A quick announcement that I’m preparing to deliver the keynote at Bank Street’s Infancy Institute next week on Cultural Self-Awareness as Professional Practice. This is both a full-circle moment (I’m an alumna) and a pinch-me moment. The Infancy Institute is a conference I never miss because it is always inspiring, thought provoking, and connecting.

If you’re an early childhood educator, childcare provider, director, home visitor, early interventionist, social worker, or otherwise support families with young children, you can still sign up! I’ll also be participating on a panel dreaming about what Universal Child Care could look like. And there are other INCREDIBLE workshops.

Preparing my keynote has had me thinking about culture and practice in all kinds of ways. This, alongside working on my book, has anchored my year in terms of research, writing, and conversation. It (along with life as a parent) has also taken me away from my newsletter over the last few months. But as the keynote approaches and my writing winds down, I’m excited to continue the conversation over here on substack.

To that end, here’s a little peek at some of what I’ve been thinking about…

One of the reasons I care so deeply about helping families embrace multiculturalism is that it makes raising children so much more enjoyable. In my line of work, I hear many parents lamenting the lack of a village. “We were never meant to raise children alone,” they say. Then, in the very next sentence, they express a distrust of the very people who would make up that village: grandparents, aunts and uncles, neighbors, teachers, and even fellow parents.

This distrust seems to stem primarily* from a belief that we, as parents, are wholly responsible for our children’s mental health, and a fear that our children’s mental health is fragile. This makes sense, given the many voices suggesting it hinges entirely on their interactions with others, especially in their early years. The stakes are high. If someone responds to our child in a way that is out of alignment with what we believe is right, we fear it may cause irreparable damage. And because we live in a multicultural society, this misalignment happens all the time.

Collective child rearing is less complicated in a monocultural “village” where most everyone shares values and beliefs about what children need. So we are told, anyway. This story shows up in advice to create your own village (aka echo chamber), and in nostalgic takes on what we can learn from “traditional” societies.

This type of premodern, precolonial cultural cohesion, however, is a myth. First of all, cross-cultural communication is as old as culture itself. Secondly, the diversity of approaches to child rearing extends so far back into history that to claim there exists a singular traditional or natural approach is incorrect. Worse, this plays directly into the dangerous myth of moral purity. (And conveniently leaves out any examples of child rearing practices that would complicate the narrative–see: infanticide, withholding colostrum, teasing, separating infants from their parents, etc.)

If the idealized conflict-free village does not exist, what’s a modern parent to do?

I suggest we instead embrace our villages with all their human messiness and disagreement. This is not to say that we allow everyone equal access to our children as a way to offload some of the labor of raising them. We have to practice discernment. It is also not to say that we should dissolve all of our differences into relativism. I’m not suggesting that we should rely on our children’s resilience to excuse behaviors that cause harm.

What I am suggesting is that if we want to have a village, we have to develop skills to be good villagers. This includes learning how to welcome difference, hold each other accountable, accept responsibility, and prioritize our relationships over control.

It sounds easier said than done, to be sure. But I’ve found that there are actually lots of simple ways to start building these village supporting skills. More on that soon.

Hasta pronto,

* There are other contributing reasons, of course. They include the personal (our own childhood experiences in which we locate harm) along with reasons grounded in a realistic power analysis (how our child’s perceived race, gender, ability, etc. increases or mitigates risk).

Get Curious

Use the following question to spark a conversation, and share your thoughts with us in the comments.

Is there an adult that unexpectedly played a meaningful, supportive role in your own childhood? What did you connect over?

Leave a comment

Can’t get enough culture?

Here are a few things I’ve found interesting lately.

• Four Families: This 1960 film from American anthropologist Margaret Mead follows four families in India, France, Japan, and Canada. You can watch it here.

• On Turning Ten: My eldest is just nine years old, but as she inches closer to double digits, she has me thinking about this poem by Billy Collins.

• 25th Annual Egg Rolls, Egg Creams, and Empanadas Street Festival: Our father’s day plan by request. New York or nowhere vibes.

Recently, a reader asked me if these posts are what will go in my book.

What book, you ask? In case you missed it, the announcement is below.

To answer that question: nothing you’ve read here will go in the book. It’s all new material! But the concepts I’ve shared here (and your responses to them) inform the writing.

On substack, I get to practice brevity. To me, it often feels like doing a short scene study. I try to go deep while maintaining a clear through line and wrapping things up in a tight and digestible 500-1000 words max.

When writing for a longer format, I get to take you through a full tour of the theater. We go backstage, see the props and costumes, lights, sound, writers room, rehearsals, and everything that goes into the play. It’s taken me years to develop my particular lens on raising multicultural children. The book will help you develop yours in a way that a short form substack could never singularly accomplish. (Though I think it is a great place to practice and sharpen it!)

But in order to finish said book, I need to focus all my attention. My creative energy is looking for all kinds of escapes as the draft gets beastlier and scarier to manage. Sometimes, those escapes are necessary. Right now, I know that energy needs to be reined in.

Surface Tension will be quiet for the next month, and possibly two.

I’ll be back when the daffodils start to bloom. In the meantime, I’ll drop some of my favorite posts below in case you missed them the first time around.

Here are some places I’m excited to direct my creative energy once I get this draft finished.

• Learning to double dutch

• Hosting a family karaoke party

• Baking focaccia

• Doing my first ever key note!!

• This substack

• My 20th college reunion (esp the unofficial one)

Where are you putting your creative energy? Let me know below.

Leave a comment

Catch you on the flip side!

Melina

ICYMI

Some posts from earlier…

Or meet me over on instagram @parentpueblo, if that’s your thing.

In last week’s At the Table interview, linguist named this plainly: “If you don’t account for the emotional or the political, something will inevitably come to a head.”

If that still feels abstract, today’s Invisible Script grounds it in a story from my own childhood. Let’s get into it.

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By now, you’ve probably seen several explanations of Bad Bunny’s masterful use of symbology throughout his Super Tazón performance. I was rapt from the opening shot of the field of sugar cane, but it was seeing Benito wake the child sleeping on chairs at the wedding that convinced me that this show was really for us, for me. The gesture passed so quickly that it could easily go unnoticed unless you’ve been that kid. Then it holds the world.

I kept my kids up late to watch the show. They watched with mouths agape, smiling, singing. They danced and jumped. They recognized the Puerto Rican flag and then, the Chilean flag. Their flags. We cheered for America–all of it–and when the show ended we hugged before I scooted them off to bed.

Laying next to my littlest while she fell asleep, I was overwhelmed with gratitude, but also something else. I found myself grappling with the grief of recognizing a rich part of my own story that has not always been welcome–even in my own home.

I grew up in a home where the melody and rhythm of my mother’s Boricua dialect was noticeably absent.

This was explained as a choice made for the sake of the theater. My parents were actors; their Spanish needed to be accessible. My father’s Chilean accent had also been softened, supposedly for the same reason but likely also from years of living in exile among Latin Americans of varied nationalities.

But it wasn’t just onstage that my mother’s Spanish changed, and even as a child I was aware that if there was a choice between the two, we only used the Chilean word.

Porotos, not habichuelas.

Palta, not aguacate.

Choclo, not maiz.

Whether it was stated explicitly or not, I understood that Chilean culture was more highly valued. I also knew that our Chilean family was descended from France. From there, I connected the dots.

Long before the world taught me that Puerto Rican culture, Caribbean culture, island culture, Indigenous culture, African culture, and Black culture were inferior to white culture, I learned it at home.

The Invisible Script

Our homes are reflections of our broader society. Boricua culture has been stigmatized for so long that my parents likely weren’t even aware that I was learning to devalue it from choices that they didn’t give much thought to.

So much of parenting happens moment to moment that we often just go with our gut.

The problem is, those instincts often originate in the systems we were raised inside, not the values we consciously want to pass on.

There was a lesson underneath the way my family spoke. I learned, quietly and early, that some parts of who I was were easier to hold than others.

Some cultures are easier to claim than others.

Some identities deserve to be centered.

Some parts of ourselves are “too much.”

Why This Matters

Multiculturalism isn’t just about adding on languages, food, or holidays. It’s about whose culture gets normalized and valued, and whose gets disappeared. When that happens inside our families, it can shape how we see ourselves and each other for years.

It is, of course, harmful for the person whose culture is sidelined. It is also harmful for our kids because they contain both cultures, histories, and identities.

Our homes are reflections, yes, but they are also forces in shaping society. Once we notice the invisible scripts we are passing on, we can work to shift them.

