Patchwork Parenting: Learning from Motherhood Mentors
Motherhood is a team sport. We need coaches, heroes, teammates both in the game and on the bench ready to come in. In this episode I share lessons from some of my earliest motherhood mentors, from how to pursue your passions to how to keep kids from making such a mess.
Links to episodes with some of the mentors I mention:
Episodes about friendship and mentorship:
Transcript:
The first time I joined a fitness class after having my first baby, I was really prepared, ok, ridiculously prepared. I wasn’t going to let this fussy baby derail my plans to not only finally get my body moving again, but to socialize with my friends. So I loaded up a pack n play, toys, binkies, and a bouncy seat. I had to make several trips back and forth from my car to the church gym where a friend was leading the class. The next time I saw that friend, she had a gift for me: the book Confessions of a Slacker Mom, about a mom who just decided she was going to do less, spend less, and accumulate less stuff than the average mom. A kind and subtle hint that I should just chill out a bit and maybe not bring my whole nursery to the next class.
Welcome to the Family Lab Podcast, where we embrace the fact that parenting and home management is one big experiment.
That friend I was talking about is the wise and wonderful Tamsin Barlow, a friend who appeared just at the right time to guide me through early motherhood with subtle and sometimes not so subtle advice and feedback—like the time she walked into my newly painted house and wailed, “you beiged it!” This is something Tamsin would never do to unsuspecting walls. Her walls were not boring, especially her most experimental walls, in her mudroom right off the garage. She changed it a lot, but the one that sticks in my mind was when it was a red color and then she used maybe a muted pink to fingerpaint flowers and leaves and curlicues that somehow looked amazing. I digress, but her mailbox was also a folk art canvas, continually painted and repainted.
This episode is a tribute to motherhood mentors from my first five years of motherhood, when I lived in Minnesota. Motherhood is a team sport. We need coaches, heroes, teammates both in the game and on the bench ready to come in. All of it.
Easy for me to say--my team is naturally big, partly because my family is ginormous and supportive. My mother is my biggest mothering mentor, followed closely by an amazing mother-in-law. Grandmas, aunts, moms from my childhood, sisters, sisters in law, friends. But also other podcasters, authors, all of the amazing guests I’ve had on my podcast.
I’m not saying this to brag. I’m saying this because I have mentors to spare and whom I’d love to share with you if your team is not so big. I’ll play some clips from some of my mentors who have been on the podcast and link to their full episodes in the show notes and on familylabpodcast.com. I’ll also list several episodes about finding mom friends and supporting each other to help if you struggle to build an in-person mothering team.
The reason we need a team of mentors is that we’re all working on our own patchwork quilt of motherhood. So I snip off a wildly patterned section of Tamsin’s artistic quilt to remind me to keep life colorful and creative, and sew it to a snippet of the striped socks Shauna Brown wears to her annual witching night to remind me to host fun events and make room for everyone. I stitch that to a neutral homespun wool from my sister-in-law Ashley’s quilt to remind me to be calm and introspective, attach it to a piece an exotic silk scarf from one of my friend Megan Robbins’s many humanitarian trips, and add a spa bathrobe from my friend Molly Liggett, who reminds me to take time for myself, preferably in her company. I could go on and on, but I hope you’re thinking of what makes up your own patchwork quilt.
Another of my mentors, Maria Eckersley speaks eloquently about this idea of adopting characteristics from different amazing mothers.
Maria: I had these two phenomenal examples, very different examples. So my mom, she was a scriptorian. She raised 10 kids, so I'm number eight of 10. So I grew up with my mom. She went back to school when I was young and got her masters and went back, up being a BYU professor. She loved scripture. She loved teaching. So I saw her all growing up and wanted to be just like her.
And then I met Jason's mom. And she was totally different, but also somebody I wanted to emulate. She was somebody who, she didn't work outside the home. She didn't love the domesticy side of motherhood as much as she loved the fun side. So she's the one where I learned how to do the fun mom stuff. How to make a birthday amazing and how to, she would like, she used to teach early morning seminary for years and years and so I would listen to her stories about how she made her seminary class fun and how Jason had memories of being in that class and could still remember years later. So I kind of had these two very different but phenomenal examples. And in my dream world, Whitney, I was gonna find a way to combine them. I was like, there's gotta be some way that I can be both of those people. And so that was my dream. It didn't quite work out for me in the short term, but in the long term, I have found that came to be. It's just, I couldn't be all those things ever at once.
We especially don’t have to be as awesome as our motherhood mentors when we’re just starting out. It takes decades to piece these fragments and weave them into the fabric of our own unique quilts, quilts from which we can eventually snip sections to give to other moms that might be looking to us for mentorship.
In this episode I’m going to talk about 5 things Tamsin taught me, and then one lesson each from several of my other mentors. I’m partly doing this to give you examples of what I’m hoping to collect for a future episode. I would really like to collect stories about your own motherhood mentors and what they taught you—especially specific stories of advice, examples, or assistance that has stuck with you and changed the way you approach motherhood. You can send them to me in any form: video, voice memo, or text at whitney@howshemoms.com or dm me on Instagram @familylabpodcast. If you want, we can even set up a time to meet in my online studio.
