped was just by checking in after each time I did the task and making sure I wasn't misunderstanding how the mistakes had happened, and that my solution was working. If it had happened again I would have talked to my supervisor and asked if we could change how the task was done. I wouldn't have become angry at my coworker for being honest that it was still not working. I wouldn't have become angry at my coworker if he had become frustrated that I was adding to his workload. No one enjoys a bigger workload.

Part of that dynamic was my coworker's ability to recognize that it was a mistake and that I truly wanted to make sure it didn't happen again. If the coworker had a world view where everyone was manipulative, he would have likely viewed my accountability and attempts to resolve the problem as an attempt to get out of "trouble" somehow. Or he may have felt like I was performing niceness to get him to say my efforts were fine. (This would have been upsetting because I wanted to solve the problem. 😂 I would have still wanted to solve the problem and would possibly have become frustrated myself if he wasn't providing genuine feedback.)

I had already caused the trouble. Someone else had already been blamed. I didn't want to negatively impact the other person's job by having people think that person had done something they hadn't done. They were navigating their own work relationships.

I didn't especially enjoy the coworker that had been blamed and found that they frequently did things that made my own job harder. I did not find that mentioning things to them was helpful because they were dismissive and did not seem open to the idea that anything could be different. There was a valid reason that everyone assumed that they had been the one who made the mistake.

But the choices I make are about staying consistent with my own inner plot, not the likeability of someone that has been blamed for my own actions or modifying my own behavior to a lower standard. They're at where they're at. I'm at where I am at.

I like to like myself.

Justifying choices or behavior that falls outside of what I feel is good and right and pretending that the ends justify the means? Nah. It's manipulative and not based on reality. And when we involve other people we're manipulating those people who haven't even been involved in the dynamic. That's just ridiculously messy internal boundaries. 😬

When a driver is being aggressive on the road I acknowledge the impact it has on me, and I move past it and focus on my job which is to drive in the safest way possible. Because I don't need to absorb the things I know are wrong and do them even bigger. No one's safety is enhanced by the two angry guys trying to run each other off the road.

And even if someone else is trying to run me off the road while I am calm, my losing my calm is not productive.

I am not three years old on a playground. I am 46. I am a mother, a wife, a caregiver, a friend, a community member and while I am also human and imperfect, I can see myself.

And even if everyone around me believed something that isn't true, I still see myself. And I am in my own head, not their heads.

Accountability is for me. I like the strong steady feeling of living as a person I can respect.

That's the true meaning of self respect. Not pretending, lying or presenting ourselves as something we are not.

And it's also respectful of other people. I don't enjoy it when people allow me to believe something that is not true. I don't accept it for myself, why would I accept it for someone else?

And to satiate curiosity, I am a farmer. One of my jobs was to spray nutritional spray on everything. The nutritional spray was fermented fish spray which smells like the stagnant water in a poorly draining gutter at a fishing pier on a 103 degree day following a thunderstorm where all the fish entrails have escaped captivity and convened for maximum putridity.

I got it on windows that my coworker had just washed. And that stuff is even more sticky than it is smelly.

I was not the only person doing spraying, but I did immediately recognize that I was almost 100% definitely the person that did that spraying. 😬

It still doesn't feel "good" like if I was the most amazingly proficient talented perfect sprayer of stinky fish juice that paid the correct amount of attention at o'dark thirty to recognize I was making a dire and honestly kind of obvious mistake. But it feels more neutral and like I navigated the situation that had already occurred as best as I could and with good intentions.

07/30/2026

lighthouse humans
are my favorite kind of humans.

07/29/2026

I have been teaching my kids about a common dynamic.

Someone behaves poorly and the person they have hurt reacts the way a hurt person reacts. Maybe they yell out in pain. Maybe they push the person away from them. Maybe they get upset at being teased and they tease back.

Then the person who did the hurting decides how they're going to respond.

They can hold themselves accountable, make amends and move forward in life.

Or they can enjoy the reaction of the person that they hurt and continue doing it until the person they're hurting behaves poorly enough to get them in trouble.

It's what we identify as "bullying". And it's important to use self reflection and keep an accurate history of what has actually happened in our heads so that no matter which part we have played in the conflict, we don't start behaving in ways that makes us dislike ourselves.

I tell them that we are responsible for the choices we make along the way and that we need to live with the outcome of our decisions. If someone calls us a name and we push them over, they are responsible for their actions and we are responsible for ours.