I am Chilena but I am also Boricua. Now that I’m grown, I refuse to choose between the two.

Try This

One of my favorite things about the halftime show was that there were people of all ages in it, just like at real Puerto Rican parties. This month, our conversation prompt is intergenerational.

Invite your family (kids too!) to imagine your own halftime show. Feel free to use the following questions as a guide:

• If you were headlining the halftime show, what part of our culture would you put on stage, even if some people didn’t understand it?

• What songs would make it on the playlist and why?

• Bad Bunny waved flags from all over the Americas. If you could carry one symbol onstage with you, what would it be and why?

• Who would you bring onstage with you that might otherwise be excluded?

• What would you give them to welcome them?

Let me know your own answers below! Especially the songs. We could all use some playlist inspo.

Leave a comment

Hasta Pronto,

Melina

What I’m Reading & Listening to This Month

• On Repentance and Repair by Danya Ruttenberg - started reading this book on ’s recommendation (see below) and it is all I want to talk about.

• on the Ezra Klein Show - I’d taken a break from this podcast but tuned in for this episode. If you need encouragement to start or return to hosting, listen in.

• The Moment with Paola and Jorge Ramos - The whole show, but most recently this episode on medical aid in dying and how culture and policy interact. Personally, I love hearing Paola and her dad move in and out of Spanish.

• How to Stop Intergenerational Trauma in Immigrant Families - this interview by of Alicia Lieberman and Vilma Reyes is deeply inspiring

• ’s cartoons - She always nails it. This one in particular really got me. Apologies to Mike and to our contractor for having intimated that with the right tools I, too, could plumb a bathroom.

Come sit with us.

-Melina

A note before we jump in: At the Table is served once a month. If you’d like to skip this course, you can opt out and still get your monthly Surface Tension and Invisible Script by updating your preferences here.

At the Table with

This month we’re joined at the table by . Malwina is the author of Mother Tongue Tied: On Language, Motherhood & Multilingualism – Disrupting Myths & Finding Meaning (Footnote Press 2024). A National Magazine Award winner, her writing has appeared in Vogue, Financial Times, Literary Hub, ELLE, The Globe and Mail and in several anthologies.

Malwina also writes one of my favorite substacks, Motherlingual, about language, mothering, multilingualism and raising multilingual children.

Here, Malwina reflects on the relational, emotional, and political layers of raising a multilingual family.

How would you describe the cultures alive in your family?

When I first became a mother, I was really focused on passing on the Polish culture and experiences I had when I was a child to my own children, and some of the ones my partner did as well growing up in Canada. But after a few years of parenting, we both realized we can create our own space as a family to yes, include some of those traditions, cultures, experiences from the past, but also create new ones for our children. It was a good reminder that our children are not us and we move forward together possibly in new and different ways.

We live in the UK but both our Polish and Canadian heritages and roots are important so we try to cultivate them but with the knowledge that we do not have to replicate everything, and certainly do not have to make it so hard for ourselves that it feels like a burden. I learnt this the hard way while trying to create the perfect Polish Christmas eve experience one year when my children were still very young. It nearly broke me. I have relaxed my approach since then, but we still do eat Polish food often, we talk about cultural traditions from my birth country and ones my partner grew up with in Canada, we listen to Polish music, watch Polish programmes, do things my partner and I did as children that we feel are important traditions for us we’d love for our kids to experience. But again, all of this with the space and knowledge that things do not have to be an exact copy of the past and also, of expanding our worlds through other cultures, through travel and new experiences.

What is something you felt strongly about as a new parent, that you feel differently about now?

I think I was very hard on myself as a new parent in a multitude of ways. I thought I had to do it all perfectly and in a very specific way. Thankfully, I feel differently about parenting now in that I try not to be so hard on myself all the time. It still happens but I also know that life moves on, things happen, we do our best and tomorrow is a new day - if we are lucky! I try very hard to have this approach to language. I do my best every day and if we do not meet my expected goals, ones that change all the time, tomorrow is a new day. I will say the one thing I felt very strongly about as a new parent that I stand by to this day is sleep! A good night’s sleep may not solve everything, but it makes everything a little bit easier to navigate.

All relationships change as couples become parents, but you write frankly about how multilingual, multicultural relationships specifically can become hostile.

What advice would you give parents as they navigate the early stages of building a multicultural family?

It is the same advice for any couple about to build a family, monolingual or multilingual: communication.

Of course raising multilingual children may add another layer to childrearing in general but I think if you communicate with one another about your desires, your goals and expectations and the reality of the situation, as well as the labour of raising multilingual children as it is truly emotional and physical labour, you will hopefully be on the same page.

Of course, things happen, emotions are very high, especially in the early days of parenting but if you’ve made a plan - with flexibility if things change because they always change - and have discussed how you want to navigate this all, you will hopefully be a united front.

And be frank, I know even in the most supportive relationships, when one partner can’t actively assist with the multilingual childrearing, there can be resentment and anger. Perhaps find ways that this partner can help, whether that is taking something else on in the family so the heritage language partner can spend some time with the child using the HL, or have the partner sit with the child when they read in the HL or watch a programme in the HL even if they do not understand. I know for some parents simply witnessing their partner trying to learn their HL is an incredible sign of support, so if there is time and space for that, think about it. This all also shows the child that both parents are supportive of multilingualism in the family so it’s a win-win.

I just facilitated a workshop about raising multilingual children yesterday and was blown away at how many couples attended together. There were couples with toddlers, with newborns, a few couples expecting their first child, and it was so refreshing to see these couples making plans together in the early days. And again, plans may change but communication is always ongoing.

Something that I appreciate about your writing is how you weave together the emotional, political, and logistical layers of multilingualism.  How does this practice show up in your parenting?

Thank you, this means a lot as it is something I strive for, so it is wonderful to hear that it comes through. Parenting is political and emotional whether you do it in one language, or four! The logistics are different with more languages of course, but I do not believe you can ever take away the political and the emotional parts of it. I am very conscious of our privilege and try to communicate that with my children all the time and tell them how vastly different everyone else’s lives are. We try to raise them with as much knowledge about the world, current events and the suffering so many others endure, linking that often to identity, language and the places we call home so that hopefully, it all comes together in their minds one day bit by bit and they can make a difference for the better somehow in the world.

We are currently learning British Sign Language together, the kids and I, and we have long talks about the way the world caters to hearing people for example and how unfair that is, and about so much more on what it means to really communicate with each other. I try to apply the political in our everyday lives as much as possible as a learning tool, often around language as that is my passion and work, but in everything else as well.

We also talk a lot about emotions in our family, for better or sometimes, maybe a little worse in that we are all very emotional, except thankfully my partner who is stoic and very patient with all our emotions!

It doesn’t always work perfectly, but I try to leave space for all these parts in our lives knowing that everything affects us as parents, and as people.

Thank you, , for sharing your thoughts on the complexities of raising multilingual children with us.

If you’d like to read more, I cannot recommend Malwina’s book more highly. It will be out in paperback on February 24th and you can preorder it here.

This month, I invite you to bring someone into conversation with you. Host a friend or neighbor for dinner and get to know each other better. (You can use any of the questions for reflection I’ve shared over the last several months, if you’d like.) Or have a bedtime chat with your child and listen deeply instead of trying to teach them something. I’ll be doing the latter because I’ve been doing a lot of explaining recently and I need to give my kids more space.

Until next time,

Melina

A Discovery and a Mirage

When I was in middle school, my brother and I discovered a sealed cardboard box at the bottom of my parents’ closet. I could tell it had traveled far because the corners were damaged and it was labeled with the markers we’d used when we left Holland almost a decade earlier. I recognized the ink from its smell.

Curious, we opened it up to discover a dozen or so containers of slides. One by one, we held the slides up to the sun. Each one was a tiny window to a past I was eager to know more about: my parents’ lives before me. There were our parents posing in front of the Parthenon. There they were in Tunisia looking young and in love.

I pulled out another slide, hungry for more. It took me a moment to make sense of the image: tanks rolling down the street in front of a government building I didn’t recognize. I pulled another one. Dead bodies on that same street. Among the boxes of personal snapshots we’d stumbled on a series of press photographs of the military coup that installed Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile in 1973.

I grew up hearing stories about Chile before and after the coup. I blamed Pinochet for why even small noises startled my dad. Why no one was allowed to walk up to him from behind. Why we’d never visited Chile (my father was exiled from 1973- 2000). With the discovery of the slides, those stories were suddenly, frighteningly illustrated.