Tamsin Barlow
Ok. Now back to Tamsin. Tamsin contributed so many of the foundational and very colorful squares to my quilt, including an abiding frustration at the very beige houses in my very suburban neighborhood. My own house is orange, the loudest hue my HOA will allow.
Number 1: She taught me to never stop learning, in any stage of motherhood. She was my first podcast friend. We’d share episodes and talk about big ideas way back in the early 2000s, when the podcasting world was just a wittle baby. She also introduced me to great courses, which were audio college lectures from incredible professors that back then we would borrow on CD from the library. I still remember the first one she loaned me, about the history of the English language. I loved every nerdy minute of it!
Number 2: She taught me to let kids make mistakes, fail and learn from it. This went along with another parenting book she bought me, which I have read and marked almost to oblivion: “The Blessing of a Skinned Knee” by Wendy Vogel.
Number 3: Go all in. Her family was always diving deep into new obsessions. For a while it was medieval history. They hosted a medieval feast with costumes we could all borrow, turkey legs, dramatic hair, dancing—the works. Is it a big surprise that one of her daughters became a bonified medievalist, degree and all?
When the Lord of the Rings movies came out, you better believe they were at the premieres in full costume. But then, to take it further, they decked out their basement hallway with art from the movies and pictures of the actors, and then watched every movie ever made by each of the actors in the movies. Of course they also eventually took a family trip to New Zealand and reenacted all the requisite scenes. In a totally different vein, they got really into the tour de France for a while, reading books about team cycling strategy and watching all the stages.
I was definitely channeling Tamsin when my then 10 year old son became obsessed with Hamilton and wanted to put on a play. We invited two other families to fill in all the parts, and since the karaoke version of the soundtrack hadn’t come out yet, I learned to play the whole first act on the piano for our live performance. We cobbled together costumes and invited an audience into our living room.
Number 4: Develop your passions all along the way in motherhood. Don’t wait for later. Get your workout in. Make your art. Dance. Sing. Make great food. Listen to music. Go to concerts. She took me to my very first concert, and now that’s one of my favorite ways to spend time and money. She used to burn me mixtape CDs organized by the mood of the songs. The titles were the best. The one I can remember is the CD entitled Mongolian Hordes Descending. And she nailed that vibe.
She always had a project going, and now, among other artistic pursuits, is a landscape artist and relief printer. Her art is seriously amazing. You can find it on Instagram @tamsibar. I believe it was this example of creating art, valuing creativity, and endless curiosity that inspired one kid to become a writer, one a muralist, and one an illustrator. The other one is a staff member on the Senate committee on foreign relations, which I guess is ok too, but I’m pretty certain she has some artistic side quests or will eventually.
Number 5: Open your house and gather people in. I mentioned the medieval feast, but over the years of my husband’s med school and residency, she opened her home to so many of us travelling students, even though she knew we were temporary residents. We had singing parties. Dancing parties. Ginormous and somewhat hazardous easter egg hunts in the woods. Innumerable birthday celebrations and feasts.
I could go on and on, but I have some other mentors to talk about, including my own mother. I’m going to limit myself to one thing each so this podcast won’t go on for days. For the same reason, I’ll have to leave many of my mentors out. I’ll focus on a few mentors from early motherhood. My whole podcast catalog is filled with other mentors and their great ideas for you to discover.
Susan Singley
OK, we’ll start with my mom, Susan Singley. Picking one thing is hard, but I’m going to choose her skill of balance self-confidence and the ability to laugh at her shortcomings. It’s such a charming attribute, and one she deliberately taught us. I vividly remember her sitting on the edge of my bed when I was 12 years old, sobbing my eyes out that nobody liked me. She quoted a scripture, Matthew 22:39: “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” And told me that I had to love myself before I could effectively love my neighbor. She told me that when she walks into a room she assumes that everyone will like her, and they usually do. I was amazed that anyone could live like that. It took me many years to get to that point in my confidence, and when I did, I remembered that moment on the bed. As for the ability to laugh at her shortcomings and just ridiculous situations, I have a whole episode about that called “I’m turning into my mother, or at least I hope so.” Here’s a clip:
Susan: We had our laundry room out in the garage and I went out in the garage and saw that Whitney was standing out there with Cassie and they were maybe four and two and I didn't see Cassie for a minute because Whitney was just standing right by the washer and dryer. And I said, where's Cassie? And you pointed at the dryer and she was inside the dryer, but the door was still open.
And I just got panicked. thought, what if I hadn't come out here? And one of them had gotten trapped there. I always think of the worst things. And my mom always had somebody that something had happened to them and they had died.
So I saw Cassie in the dryer and freaked out and I said, my gosh, you two, you could get hurt so bad. This is not any place that we play. We cannot climb inside dryers or washers. And I said, Cassie, I want you to see how you can't get out if that door gets closed. I shut the door and I'd forgotten that when you shut the door on the dryer, it begins rolling. And the only way to stop it is to open the door because you could not make it stop by using a dial on the top.
