repairenting presents: new year, new spoons

Perhaps you’ve heard of the Spoon Theory. Christine Miserando coined the metaphor in an effort to describe her indescribable experience of chronic pain. It goes something like this: each morning you wake up with a limited number of spoons, and throughout the day—as you do things, as you exert your energy—you spend them. Different folks start with a different amount: there are days when some can rival the energizer bunny and some days when the three toed sloth, officially the world’s slowest mammal, sets a high bar for our tired beings.

If you’re like Christine and live with chronic illness and pain, you’re likely to begin the day with fewer spoons than if pain wasn’t a daily companion. Chronic pain narrows a person’s spoon count. Other things—systemic oppression, unsupported trauma, grief, and illness—do too. It seems to me that living through, and continuing to live through, the Covid pandemic has narrowed the spoons of virtually every person I know. This seems to be all the more true for people who are responsible for babies and young children.

And, so, perhaps it should be no surprise that as I look to the new year and lean into some of my grounding rituals of reflecting on the past year and integrating learnings into the upcoming one, I notice weariness. I am tired. My spoon count is low.

As I think of the work I want to do at home (in my body and in these walls) and the work I want to do outside, I want to be judicious. I want to spend these spoons in alignment with what matters most to me. And it’s also true that when I spend my spoons in ways that align with my heart, it seems that I pick up some extra spoons along the way.

With your spoons, and ours, in mind, we warmly invite you to our January repairenting course: New Year, New Spoons. We offer a time where folks can learn and practice neurobiological tools that bolster resilience, relationship, and repair. Our purpose at repairenting is to support adults to be with and for children, including our younger selves that live within each one of us. Our strategy for doing so is to support adults to accompany themselves, enabling adults to engage with children from a more resourced, skilled, and emotionally regulated space. This is about supporting you.

Our hope is that if you choose to spend a spoon with us, it will be in alignment with what matters to you and that doing so will help you pick up an extra one along the way. We hope you’ll explore with us, and in the meantime we are sending fierce love and tender care your way.

RSVP today! $15/participant (email kerry@repairenting.org to inquire about scholarships)