My childhood front door was a portal between parallel universes. On either side the language was different. The rules were different. The history was different. Outside, it seemed that no one had heard of Pinochet, let alone Salvador Allende, whose image hung in our home. Inside, those stories lived alongside fairy tales just as L’Internationale was sung alongside lullabies.

As a child, if the door had closed and I’d had to pick a side to live in, I would have been tempted to run outside without looking back. Outside held the promise of safety, normalcy, and progress. Police officers were community helpers, not oppressive tools of the state. Of course, it was a mirage. Like a mirage it was impossibly alluring, but it disappeared whenever I got close. I could never fully embrace the myth because I was rooted in my family and I couldn’t have both.

I’ve been thinking about those slides a lot as images of Minnesota have poured out. My dad, like many others who have lived through or studied fascism, recognized it years before I was ready to believe it. Every day, new images illustrate his warnings and more people wake up to the reality of our current moment, both the horrors of oppression and the necessity of hope.

It’s a bewildering experience to find myself living in a shared reality that looks a whole lot like the one I tried to escape as a child. It turns out that what I thought was a portal was a revolving door. It was always the same world on either side. (Of course, my parents and many others knew this all along.)

I could feel sad about this, and often I do. But I am also relieved.

I’m relieved because all around me people are reminding me that there is also joy to be found here. That there is strength in numbers and so much love and courage to go around.

I see it in the people of Minnesota who are standing up for each other and protecting their immigrant neighbors. I see it on my own block, where we are practicing how to share resources as small as a lime and as big as our collective power. I feel it in the joy of watching Bad Bunny win album of the year, dedicate it to “all the people that had to leave their homeland, their country to follow their dreams,” and recognize all the Latino artists who came before him and deserved the same recognition but never got it.

I also see it in the families I work with who are actively learning how oppression shows up in their cross-cultural parenting, working to undo it (even if we aren’t always using these words to talk about it), and then taking these skills out into the world. This is not about helping our own kids thrive as if they exist in a context-less vacuum, but about our responsibility to reshape the systems our children are all growing within.

When my dad saw my brother and I looking at the slides, he packed them away. I didn’t see the images again until he and my mom had them printed for an exhibition in 2016. They showed them alongside their collection of protest posters, paintings, and prints from the same period. Some of these now hang in my home.

Standing in that gallery, I realized something I hadn’t fully seen as a child: my father’s stories were never only about loss or fear. They were about resistance, imagination, and the belief that another world was possible. Even in exile, even after everything he had lived through, he has never stopped dreaming or creating. He never stopped teaching us to notice injustice and beauty at the same time.

I know love will win because I’ve seen it win. I’m teaching my children the same. And I’m showing them what it looks like to fight for it together.

Get Curious

Use the following question to spark a conversation, and share your thoughts with us in the comments.

What stories about history, power, or justice did you grow up hearing at home that were absent (or different) at school?

Leave a comment

What’s Coming This Month

All month long, we’ll keep exploring what it means to raise children across cultures in a world shaped by power and how we practice moral clarity, love, and courage inside our own homes.

Next week, I’ll be sharing an interview with a linguist and parent raising multilingual children as part of my At the Table series. You’ll hear her perspective on the emotional, political, and logistical layers of multilingualism.

In two weeks, the Invisible Script of the Month will go deeper into the hidden stories we carry about power, belonging, and safety and how they shape our closest relationships.

And over on Instagram, you’ll find small reflections, real-life moments, and gentle prompts for staying grounded, curious, and connected as culture-making parents.

Want to support me as I continue growing?

Share Surface Tension with someone who would enjoy it and help open the door to deeper connection as we learn together.

Thanks in advance! I appreciate you!!

Share Surface Tension

After writing an earlier post about recognizing and rejecting inherited stories about inferiority, I got thinking about how often this shows up inside our closest relationships. (Stories about superiority show up, too.)

Many of us enter parenting believing that if we love each other well enough, raising kids together should be simple. That we shouldn’t have to work so hard to talk about power, culture, or identity. And if we do, something must be wrong.

We might fear that naming difference threatens connection, and believe that real closeness must mean avoiding conflict or neatly resolving it.

It’s the script that says harmony equals safety, and discomfort means danger.

Most of us didn’t choose this script consciously. We inherited it from cultures and experiences that taught us conflict is something to smooth over or survive, rather than something that can deepen trust.

Why It Feels So Charged

When cultural identity, race, gender, class, or belonging surface in parenting conversations, the body reacts before the mind catches up.

So when one parent names something uncomfortable, the other may hear it as criticism or a threat to the relationship itself. The first, sensing that tension, either retreats or defends. And before long, you’re no longer talking about the question at hand. Instead, you’re negotiating safety and whether your relationship can hold complexity.

This is a pattern that I come across frequently in consultations.

How It Shows Up

• The parent who wants to toughen their child up for a world that will treat them harshly, raising a child with a parent who wants home to be a haven from that same world.

• The parent who wants to protect their child from ridicule by helping them fit in, raising a child with a parent who wants their child to “fly their freak flag” confidently, haters be damned.

• The bilingual parent who wants to raise a bilingual child, and their partner who wonders whether this will confuse their child or cause speech delays.

Sometimes these are two parents trying to raise a kid together, and sometimes it is one parent who is holding all this complexity themselves. Under each desire and worry are inherited beliefs about who gets to belong and at what cost. These gut feelings can drive our actions in ways that cause harm, unless we face them.

Can you relate? How does this surface tension show up in your life?

Leave a comment

Try This

Next time you find yourself disagreeing with a partner (or with yourself!) about a parenting choice, instead of rushing to fix the moment or get back on the same page, slow down and practice naming what’s underneath.

That shift moves the conversation from problem-solving to connection-building.

You are no longer choosing between honesty and closeness.
You are practicing how to hold both.

That is leadership.

Prompt for Connection

Think of a recent parenting disagreement that felt heavier than the situation itself.

What might each of you have been protecting in that moment?

What would it sound like to name that without judging it?

Leadership begins here, in these small moments where we decide whether to retreat from complexity or grow our capacity to meet it with care. Take turns sharing with each other, and drop any reflections you have for me in the comments below.

Hasta luego,

Melina

Help spread the word

If this reflection resonates, consider sharing it with someone who’s navigating the same work. These are the kinds of conversations that grow our capacity to care for each other in spite of our differences.

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Share your thoughts

I love hearing from you. Drop your questions and reflections in the comments if you feel called to do so.

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Did someone who loves you send this your way?

I’m so glad you’re here! Hit subscribe below and get the next installment. Or head back in time and catch up here

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Parenting is full of decisions that look small from the outside and feel enormous on the inside. This series makes space for the conversations underneath those moments. It builds on the Surface Tension and Invisible Script series by bringing in other voices.

You’ll hear from parents with different stories and backgrounds, reflecting honestly on culture and how it shows up in their families.

Come sit with us.

-Melina

A note before we jump in: At the Table is served once a month. If you’d like to skip this course, you can opt out and still get your monthly Surface Tension and Invisible Script by updating your preferences here.

At the Table with

This month we’re joined at the table by , a parent and writer whose life has unfolded across Hong Kong, Germany (for 13 years), and now the U.S. Her story stretches across multiple continents and cultures. Along the way, she started a blog to help others navigate a move abroad. Now she’s widened her lens to what it means to build a life across cultures, including as a parent.

Here, Sindy reflects on the ways living abroad has shaped her. It’s an honest, thoughtful look at what happens when your world gets big enough to challenge what once felt fixed.

You can read Sindy’s writing on her substack Life Across Borders.

How would you describe the cultures alive in your family?

I grew up in Hong Kong, which is very fast paced and very focused on money and success. People talk a lot about income, job titles, and status, and that is just the air you breathe growing up there. Earning more, saving more, and “doing better” are always part of the conversation.

Moving to Germany felt like the opposite. Life there is much more about balance and working to live, not living to work. I met my husband in Germany.

Now we are raising our kids in the U.S., which feels like a third culture. In some ways it is similar to Hong Kong’s ambition, but with more emphasis on choice and self expression. Our family culture is really a blend of all of that.

What is one meaningful way your family has changed from one generation to the next?

What do you think made that shift possible or necessary?

One big shift from how I grew up is that we don’t use physical punishment at all. That was common in my childhood, and there wasn’t much talking or explaining. If you did something wrong, you were punished. If you did something right, it often went unnoticed. That made relationships feel distant.