But at the moment, when I was hearing my daughter start to be tossed in there, I was punching every button on the top. And finally I remembered and opened the door and Cassie looked out and I wish I had a camera to get the look on her face, but mine was mortified and yours was pretty mortified as well because I had just dried your sister.
I’m Turning Into My Mother (At Least I Hope So)
Marjean Archibald
My mother-in-law has taught me many things, but one of the most important has been how to teach kids emotional intelligence. When she sat down to play with my kids, she’d get really into character with the little action figures and help my kids make up elaborate story lines. The kind of play where they could really work out some real-world situations. Then she’d sit my kids on her lap and make up the most amazing stories, with such sad endings that she’d sometimes get teary along with my kids as she finished them up. I asked her about her sad stories and she told me that she loved to invent and read sad stories with her kids because it gave them a safe way to learn how to process emotions and practice empathy. It’s time to pick a tear-jerker for family movie night. My girl anyone? Old Yeller?
I have had little clips of my mother-in-law in various episodes, but I don’t have a link to one main episode to send you to. It’s probably about time I do that!
Donna Dayton
My grandma, Donna Dayton, taught me to delight in my children. She still lights up every time I walk into the room, and I remember this from my childhood. Sometimes she’d just be overcome with how great we were and say, “Ooh, it’s a wonderful thing and a ring-a-ding kid.” I try to channel her delight with my own kids, something I could definitely improve upon lately. Even teenagers—especially teenagers—need to feel adored. My episode with my grandma is one of my favorite episodes of all time. I even had to bleep her once to keep it family friendly. If you haven’t listened to that one, it’s about time.
How Donna Mommed Back in the Day
I'm actually going to backpedal on sharing just one thing because I want to show you this excerpt from her episode where we were talking about comparison and just the whole competitive parenting vibe that we have going on here these days. So I asked her if comparison was a problem back when she was raising her kids, and I loved her answer.
Donna: I feel like we were all in the same boat. We were all poor. We were all... I think we all just did the best we could. Get them educated, go to church, and I was home tending them and there when they needed me. Her reaction made me think. Maybe the whole concept of mom guilt, which is so pervasive these days, is as much a modern invention as disposable diapers and jogging strollers.
Jana Frei
Jana Frei taught me to always participate and join in the fun with my kids. Her family, the frei family, hosted an annual Frei for all each summer, with a giant slip ‘n slide, barbecue, potato sack races, you name it. She was always rounding up the parents who had gathered under the trees to chat to get up and join in the games. She is full of fun and goes all in with any activity she does.
Jana: That is a huge thing of our family culture is to participate. Don't stand on the sideline.
You know, if Scott and I go to a youth dance, we dance. and, you know, yeah, people may think we're crazy, but we have a great time. And, and we play with the kids. You know, if we're at the park together, we're playing a game with the kids, right? We, came up with this game called Dungeons and Dwarves. And, you know, we, we play this game with the kids at the park. We're swinging on the swings. We're on the equipment and That's not to say that we might not sit down or whatever, but when we're places with the kids, we're participating. We're not, in particular, as a family. Now, that doesn't say that I wouldn't take my kids to the park and sit on the bench, right? I not, right? But when we're doing things, we're doing things. If it's a family event, the family's together.
She was part of an early episode called How She Connects With Her Kids. I should probably dig up our interview and make it a stand-alone episode.
Lisa Hoelzer
My friend Lisa Hoelzer was my housekeeping mentor. Her kids were just a few years older than mine, and yet her house always looked amazing. I remember once she came over and you probably could have made a whole meal from what was on my kitchen floor. I asked her what she did when her kids made such a mess, and then watched her formulate her answer in the nicest way she could—because her kids had never made such a mess. That’s when she taught me the magic of teaching kids to not to make messes in the first place. For example, she took the time to sit with her kids while they ate so they didn’t make an enormous mess, instead of letting them go to town on their own and then spending the same amount of time it would have taken to sit with them and help them to clean up an enormous mess. It had honestly never even occurred to me. Now I’d love to say that it worked and now my house is always as spotless as hers. Big no there. But I do think some of her help and training made me a much better housekeeper than I would have been otherwise.
Even with all these people, I’m just barely scratching the surface of the many incredible mom mentors from those early impressionable years. I didn’t even include any of my peers at the time, who not only showed me how to mom but actively participated in mothering my kids. I hope this episode makes you reflect on the motherhood mentors who are helping you design your own beautiful quilt, and maybe inspires you to lend a square or two to a mother that could use your ideas, guidance, support, or even just companionship right now. This has really been my purpose with this podcast from the beginning. To provide a community of mentorship and support where we can laugh together at our mistakes, celebrate our successes, and find new ways to experiment.
Thank you for joining me for this episode of the Family Lab Podcast. And thanks to my wonderful assistant Kimberly Hanson, and my production assistant and editor, Miriam Brantley. As always, thanks to my mom, Susan Singley, for playing the theme song for this podcast. She played this song all the time while I was growing up, and to me it’s the soundtrack of motherhood.
