My mother’s best advice: talk to your children like old friends

One summer I sat on the washing machine while my mother told me the best thing about having children: she said she’d always had a little friend. For me and my sister there were two friends. Divorced and largely on her own, she took us to galleries, to the supermarket, sometimes to work, and she talked to us like old friends.

We listened, and we remained incredibly close until she died in August 2020. I now have two children myself, though I came close to not having any at all, and of course that would have been fine. I don’t know how much her words pushed me, but the memory of them must have nudged me twice.

I knew my largely happy childhood offered no guarantee for my own children: my mother only really wanted to be a mother, whereas I wanted a whole family, and I had children at a very different time, with the destruction of our planet so much clearer and the world less stable.

mother, parenting, children, childhood, mother's advice, divorce, family, grief, closeness, climate anxiety