Living in Germany showed me a different approach. Parents talk with their kids, even when they are young, and treat them with respect. That really stayed with me. In our family now, we try to communicate instead of punish, and we use encouragement and praise much more.

Another change is how we see money. Growing up in Hong Kong, everything was about earning more and saving more. Now we still value being careful, but we also believe money is there to be used well. We spend on experiences, learning, and things that create memories, not just on saving for the sake of saving.

What was an unspoken rule in your childhood home?

How did you know?

One unspoken rule in my childhood was that you don’t question adults. Decisions were made for you, without explanation, and there was no discussion. Respect meant obedience, and being a “good” child meant not causing trouble.

Another unspoken rule was that emotions were something to hide. We didn’t talk about feelings, especially not with parents. You were expected to stay strong, get on with things, and not burden others. Your worth was closely tied to academic success, productivity, and later financial success, not how you felt.

As a parent now, I’m actively unlearning that. I’m trying to create a home where it’s okay not to be okay, and where my children are valued for who they are, not just what they achieve.

What unspoken rule or expectation do you think your children are learning in your home or community?

Who or what is shaping it, and where do you see it showing up in their lives?

My kids are learning that their feelings matter. They can ask questions and say when something is hard, and they’re always welcome to tell us how they really feel without worrying about consequences. We want them to communicate openly and know that we are always there to support them, no matter if their feelings are good or bad.

They’re also learning that curiosity is more important than just following the rules. For example, one rule at home is that we eat dinner first, then shower and go to bed. My daughter asked why we can’t shower first and then eat. She doesn’t just accept things as they are — she wants to understand why and how else it could work.

Culture shapes our practices and behaviors. It also shapes how we understand what’s important, what our role is, and what our children’s role is in the world. And we have agency in choosing what we pass down and what gets adapted or left aside.

Thank you, for sharing with us how your family doing this in real time.

What is a saying or phrase you grew up with that would tell us about how children or adults were viewed?

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The Moment That Cracked Me Open

When I was a nanny, fresh out of college and building a creative life in a city where that still felt possible, I was frequently mistaken for a young mom. Never mind that the children I cared for were both fair-skinned, blonde, and blue-eyed. People seemed to look past that.

At the time, I believed what they were seeing was my deep affection for the children—the love between us.

These days, with my own children (two girls who look far more like me than the children I nannied ever did), I am instead often mistaken for their nanny. It has happened more times than I can count, but it was the most recent moment that finally cracked something open in me.

During coffee hour at my children’s school—a casual morning gathering for parents to connect and hear about upcoming events—a white parent approached me to ask whether I was a classmate’s caregiver. When I explained that I was, in fact, one of her parents, her eyes widened and her speech quickened. The shift was subtle enough to pass unnoticed by many, but unmistakable to me with my lifetime of training in moments such as this. It was the recognition of a mistake.

And just as familiar was my own response. I moved quickly to smooth the moment over, working to spare both of us any discomfort. But I left the interaction feeling unsettled. The tools that I once used willingly no longer serve me, and I was disappointed at having reached for them.

Multiple conversations with dear friends later, I’ve put some pieces together.

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The Story I Didn’t Know I Was Carrying

Years ago, when people mistook me for a parent while I was “just” a nanny, I felt pride. I told myself it was about being seen as loving and capable, because underneath that was something too painful to name. My pride masked a relief at not being seen as just another Latina nanny, and everything I had learned from the world around me to associate with that role.

That same internalized story surfaced again at my children’s school. My instinct to protect the other parent from embarrassment came from the same place. A learned reflex: don’t make this about race, don’t make this about power, don’t make this uncomfortable. It also revealed my own assumptions about her reaction. Feeling dehumanized, I turned around and did the same to her.

What I Chose In the Face of Discomfort

In rushing through the discomfort to make the moment disappear, I also closed the door on the possibility of honesty, repair, and growth for both of us. Instead of leading with connection, I receded to familiar haunts. Only this time, instead of finding safety, I found grief.

I am slowly, imperfectly, learning to grow my capacity for the kind of connection that allows for accountability, tenderness, and truth to exist at the same time.

Not just for me, but for my children.

Leadership Begins at Home

This is where the work of leadership shows up for me now.

When I move quickly to erase myself, to protect someone else from discomfort, or to carry the emotional load of a conflict alone, I am modeling a way of being in the world.

I am teaching my daughters something about who we are allowed to be.

Two white-presenting Latina girls are watching me learn, in real time, whether we make ourselves smaller to keep things smooth… or whether we grow ourselves and our relationships until they are strong enough to hold complexity.

Undoing that internalized story is not abstract work.
It is daily culture-making.

This month, when I say leadership I mean stepping into the version of ourselves that is brave enough to reshape the emotional culture of our families.

Get Curious without Getting Confrontational

The work of undoing these inherited stories doesn’t happen all at once. And you don’t have to start with confrontation or grand declarations. Try curiosity instead.

If you want a place to begin, use this question as a journaling prompt or to spark a conversation with a friend or partner.

What’s something about your upbringing that shaped your sense of worth (for better or for worse) that you still carry into parenting?

Until next time,

Melina

Ever been mistaken for your child’s nanny? Let me know in the comments. <3

I know we’re not alone in this because wrote about her experience with this beautifully for here.

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What’s Coming This Month

All month long, we’ll keep exploring how to lead as parents who are shaping culture in our homes and communities every day.

Next week, I’ll be sharing a conversation with a fellow parent and substacker raising multicultural kids as part of my new series At the Table.

In two weeks, the Invisible Script of the Month will dive deeper into the invisible stories we carry about identity, power, and belonging, and how they shape the way we show up in our closest relationships.

And over on Instagram, you’ll find more small reflections, real-life moments, and gentle reminders about what it means to lead as culture-making parents.

This is not about perfection.
It’s about practice.

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Dear readers,

Before we head into a new year, I wanted to send a quick message of gratitude to you. This newsletter would not exist without you.

Whether you’ve been reading quietly, replying with your own stories, or sharing these reflections with a partner or friend, you have helped make this space feel alive. Writing Surface Tension has been one of the most grounding parts of my year, because of the care and curiosity you bring to these conversations.

Since I picked up the proverbial pen again this past August, we’ve explored belonging, cultural difference, connection, conflict, and the small moments that carry big meaning in family life. Next year, we’ll keep going with more stories, more tools, more gentle unpacking of the invisible scripts shaping how we love and raise our kids.

I’m especially excited for what’s ahead, including opportunities to hear from other voices, and ways to connect more meaningfully with each other.

Thank you for being here. Truly.
I’m so glad to be carrying this work forward with you into the new year.

Below, you’ll find some inspiration and offerings.

With gratitude,
Melina

Inspirations

Love a New Year’s resolution? (I do!) This year, consider joining me in turning our focus away from the self and towards community. More than reviving or tending to my existing relationships, my resolution for the year is to deepen them.

Not sure where to start? Here are some ideas and inspiration:

Plan a meal train.

wrote beautifully this year about learning to accept help in her essay about meal trains. Meal trains bring us closer at vulnerable moments when many find it easier to turn away. Not sure what to cook? has you covered.

Organize a potluck.

Love em or hate em, potlucks bring people together. For a fascinating dive into types of potlucks and ways they build connection, check out ’s take. A potluck is a way to share culture. My challenge to you is to organize one with a group you don’t feel close enough to yet to ask for a favor. Maybe it’s your neighbors, the families in your kid’s class, or some colleagues?

Practice curiosity.

Every month, I share a prompt for connecting with your partner in my Invisible Script series. The questions are meant to get the conversation flowing so you can learn more about each other. But they are also great questions to bring to your friends! Sharing culture can happen through story telling as much as through shared meals.

What would you want to see more of here on Surface Tension? Let me know below.

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This week, we’re taking the next step: How to have that conversation with your partner when each of you is carrying meaning that isn’t visible on the surface.

These days, it feels particularly necessary to engage in conversations that bring us closer across differences. I am sending my deepest love to the many across the world who are hurting today because of our tragic failures to see the humanity in each other.

Joy Misses the Point

Many of us grew up with holiday expectations shaped by the dominant culture we grew up surrounded by. Case in point: when I think of Christmas, I still think of opening scenes of Home Alone even though the holiday looked quite different at my house. In fact, the parts of it that were different (like celebrating on Noche Buena instead of Christmas day) were often a sore spot growing up.

