How to stay sane during an insane time with TEENAGERS!
Jody will be sharing some tips and tools with you to help you
and your family stay sane.

Jody Lewis - Mother of 3 teenagers & living in 900 sqft home. Her art is interior design and poet. She is an Unschooling mom until each started high school, married 23 years, newly divorced.

Here's more:
An invitation to join me....

I'm speaking on this parenting FB live with the awesome Ruth Kim, where I will sure as shit NOT be sharing tidy tricks to parent for success in the crazy daze of these days.

Only the arrogant and the orange have answers at a time like this.

What I have is what I love, distilled and compressed and looking to me... a family of teenagers in suspension, in grief, in cuddle with the dog mode, in denial, in laughter over some new virus meme, in too-close quarters, in baking-binge-watching-painting-nails-dying hair marathons, in search of a way out and any way in, in pajamas, in salt baths and those weird sheet masks, in every inch of the house, in rebellion, in multiple family households, in awe, inquisitive, in fear and faith and conflicting playlists, (not) in the frame of mind to study, in search of the ukelele and those old paint sets I'm so glad I rescued from the divorce yard sale, in love and hate and trigger and tears, in the impossible in between of teenage independence and pandemic lockdown.

In the center of my family's experience of this virus, I am the wildly arhythmic thudding heart of loving and learning and limits and letting limits go, of giving into fear and coming up for air and fucking up and fucking up again, of forgiving (myself and them) and loving more and cracking up and cracking open because fuck everything else right now, I fiercely love my family.

I am the face of their confinement, the safe one my girls unleash their fear and anger about this shitshow on, because they know there is no shaking this love. I am the one crying with them when they collapse into me, sobbing. I am imperfect and spit for sure off-limits-to-moms feelings under my breath when I'm scared.

And please know, I am scared.

Like every parent reading this, I don't know how to parent and to protect and to let go in this time.

But there is one real thing: scared is nothing to this woman's love. I am the heart and the head of my family dammit. As the trappings of our life are sloughing off like the outgrown skin it was, what's under here is love. As a job description. As the only thing left on my calendar. As my only remaining thing on my to do list.

As the only answer to my every parenting question.

So I'll be a guest on this FB live, sharing my parenting experience and pretty much just doubling down on love. If you're looking for tips 'n' tricks to make your kids behave while the national guard rolls by your living room window, I got nothin'. If you're searching for permission to strip down your parenting so you can manage this new day-to-day life of your family as a flayed open mama heart in your fierce and tender woman's body, tune in.