Me Thinks

 Three book I learned from:

As you give simple choices throughout the day, you make your child’s world predictable.  Giving choices is an unassuming way to partner with your child, give them a voice, and build trust (pg. 149).

There are no terminal mistakes in parenting.  Making mistakes is quite healthy.  If we make a mistake but we are attuned to our child and repair that mistake, there is a release of dopamine, and a new synaptic connection forms in the brain.  Giving yourself a redo can create new pathways in the brain! (pg. 172) Errors are not terminal, but failure to repair a mistake could damage your relationship with your child.  So be intentional about repair (pg. 173).

Of all the helpful tools on this journey, the one that has contributed the most to my emotional health is community.  People who understand my life, my kids, and my feelings (even my tears) are the greatest gifts (pg. 152). Connections are essential to overall well-being (pg. 165).

 

You can’t rush experience.  And experience is what builds consistency.  And consistency yields confidence (pg. 22).

As a ballet dancer, you are never done working.  That is what we do.  No matter how well a performance went one night, the next day, we are back in the studio working on it.  There is always improvement to be made before the next show.  But it’s hard for a dancer to feel confident while performing yet be open to deconstructing their performance the next day in the studio, breaking it down in order to keep improving.  Those are two conflicting mentalities: confidence in front of a large audience, and, in order to grow, humility the next day in the studio.  But having the ability to express both is necessary to be a great dancer (pg. 100).

Allowing myself the freedom to have these life experiences away from the daily grind of ballet barres and intense scrutiny helped me become the artist I was meant to be.  Finding my best dancing didn’t happen in the studio.  It happened when I stepped away and allowed myself to have deeper experiences outside of that world that I could then bring back and add to my dancing (pg. 143).

 

Women near the bottom of the American class ladder hope their children will give them a vicarious second chance at the social mobility that has slipped out of their grasp. Even though a woman’s own prospects might be limited, a new baby’s life is a clean slate. As she “struggles and strives,” to give them a better life, she heals the regret of having “messed up” her own (pg. 179).

Poorly educated women were much more likely than the more highly educated to agree that motherhood is one of life’s most fulfilling roles (pg. 204). 

Poor women realize that is fragile, and so they make their primary emotional investments in their relationships with their children, which are not subject to the threats that so often destroy relationships between men and women (pg. 211).