In my last newsletter, I wrote that I am not precious about holiday traditions. As a child who moved across countries and states several times, I spent much of my childhood preoccupied with fitting in. I’m not precious about traditions in part because I got very comfortable with setting aside my own culture in favor of others. So, sometimes for better but often for worse, I find it easy to let go of traditions. It is a bigger challenge for me to hold onto my culture than it is to adapt or release it. This is something I am working on.

So it was hard for me to understand why it was easy for me to add Hanukkah onto my holiday celebrations, but painful for my Jewish husband to add Christmas onto his. Especially since neither of us consider ourselves religious. I thought I was welcoming him in, but he felt threatened.

“Christmas has always been available to Jews, on the condition that we let go of who we are,” he explained. Yes, feeling excluded from Christmas, which as the dominant celebration overshadowed everything else, had been difficult as a child. But being included now felt complicated, too.

What’s Underneath

If you grow up inside holiday landscapes that feel fixed, it can seem as if every “real” family celebrates the same days in the same ways. Even when our own families don’t follow that script, the dominant culture around us does, and it quietly teaches us:

Your traditions are optional. Mine are baked in.

For those of us who learned or were forced to adapt, this invisible script runs deep. We become fluent in folding ourselves into the dominant template. We learn to minimize what is culturally ours so as to downplay difference. That’s why someone like me could easily add Hanukkah without hesitation… I was practiced at it.

Yet my Jewish husband felt the weight of adding Christmas, because inclusion in a dominant tradition isn’t always welcoming. It is also an invitation to erase yourself.

And that’s the part we’re rarely encouraged to confront:

How we celebrate holidays isn’t just about what we do.

It’s about whose story gets told. It’s about power.

Why It Feels Charged

Holidays carry emotional residue from the worlds that raised us: power, belonging, visibility, cost. When partners navigate blended holidays, we’re not just deciding about food or timing or decorations. We’re actually negotiating inherited power dynamics.

That’s why a simple conversation about “Should we celebrate this?” can feel like a referendum on your childhood or your cultural legitimacy.

Let’s Get Into It

Here’s a way to bring this invisible script into the open without collapsing into defensiveness or guilt: Try naming the tension, not just the preference. Get under the practices to explore what’s behind your gut instincts and desires.

The goal isn’t to make any fixed decisions or create a perfectly balanced holiday. This is an ever evolving process.

The goal is for both of you to understand the power, history, and emotional truth behind why certain traditions feel the way they do.

Prompt for Connection

What holiday tradition feels surprisingly tender or emotionally loaded for you?

And what does that tenderness reveal about the cultural messages or power dynamics you absorbed growing up?

I’m growing this substack and have big plans for 2026. Help me bring others into the conversation by sharing Surface Tension with friends and family. I truly appreciate it!

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As I look ahead to 2026, I’m dreaming up ways for us to grow the conversation. If there is something you’d like to see here, let me know. I’m all ears.

xo Melina

I’ve never been one to cling to holiday traditions. I’m the one in the family always ready to experiment with new recipes, create new rituals, and generally shake things up—sometimes to the point of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Thankfully, my brother balances out my proclivities by clinging to traditions like a baby’s fist to an index finger.

Because of him, our family holidays maintain a thread of continuity from year to year that anchors us.

What Happens When New Cultures Enter the Room?

It was easy enough to negotiate our family holidays when it was just the two of us and my parents. But when we each got married and then had children with spouses from different cultural backgrounds (in my case, a Jewish husband), I began to wonder what Christmas at my parents’ house would start to look like.

Would we hold fast to our way of doing things? Would we adapt to the point we might not even recognize it?

In our family, we’ve generally taken a more is more approach. So when my brother and his family fly in this December, I expect we will:

• Decorate the tree with the same ornaments as always

• Make his wife’s Midwestern wreath cookies (a truly welcome addition)

• Eat my dad’s famous escargots

• Open gifts on Noche Buena instead of Christmas morning

• And light Hanukkah candles on the nights that overlap

To me, this feels fantastic. Like I said, I’m not precious about holidays. But I know it isn’t as simple for everyone else involved.

The Hidden Weight of “Just One More Tradition”

I was recently speaking with another interfaith couple. They’ve been celebrating Christmas with their children, too. But the father (who is Jewish like Mike) shared that his feelings around it (like Mike’s) are far from straightforward.

Celebrating Christmas feels complicated, not because these dads don’t want their children to experience it, but because the holiday carries memories of exclusion. Growing up, Christmas wasn’t just a holiday they didn’t celebrate. It was a season that made them feel outside of something loud and culturally dominant.

So even now, surrounded by people they love, there’s discomfort.

For my part, I am eager to celebrate with my children, but wary of recreating Mike’s experience of a holiday that swallows other traditions whole. Our approach includes lots of conversations and check-ins as we go, but every family has to find their own way forward as they balance all the dimensions of their particular situation.

Note: I am focusing on culture here, but families navigate all sorts of power dynamics as we celebrate our various holidays. Holiday decisions are rarely just logistical. They’re emotional, political, cultural, and deeply personal. That’s why reimagining holiday traditions can’t just be about what feels good to you.

What Our Kids Are Actually Learning

And then, of course, there are our children. They’re soaking it all in:
Which traditions we hold onto.
Which ones we gently let go of.
How we negotiate, compromise, protect, and experiment.

On the surface, we adults may be having conversations about whether to get a tree or when to open presents. But underneath is a question that many multicultural families meet every December:

How do we build a holiday season that includes everyone in our family when our traditions carry joy, loss, longing, and complex power dynamics?

A Conversation Starter for Your Next Late-Night Debrief

Before the holiday season fully descends upon us, check in with each other. You’d be surprised how much opens up from this single question. The goal here is not to talk logistics, but to get at what matters to you and why. Get curious.

What’s one holiday tradition from your childhood you want to carry forward, and one you’re ready to release?

If you want to read more about how to navigate this exact conversation, I’ll share more in two weeks in the Invisible Script of the Month. This question is a starting point, not an end.

Make sure you subscribe to follow along!

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Until next time!

Melina

This month, we’re continuing the conversation about connection across the holiday table. Family dinners are rich with tradition, but they also carry invisible tensions. This month’s Invisible Script looks at what’s happening beneath the surface when expectations, culture, and personalities collide around the table.

Who does the work? Family roles in the spotlight

This story comes from a couple I worked with who are raising two young boys. Both parents want to raise sons who are helpful and engaged in the life of the family, and the father is intentional about modeling this by doing household chores and carework in a way that diverges from the way his father participated in family life. But during holidays at the grandparents’ a dynamic that is familiar to many emerges.

“It is always the women doing everything except for maybe carving the meat. None of the men lift a finger except for him, and even then his mom just takes things out of his hands and tells him to go relax,” shared the mother.

She worried about what their sons learn from these interactions, especially when their father acquiesced.

He wondered if insisting on helping when it wasn’t wanted was disrespectful, and what his sons might learn if he ignored their grandmother and pushed to help even when it wasn’t expected (or welcome).

Both of them knew that throwing angry glances across the table was not helping anyone.

Invisible Script

This might seem like a simple question of chores and sharing them equitably. Or like a question of setting boundaries with grandparents. But underneath the surface there’s a collision of values, histories, and social norms.

• The mother’s concern reflects a particular vision of fairness and active participation. She wants her sons to internalize participating as a responsibility, not a favor.
  

• The father’s hesitation is rooted in respect for his family of origin and the unspoken rules that have always governed his interactions with his mother. He is balancing loyalty and deference with the desire to model a different way of being for his children.
  

• Implicit cultural scripts are at work: notions of gender roles, family hierarchy, and what counts as appropriate participation in domestic life are being reinforced or challenged in front of the next generation.
  

• AND this is also about teaching children how to navigate complexity: how to be caring without being controlling, helpful without overstepping, and respectful without passivity.

Why this question feels so charged

A moment like this hits hard because it carries multiple stakes at once. Parents are confronting the tension between the life they want to create and the traditions they’ve inherited. Meanwhile every action (or inaction) feels like a lesson for the children, creating pressure to get it “right.” The father’s desire to avoid offending family meets with the mother’s desire to intervene to create a charged, almost impossible negotiation.

And underneath it all is the question: how do children learn what it means to belong, to contribute, and to care?

Try this

This holiday season, if you find yourself in similarly charged moments, try experimenting with small, intentional gestures rather than grand interventions to balance respect with participation.

When cultural or familial norms feel complicated, take a moment to talk about how different families do things. Sharing stories of what you grew up with, or asking others about their traditions, models navigating complex social dynamics thoughtfully without rushing to judgment.

These conversations don’t have to be heavy! Conversations that spark reflection and curiosity can lead to deep shifts and open possibilities we didn’t realize existed.

