Parents
Feeding a household while your own appetite has changed.
16 conversations203 membersTuesdays, 21:00 UK — fortnightly
Facilitator — parents & carers
Wren
“You are allowed to need something too.”
I hold parents, carers and partners-and-family, which are three circles about the same underlying problem: your body has changed how it works, and the household did not get a memo.
Practical things come up constantly. What do you cook when you cannot face the food you have cooked every Tuesday for nine years. What do you say to a fourteen-year-old who has noticed and is worried. How do you handle a mother-in-law with opinions. What do you do when your partner is quietly threatened by it, which happens more than anyone admits and is not a sign that anything is wrong with either of you.
The carers' circle is different again. Half of those members are not on anything themselves — they are here because someone they look after is, and they are exhausted, and nobody has asked them a single question about how they are. So we ask. That circle has the longest silences and I have learned to let them sit.
I am careful about food talk in front of the parents' circle in particular. Children are extremely good at hearing the rules the adults are following. We talk about that a lot, and wrote it down.
Circles Wren holds
Carers
For the people nobody has asked how they are.
15 conversations145 membersThursdays, 14:00 UK — fortnightly
Partners and family
Your body changed how it works. The household did not get a memo.
15 conversations135 membersSundays, 19:30 UK — fortnightly
Recent call recaps
Guides Wren reviewed
eating
Holidays and family meals
Christmas, Eid, Diwali, a fortnight at your mother-in-law’s. How members got through the meals that carry the most meaning and the most commentary.
eating
Cooking for people who are not you
You still have a household to feed and you no longer want to smell dinner. How members kept everybody fed without cooking two of everything.
living
Talking about food in front of children
Children are extremely good at hearing the rules the adults are following, including the ones nobody said out loud — what Wren’s parents circle has worked out about that.
living
When your partner is struggling with it
Your body changed how it works and the household did not get a memo — the shapes this takes at home, what has helped, and where the line is between struggling and controlling.
practicalhow-to
A symptom diary that you will actually keep
Five lines a week, kept for months, beats a beautiful spreadsheet abandoned in February — and it is the single thing that makes a short appointment worth having.