The 2023 Last-Minute Mostly-Free Gift Guide for Overwhelmed Parents

I went to Costco last week to try and get that sweet sweet Novavax (sadly I had to give them $200 for it, so I chose basic-bitch Pfizer and paid the price with a brutal reaction!). It was an actual zoo. Thousand cars in the parking lot. Billion people in the store. Lots of that awful, dead-eyed, post-globalism horror moment where two people look at each other and their eyes are saying “do we or does ANYONE actually need this???!” and then the light goes out of their eyes, and it is replaced by the ghoulish shadow of pre-apocolyptic consumerism, and they load like twelve of whatever it is in to their cart and stumble on.

I don’t have a Costco membership, so even after I realized I couldn’t get the vaccine, and wanted to make something of my journey to this haunting world of stuffy stuff, and convinced myself that a 400-count bottle of supplements which advertised itself as “clinically studied” which is amazing cause we dont know at all what those studies found, I wasn’t able to buy a damn thing. Walking to my car, across the parking lot that could easily have accommodated a 1000-unit affordable housing complex, I thought, “I would have really like a hot dog though.”

Then, I thought, what do I really want for Christmas this year??? Like what has actual, palpable, life-altering value??

I chewed on this, and not, sadly, a hot dog, all day, until I had it. Its ideas. Sometimes from friends. Sometimes from strangers. Always from people who see through the fourth wall of bullshit and all the gd trying. And lately, it’s usually about parenting. I wouldn’t trade the insights I’ve gotten about how to be more myself and less on-script and remember what I actually care about in my parenting for all the Kirkland pre-shelled pistachios in the world. I would give a thousand three-pack Calvin Klein jeans to have a little more equanimity about my children experiencing anxiety or disappointment.

Well guess what! Those kinds of gifts can be hard to come by, but they are mostly free. And quickly delivered! And when you have a friend obsessed with dismantling the parenting industrial complex, like me, you don’t even have to go looking for them.

If you or a parent you know needs some perspective, permission, or levity, I present to you…

The 2023 Last-Minute Mostly-Free Gift Guide for Overwhelmed Parents

For the new parents in your life, Nancy Reddy shows us how old, imperfect, biased research on attachment of the past still haunts mothers with guilt today.

“The stickiness of the story of golden-hour bonding, which persists despite reassuring words from mental health care providers like Oreck and decades of challenges from researchers in psychology, anthropology, the history of science, and more, is emblematic of a larger phenomenon in American parenting culture, in which a bad or incomplete idea, often accompanied by claims about what’s “natural” for human mothers and supported by studies of animal mothering, enters the popular imagination and stays there, long after it’s been critiqued or debunked by other researchers.”

For those who are over validating feelings, Jessica Winter casts doubt on the dominance of “gentle parenting” and illustrates the impossibilities of what it asks of parents.

“If members of Gen X can blame their high rates of depression and anxiety on latchkey parenting, and if millennials can blame their high rates of depression and anxiety on helicopter parenting, then perhaps a new generation can anticipate blaming their high rates of depression and anxiety on the overvalidation and undercorrection native to gentle parenting.”

For the neurodivergent or working through some shit parent, Taylor Harris normalizes feeling different or unsettled in your own family.

“I’ll continue to learn how to best advocate for them and love them (and myself) well, but I’m not the best mom for them because I’m also neurodivergent. I’m the best mom for them because I’m their mom. And it’s OK that I’m still learning what that looks like.”

For the single, working, or guilt-written parent, Emma Johnson, a working single mother, tells us it’s okay to spend less time with our kids.

“The ramifications of this trend are enormous. The more-time-is-more parenting paradigm has given rise and supported the stay-at-home-mother trend, which puts women, children and families in financial peril and threatens marriages, as studies find that divorce rates plummet when both partners in a marriage are happily employed. The University of Maryland researchers found that all this kid-time can result in parents, mothers in particular, being stressed, sleep-deprived, guilty and anxious -- which, as any parent knows, trickles down to the kids.”

For the ambling parent, Angela Garbes doesn’t think there’s a “right way” to do mornings.

“There is no hero’s journey in this particular labor of mothering — or maybe there is, but you are definitely not the protagonist. Our society values production, novelty, progress, hustle (and side hustles), and, once we’ve offloaded our children to other people, weary and numb, we are then expected to get to work.

For the parent who wants something more, Amanda Montei promises something better coming in the parenting discourse.

“The “parenting book” has long specialized in context-free, allegedly apolitical counsel. Prior to the last decade, parenting books avoided bigger questions about how we parent and why, largely excusing themselves from addressing how racism, sexism, and ableism can unconsciously structure the dynamics we maintain in the home. Even fewer parenting philosophies acknowledge the pain and terror one feels preparing children to enter a world that disempowers those who raise them.”

For the parent who just wants to be themselves and fuck all y’all! Jessica Slice tells of how she started using her wheelchair more as her son aged, even when people were weird about it.

7. “Parenting changes all of us. I now memorize ridiculous songs with hand motions and wear nightgowns that match my toddler’s pajamas. My sleep schedule, my concept of a vacation, and my definition of clean have evolved. I have confronted my own fears and the discomfort that comes from others’ judgments, in order to make the path set before me and my son a little less narrow. For us, at the moment, the path happens to be a dinosaur trail.”

For the parent who has decision fatigue! It’s me, saying there is no right answer to anything (this is the actual lesson of every installment of my parenting column).

“Everyone has an opinion about the ways other people structure their families. They are eager to tell you about the only child who lived next door to them growing up and could only interact with squirrels, or the parents who wished for a second child and instead got triplets. The message is that it is audacious both to think that you can raise one child or to think that you can raise more. But, really, parenthood is all audacity, any way you slice it.”

For the parent who needs to laugh (everyone)! Janet Manley gets the job DONE.

“I’m an okay parent, but I’m no Keanu. I’m more of a dirty sandbox than a Zen garden. Give him a piece of printer paper, and he will find the beauty and peace within it. “How did they do it?” he’ll ask, looking at how thin the edge is between the page’s two sides and admiring the Amazon Prime logo your consumerist child drew in orange marker.”

And finally, for the parent who is more of a listener, I am partial to my new podcast, and this episode of our Movie Club on Home Alone and particularly, the MOM, featuring the aforementioned Nancy Reddy, is a real good one, affirming of parents, and seasonally appropriate!

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Thank you for reading! And remember, this doesn’t haaaaaaave to be free if you don’t want it to be!

If you are going “I really had hoped I’d spend more money this month!” or even “Gosh, I enjoyed a lot of free content this year, I want to give back!” consider becoming a paid subscriber to this Substack, or to Nancy Reddy’s Write More, Be Less Careful, Amanda Montei’s Mad Woman, Angela Garbes’ Donita Reason, Jessica Slice’s Newsletter, Janet Manley’s Kafka’s Baby,

Or buy Taylor Harris’ fabulous memoir or Emma Johnson’s guide to single motherhood, or subscribe to the New Yorker, OR do whatever makes you happy and helps others write and publish more wonderful things for you in the next year!

Or just stop clicking and spending, take a breath, and climb into a bathtub full of Martinelli’s.

Cheers!

Sarah