Some prompts to spark reflection:

• What’s the silliest tradition your family has around the holidays?

• If you could invent one new family ritual this year, what would it be?

• Who’s the unsung hero at our table, and how can we celebrate them?

• What’s one task at the holiday table you secretly enjoy (or secretly dread)?

• If kids and adults could trade roles for one meal, what would happen?

  ---

Follow along on Instagram for shorter reflections, invitations to connect, and more.

The golden light that floods my living room in November is also my sign that winter is coming, and with it lots of holidays. I’ve never particularly enjoyed holiday dinners. I’ve always felt there’s too much pressure to enjoy them, too much perfectionism (sometimes my own), too much rigidity (not mine), and too many dishes. I’ll gladly host dinner any night of the week, and in fact plan my groceries in a way that allows me to add people to the table easily, but holiday dinners make me want to retreat to my bedroom like a sulky teenager.

I know I’m not alone in this because in my consultations with parents I’m already fielding questions about conflict at the family dinner table that makes folks want to skip over the holidays altogether. Sometimes the conflict is about expectations about how kids should behave. Other times it’s about what is appropriate conversation. Or what role each person is expected to play.

I get it. And I also would never skip a holiday dinner. At their best they are amazing opportunities for us to come together and connect meaningfully.

So instead of retreating, I make a point of sandwiching holiday dinners with one of my absolute favorite group activities: going for a walk.

Family walks through the woods, on the beach, along the boardwalk, even a short one around the block are the key for me to feel connected and ready to sit at the table and break bread.

Rather than break down a Surface Tension this month (since I have a feeling you know quite well the tensions that come up at your holiday table) I want to offer this ritual to you as you head into a season of connection.

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3 Ways Family Walks Prepare Us for Holiday Connection

1. Resetting the mood:

Walking together gives everyone a chance to shake off tension, release some energy, and arrive at the table in a calmer, more present place. It’s like pressing a reset button before the next round of dishes, stories, and expectations begins.

2. Creating a shared rhythm:

Moving together side by side noticing the trees, the light and sounds gives a natural sense of togetherness without pressure. It’s a quiet, unscripted way to connect across generations, letting kids, parents, and grandparents all exist in the same space without having to perform. (I prefer paths and streets that don’t require lots of rules or hand-holding to be safe.)

3. Practicing conversation and listening:

Walks open up a different kind of dialogue. Because you’re moving, you can talk, ask questions, and listen differently than at a table crowded with food and opinions. And you can more easily drift in and out of conversations when they feel casual. Sometimes the most meaningful conversations about family, traditions, or even differences happen when the only thing you have to focus on is the path ahead.

Get Curious without Getting Confrontational

Not sure what to talk about on a family walk? You don’t need to talk at all, but if you find yourself wanting to get a conversation started here is a suggestion. There is no right answer to this question, just an opportunity to get to know each other more deeply.

What is a rule that our/your family had that felt unfair to you as a child?

(mine involves nail polish)

What about you? What rituals, traditions, or conversations help you stay grounded and connected through moments of family tension?

Share them below… I certainly could use more tools!

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Hasta pronto,

Melina

This month we’ve been talking about belonging and how kids are welcomed into community. Now I’m turning my attention to “child-centered” spaces and what they tell us about the cultural values we have around childhood.

Two “child-centered” spaces with two very different messages.

THE YARD

One Saturday, my family rode the ferry to Governor’s Island to visit The Yard, the junkyard playground of my childhood dreams. Parents aren’t allowed inside.

On the other side of a gate, kids hammered, dragged boards, and climbed child-built structures that were, per the signs directed at us adults, “safe enough.” As in, back off. Playworkers circulated. They were not there to instruct, but to protect children’s agency and ensure cooperation and safety.

The message: play, on your own terms.

The freedom to play and problem-solve is a child’s right.

THE MET

A week later, we visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s children’s play space. At first glance, it seemed made for kids: colorful signage, hands-on displays, and stroller parking sent strong signals.

But the closer I looked, the more adult-centered it felt. Signs dictated exactly how to play: “Touch & Smell.” “Play & Listen.” Rules like “no running” and “keep shoes on” were enforced by staff and echoed by caregivers, even though the floor was padded and most materials secured. A table with built-in screens offered an experience with metal, clay, and wood. Children could touch the materials in the form of three identical cylinders connected to the table with a rod, while watching videos of adults using and explaining each.

The message: this is art, on our terms.

A fitting lesson for a museum that houses an invaluable collection of arts and antiquities to be admired and not touched, even if it feels less comfortable to me.

Invisible Script

To be child-centered is to prioritize children’s needs.

This seems straightforward until you realize that we don’t all agree on what those needs are. Sure those needs change based on the environment and the context, but even within the same environment and context my understanding may differ from yours. This is why parents aren’t allowed into The Yard, and why there are signs telling us what rules to enforce at The Met. Our hosts understand that they must make the expectations clear because we might not intuit them.

Which of the following do you agree with? (or if it’s easier to answer… which one makes you bristle?)

Children thrive when trusted with real freedom. They don’t need every risk managed or every choice pre-approved. Adults can trust them to learn from experience what is appropriate and what is not.

VS.

Children thrive when guided by structure. Freedom is valuable, but without clear rules, things get chaotic. Adults know what’s safe and meaningful, and setting boundaries helps children learn how to belong.

Why this question feels so charged

On the surface, it’s just about whether kids can run free or should follow rules. Although of course, in reality it is not one or the other, but rather a balance. But underneath, it’s about what you believe children need in order to grow and who gets to decide.

Beneath the moment is a bigger cultural question:

When you step into these spaces with your child, you’re also carrying your own history: when you were trusted to take risks, when you were guided with structure, when you felt safe or stifled. That’s why a playground full of hammers might feel liberating to one parent and terrifying to another, or why a rule-filled playroom might feel reassuring to one and suffocating to another (hi, it’s me!).

And the stakes are high because belonging isn’t distributed equally. Some kids are given more leeway, more patience, more trust than others. And parents know this.

The tension isn’t just about kids running or rules on a wall. It’s about how we balance agency and guidance, freedom and care, and which balance feels truest to us and what is possible to pass on to our children safely.

Try This

The next time you enter a space with your child (a playground, a library, a family gathering, even the grocery store) pause and ask yourself:

What balance between freedom and structure does this place expect?

What balance am I carrying in?

Notice where those two align and where they clash, and consider why.

Later, you might share your reflection with your partner: “I realized today I wanted to step in, not because I thought the kids couldn’t handle it, but because I thought that’s what was expected.”

Sometimes the most powerful shift is becoming more conscious of the balances you’re negotiating, often without even realizing it.

To read my own reflection on one such moment, check out this months’ previous newsletter: Children in the Circle, and How Belonging Feels

Until next time,

Melina

What I’m reading and watching this month:

A few things I thought you might like that are not parenting related because I contain multitudes. :)

• Group Life - Priya Parker’s substack is breathing new life into my gatherings. Get your people together, folks! Priya makes it simple and deeply meaningful.

• Someone’s Gotta Give by Alisha Fernandez Miranda - Started this book by the pool this summer and finished it as a treat with my morning coffee. It is a fun and funny read that is also a smart and fascinating peek into the world of philanthropy.

• Unforgotten - Murder mysteries on PBS? Sign me up. I love to solve a cold case. Fair warning, this is not for you if you like things resolved in a tight 42 min. For that, may I humbly suggest my standby: Law & Order SVU.

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Follow along on Instagram for shorter reflections, invitations to reflect, and laughs.

In my own life, I’ve also been noticing the different ways children enter community life across cultural settings.

Not just whether they’re there, but how they’re there. What role they’re invited to play. What part of themselves they get to bring forward. And how the adults present include them (or don’t.)

That question stayed with me over the last couple of weeks as I took my own kids into different spaces.

Bread and Puppet Theater: Shared Story, Shared Song

One Friday after school, we rushed across Brooklyn to see Bread and Puppet Theater with my parents. They had last seen the company in Paris in the 1980s.

We joined families gathered on a lawn, facing a school bus turned set piece with a hand-painted backdrop reading Our Domestic Resurrection Revolution in Progress. A group of local musicians who had joined the company for the performance struck up a familiar but unexpected Chilean protest song. My five-year-old, sitting closer to the stage, turned to find us with a giant smile of recognition and yelled to get our attention. My daughters, like me, have grown up chanting el pueblo unido jamás será vencido at marches and, on occasion, at bedtime.