It's important to try to choose the actions we are okay with being responsible for.

It's important to recognize when there is a genuine threat to our safety and we are acting in self defense, and when we are being baited by a bully who enjoys seeing other people get in trouble.

And it's important to recognize when we are interacting with someone who is genuinely concerned for their own safety in our own interactions and not adopt the line of "why are you making a big deal, it was a JOKE".

When we misread a situation and make a hurtful joke, we apologize we don't dismiss. And if we tickle someone and they get upset, we don't downplay. We learn about each other's boundaries and we don't mistake them for the boundaries of someone else or try to change Becky's boundaries because Anna doesn't mind when we tickle her. People are not interchangeable.

I use splashing games as an example. Some people love splashing games. I don't like water in my face. I am responsible for telling people my preference, and they are responsible for processing that preference and not pushing me into games I don't like and do not consent to. Sometimes they will make a misstep and I am responsible for reminding them. If it's consistent there's a problem and I need to consider that they are not safe people to interact with when water is involved.

The same applies with kids. We don't splash people without understanding if people like splashing games. And the way to communicate we don't like splashing games is to state that. It's not to get progressively more upset and vengeful until we are screaming at the other person and trying to push them under the water.

Not everyone accurately interprets facial expressions or processes playful objections vs actual objections and sometimes kids escalate until an adult is involved. But it's part of growing up to figure out how to not escalate, communicate accurately and calmly and figure out if we can withdraw from the situation in a way that is appropriate.

I try to remind my kids that "no" and "stop" are not play words but some people use them to play and it confuses everyone and if someone isn't listening to our "no" the way we listen to "no" sometimes we need to be more explicit.

"No. I mean it."
"I said no. You can't touch me that way."
"I am not playing. Stop. That hurts."

And we need to recognize that not everyone is able to communicate that way in the moment and we need to check in and actively ensure that someone consents and is enjoying themselves. And if they're not seeming to enjoy themselves it's important to see if there's something they would rather be doing.

Some people intentionally ignore boundaries and claim ignorance.

And it's okay for us to not interact with those people and for us to choose safer friends.

06/04/2026

My girls are always in the yard with scissors bringing flowers inside.

It makes me happy.

My yard is very.. uh. Green. With beheaded plants. Which is a good sign I need to throw down some zinnia seeds and sunflowers and try to out-compete the children. 😂

The nice thing is immediately removing flowers makes them bloom even more prolifically. 😂

06/04/2026

I enjoy the practice of working out the details of my internal narrative and making sure that I am consistent with my own plot.

Particularly when dealing with erratic people that swing rather wildly in every given direction depending on their mood.

Radical acceptance, dropping of defensiveness, dealing with uncomfortable emotions and learning to deal with my own cognitive dissonance to resolve issues within myself instead of getting defensive with myself and trying to hide from them?

It's great for an inner sense of peace and calm.

06/03/2026

When I was a teenager I painted a flying pig on the wall of the room I was sleeping in at my mother's house.

I liked to say "when pigs fly".

Five years ago on my birthday I went on a one night backpacking adventure with an adventure buddy of mine. She gifted me a pink flying pig bird house. I laughed and laughed and was delighted. She did not know about the pig.

I was pregnant with Skylark at the time.

I hung the pig in the garden that I had started. It stayed empty for years.

This year a pair of incredibly bossy wrens settled in and built a nest inside of it. They hop around yelling at me while I work nearby.

The summer I was pregnant with Skylark 's sister Wren, a pair of wrens built their home in a shade tarp over where we used to swim and would yell at me while I weeded the patio planters.

My father passed away while Wren was nestled in my belly, and the little birds became her namesake.

Every time the birds yell and hop around and fly in and out of their little pig home, I find myself remembering those wrens. The passing of my father. The bluejay that screamed at me from the powerlines the day that he died. (His name was Jason and my mama called him Jay).

Now a little house wren has been yelling at me. One flew into my house through the open door and into my kitchen two rooms away to sit in the plant grown from a cutting from my mama's house which was in turn grown from a cutting from her Mama's house.

It feels like I am running my finger over the wafer thin layers of generations of love all tied up in birds and plants and in my children, my siblings, my nieces and their babies.

And even though the ones that came before me are no longer here. They existed and still feel tangible and real, even as memories.

Nurshable

08/19/2026

08/16/2026

08/08/2026

08/08/2026

08/05/2026

07/30/2026

07/29/2026

06/04/2026

06/04/2026

06/03/2026

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