I caught myself dreading needing to shush her, or to rush over and sit her securely in my lap. I quickly scanned the crowd, trying to read the room. Were people annoyed?

At other shows I’ve taken my kids to, from the Metropolitan opera to story time at the library, the expectation is to sit still, stay quiet, and listen. Those scripts about “appropriate behavior” kicked in before I even realized it.

But at Bread and Puppet, I slowly realized the opposite was true. Next to me, my parents had leapt to their feet, fists raised, to sing loudly alongside the company. I felt my heart expand with gratitude at being able to share this moment together. It was comforting to notice that none of us needed to perform “good assembly etiquette” (as the teachers at my kids’ school call it, and which includes “clapping only when appropriate”) to belong.

Bread and Puppet has always been about more than entertainment. Their radical circuses are about pulling the community into a shared ritual where everyone—from the puppeteers, to the musicians, to the audience (including children)—contributes. Jeering, cheering, and chanting is encouraged. None of it is dumbed down for kids.

My daughters were wiggly, curious, full of questions, and still welcomed as they were.

Watching them, I remembered how they were folded into another intergenerational circle a few years ago. On my uncle’s porch in Puerto Rico during Día de Reyes, my family sang décimas, improvised ten-line verses carrying humor, history, and family lore. The songs are living archives built over the years. My adult cousins added lyrics, others joined with a guitar or güiro. Children were invited too, handed instruments or danced with. But their role was different. They listened, clapped, and danced along, taking in the rhythm and the stories until the day they’d be old enough to add their own verses.

Both Bread and Puppet and my Puerto Rican family wove children into culture-making, not by centering them, but by trusting them to find their place inside a larger, intergenerational story. Sure, much of it went over their heads, but a lot of it landed, too. As my eight-year-old affirmed, eyes wide open, during the puppet show: “Everything they are saying up there is true.”

Belonging isn’t just personal

The urge to shush my children that rose up in me at Bread and Puppet wasn’t really about my kids. It was about me navigating the invisible rules of the space.

In some spaces, children are expected to be quiet; in others, they are expected to participate. I was wrestling with what role was appropriate for them to play and how my parenting would be read by the other adults in the circle.

I notice the same thing at playgrounds or playdates.

Every time we walk up to a new group of kids, I find myself scanning the scene to figure out the invisible rules.

How do these kids share? What’s considered too rough? Who gets included and who gets left out? And what is my role as an adult?

My kids, too, pick up on those cues, though not all children do. Sometimes they fit right in. Sometimes the rules feel confusing, or even stacked against them. In those moments, I feel that same tension rising in me: Do I intervene? Do I hold back? Am I teaching them to adapt or protecting them from exclusion?

What shapes these norms?

Ideas about “good behavior” are deeply cultural.

• In some intergenerational spaces, children’s presence is valued most when it’s contained: quiet, orderly, learning from adults.

• In others, children are expected to engage with the adults through sound, movement, curiosity, and even chaos.

• And in everyday spaces like playgrounds, where children were once often left to sort out belonging on their own, we adults are now a strong presence, intervening with our own ideas, rules, and invisible hierarchies shaping how we relate to each other.

None of these dynamics are neutral. They carry histories of how we think about authority, knowledge, and belonging. They also carry real consequences. For some kids, the “rules” of a space feel intuitive or welcoming, for others they’re a mismatch.

Those mismatches often reflect bigger forces: whose cultural norms are being privileged, whose voices are amplified, and whose ways of being are treated as disruptive.

For parents navigating more than one cultural world (as most of us are), this can be disorienting. Whose rules do we follow? What feels familiar? What feels strange or even harmful?

And what happens when my instincts and others’ don’t align?

Notice Together, Connect Together

Often, the way we notice belonging comes from the stories we carry from our own childhoods. The way Bread and Puppet included children felt familiar to me, but it might have felt chaotic to someone else for whom enforcing “good assembly etiquette” comes more naturally.

Sharing our reflections about these questions with others can create space for curiosity, especially when our instincts about how children should behave don’t always align.

Here are two questions to get the conversation started with your partner this week:

What’s one intergenerational gathering or tradition from your childhood that made you feel like you belonged?

And what do you hope our kids will remember in the same way?

Until next time,

Melina

It looks like a simple question: “Can you help me?”

Usually accompanied by those big eyes that are hard to resist.

The moment your child asks you, your instinct kicks in (or maybe you feel it as tension): do you step in, or hold back? And what about your partner—would they handle it the same way, or differently?

Underneath it all is a deeper question: What does it mean to care?

Every parenting moment carries culture. Even the tiny ones. Sometimes it feels like you and your partner are clashing over tactics, but usually the conflict is rooted in what those moments mean to each of you.

This month, we’re looking at a moment many of us get stuck in: when your child can do something on their own but won’t.

Let’s break it down.

Surface Moment (and this week, confession)

The tiny trigger for a bigger story.

My mom cut my meat until I was 10. And yes, I was perfectly capable of using a knife.

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Invisible Script - The deeper stories fueling the tension.

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​Love means anticipating a need before it’s spoken.

VS.

Love means letting them figure it out.

When my kids ask for help with things they can do, like cutting food, brushing hair, or tying their shoes, I feel a pull to step in, the way my parents once did for me. Not because they can’t do it, but because I hear a need between the lines for a moment of connection. For me, showing care means meeting it.

But other adults in their lives—teachers, neighbors, even my husband sometimes—see it differently. To them, stepping back is an act of trust. Letting them figure it out, even if takes longer or is a struggle, is their way of encouraging autonomy. For them, showing care means giving space.

Neither approach is wrong. We’re just working from different definitions of care.

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Why This Feels So Big

When Mike doesn’t step in, I feel it in my chest.
When I do step in, he feels it in his.

This is the invisible script beneath our dynamic: How we show love is deeply personal. Whether that love is recognized feels even more so.

To me, helping feels warm and connected. To him, it can look like coddling.
To him, stepping back feels respectful and trust-based. To me, it can feel withholding.

This is the heart of it. We are two people, with two definitions of care, both rooted in love. The tension isn’t a sign that one of us is doing it wrong. It’s an opening to notice where each of our instincts come from, and what stories we’re carrying into the moment.

Try This

Making room for curiosity and connection.

Next time your child asks for help with something they can already do, try this before you respond:

1. Notice your body. Do you feel the tug to jump in, or the urge to hold back?

2. Name the instinct. “I want to help” or “I want them to try.”

3. Trace it back. Ask yourself: Where does this instinct come from? Why does this moment feel tender or tense for me?

No right or wrong answers. Just a chance to get a little more clarity about the stories under the moment.

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Until next time,

Melina

What I’m Reading, Listening, and Laughing to This Month

A few things I thought you might like that made me pause, laugh, or rethink something I thought I knew.
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​Fumbling Toward Repair by Mariame Kaba & Shira Hassan - technically a guide for community accountability, but its wisdom around repair, boundaries, and care feels just as relevant for family life. Especially in those moments when parenting brings up our hardest, least polished parts.

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​“Mothering, Not Smothering: Power‑With When Your Child Is Struggling” from The Come Back to Care Podcast - this episode explores how to show up with support without overstepping, teaching autonomy while staying deeply present. A beautiful companion to our theme of noticing invisible scripts around helping and holding back

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​Children’s House of Horrors cartoon by Roz Chast - wrote about dressing kids for my book and was reminded of this gem. Click the link for a good laugh.

The same toddler who used to happily devour avocado, blueberries, and the occasional chunk of liver was suddenly rejecting food. I knew it was a typical developmental shift, but when it was my child going through it, it felt like a crisis.

Which is how I found myself in the middle of daily three-person face-offs around our kitchen table. My husband with a look of quiet disapproval. My daughter with yogurt oozing all over her face. And me, silently pleading for just a few more bites from her as I scraped the rejected yogurt off her chin to pop it back into her mouth.

That night, my husband and I had the same tense conversation we’d been having for weeks.
"If we keep doing it for her, she’ll never learn."
"If she doesn’t eat, she won’t sleep. If she won’t sleep, we won’t sleep."

Neither of us was being unreasonable, but we were stuck. It felt like we were debating strategy, but underneath that was something much stickier that we hadn’t named yet.

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From purees to panic

When our daughter first started solids, making her purees gave me joy. Part of that had to do with hearing about how my dad used to always make my baby food. He’d go to the local market in Colombia, picking out roots and vegetables to cook into soups and purées at home. The image of my father lived in my head, not as a parenting strategy, but as a story of care. Feeding my daughter that way felt tender and familiar.

Meanwhile, in our Brooklyn parenting circle, baby-led weaning was “the way” to transition to solid food. It’s backed by research, endorsed by experts, and reinforced in every mom group. We quickly combined these feeding approaches. As we watched our daughter happily feeding herself, we felt like we were totally crushing it.

Until, out of nowhere, she stopped. She’d wander off mid-meal, climbing out of her chair, returning for a tiny bite, and wandering off again, declaring she was “all done.”

My instinct told me to pick up her spoon and start to feed her again. If she wasn’t going to do it, someone had to help her fill her belly.

What I saw as loving support for our daughter, my husband saw as backtracking. Helping her eat now felt like interfering with her growth.

What looked like a disagreement over a spoon was actually two people responding from two very different places. Each of us was trying to protect what we believed mattered most.

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The iceberg under every parenting decision

Anthropologist Edward T. Hall, drawing inspiration from Freud, described culture like an iceberg: the visible parts — holidays, music, art, food, language — are just the tip. Underneath are the invisible forces like values, fears, beliefs, worldviews, and memories.

When something small feels disproportionately big, it’s because you’re only seeing the top of the iceberg. In parenting, you’re only seeing the behavior. What you’re not seeing is why it matters to you — beliefs about love, safety, responsibility, or what it means to be a good parent.

The spoon was visible. What it represented to each of us was not. Whereas I came from a family rooted in interdependence, he had grown up with independence as a core value.

It’s natural to turn to the latest research and parenting trends to figure out the “right” way forward, and there’s always something else at play underneath the surface. Your parenting decisions are also shaped by the cultures you come from, the ones you married into, and the fears and hopes you bring to the table for what you want to create together.

A new kind of conversation

In the end, there was no brilliant parenting hack or gold-standard, science-backed solution that fixed our daughter’s eating habits. Like most phases, we went in circles agonizing over the right solution, and she just grew out of it. As quickly as she had stopped eating on her own, she just as quickly picked up her own spoon again.

Our second daughter is now five and asking for help at the table after years of refusing any help and insisting, “I do it!”

We still have those flickers of “Am I doing this wrong?” or “Here we go again,” but our post-bedtime conversations are much more nuanced.

We’ve shifted from “what’s the right thing to do” to “what does this moment mean to each of us?”

Get curious without getting confrontational

The more curious you get about what’s beneath the surface, the more space you make for both of you to show up with your full stories.

You don’t have to dive straight into the hard stuff. You just start noticing and share some laughs to lighten the mood. Here’s a question to ask your partner this week.

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What felt totally normal in your house growing up, but would surprise me?

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Until next time!

Melina

“Trump is a bad person.”

“Yeah, I know. You know, he won the election.”

“Yeah, I know. He’s gonna do bad things.”

“Yeah, he is definitely gonna do bad things. But not to us, right?”

“Yeah, really bad things.”

“Yeah, but not to us. Right?”

“What kind of bad things?”

“I don’t know.”

By the time I considered how I might interject, the conversation had moved onto what other snacks I’d brought and whether we were going to have dinner together. I resisted the urge to backtrack and force a conversation none of us were able to have thoughtfully in that particular moment. I have made that mistake before. But I made a mental note to reopen the conversation with my own kids later.

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I moved to Georgia (the state) as a six year old. I had lived in various other places before that: Colombia, Holland, France, Puerto Rico. But my world had been small, limited, as young children’s worlds are, to my family and close friends. By the time we moved to Georgia, my sense of the wider world had started to expand.

Our family moved to the States for a teaching job my mom had landed at West Georgia College. It was not our first move, but it was the first time I noticed language being a barrier for all of us. My parents each knew enough English to get by, but, in the US, their accents and small errors were less easily forgiven than they had been when they spoke French in Paris or Dutch in Rotterdam. There was much to learn and my parents knew no one so they went about it with little help.

From our neighbors, my parents learned to shop for groceries at the local Kroger. My brother and I would hang off of the grocery cart or ride underneath it snacking on samples and making requests for canned cheese, neon cereal, and other new-to-us delicacies as we passed them. If we were lucky, one would be on sale enough to make it into the cart.

At six, I was awake enough to the world to start making quick sense of our new home. I clocked the looks we got

when we spoke Spanish in public–surprise, confusion, disgust. A single school day revealed that my classmates were divided and divided themselves along racial lines. It wasn’t official, and there were exceptions, but the pattern was clear. The vast majority of my classmates were either Black or white. I wondered where I, with my black hair and tan skin still darkened from the Caribbean sun, fit in and easily picked up what group it was most beneficial to belong to.

After about a year, we moved to the apartment complex where we would live until our next big move a few years later. Our backyard led to a deeply wooded area. I was sure that on the other side was a poultry packing plant, but a look at the map today showed that the plant was actually quite a bit farther down the road. I once saw workers running towards the woods near that plant when la migra raided it. At least, I think I did. It is possible I just overheard an adult conversation about it or a news report. Or maybe all of those things happened. Anyway, it all came together in my six year old mind in a way that convinced me that the trees the workers had fled into led directly to me and my family.

My mother is Puerto Rican. American. We were in the country legally. But it was clear to me that my family looked a hell of a lot closer to the people being rounded up and deported than to anyone else around me. Keeping a distance seemed best. Though my brother and I spent endless hours exploring the woods behind our house, we never fully crossed them, never got close enough to the far edge to see what was actually on the other side.

At Kroger we would occasionally run into another Latino family. I dreaded the possibility because it meant that my parents, especially my father, would stop to talk to them. He would make faces with the babies or joke with the toddlers. He would ask the parents where they were from. Soon enough they would be chatting away in Spanish, while I hid under the cart wishing I could disappear. If there were children, my dad would ask the parents whether the kids were in school. “You have every right to enroll them,” he would advise. “They can’t ask you for your papers. Go tomorrow.” Sometimes the conversation would go on, with my dad urging the parents to know their rights.

I hated how exposed I felt in these moments. It scared me.

In spite of the reassurances my parents offered, it wasn’t until I was much older that I truly understood that my family and I were not at risk. Well, at least not at risk of deportation. I was already an adult when my dad finally became a citizen of the US. I knew it had not been an uncomplicated decision for him, but I still found I could breathe easier.

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This week I read an opinion piece in the NYTimes about how doctors and nurses should prepare to support their undocumented patients in the face of the incoming president’s promise of mass deportations. The opening vignette left me full of dread for the coming years. A wound reopened. As I read Dr. Ofri’s words, urging medical professionals to know their own rights and their patient’s rights, I was reminded of the conversations between my parents and the other Latino families we ran into in the cereal or canned soup aisles of our Georgian grocery store. Usually, I push these memories aside in discomfort. This time, I found they offered a salve and a glimpse of a plan.

I have a mental map I use when I have conversations with my children about difficult or painful subjects. It helps me organize my thoughts. I ground the conversation in our family’s values. I answer their questions using simple language. And I end with the actions that we and others are taking or can take to help. Sometimes we cycle through these three things multiple times as we talk.

In the coming years, this map will grow worn. Maybe it will grow more detailed, too. For now, I’m keeping it in my back pocket so I’m ready for whatever leaves them confused and uncertain this week. And I’m using it to remind my six year old self that we are strong when we stand together.

I love to hear from you…

What conversations (easy or hard) are you having with your kids these days?

Leave a comment

Ways to help.

I had hoped to pick up this newsletter on a more cheerful note, but 2025 is 2025ing and so here we are.

My husband, Mike, lost his childhood home in the Palisades fire. We learned it had burned from his brother who was closely tracking the fires from Boston. His parents no longer owned the house. They and his siblings live far from LA now, on the East Coast and across the Atlantic. But over the course of the night and into the next days, we all watched from thousands of miles away as his childhood home and the homes of so many other families who live there today disappeared under the flames.

We have spent many of the days since checking in with our friends who are affected, trying to offer support without further burdening them. The impact of the fires is horrific. There are many ways to help. Money seems best. Here are two ways to give:

• Underfunded GoFundMe campaigns.

• Fundraiser to help LA’s Artists and Art Workers start over

A short list of things for you:

• Rabbi Sharon Brous’ Reflections on Home helped me grieve and return to hopefulness

• Boymom by Ruth Whippman: Mike and I have been listening to the audiobook together and chatting after each chapter. The return of our two person book club!

• Our First 100 Days: A gift of three questions to sit with in the coming four years, from Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Use them as a writing prompt, a meditation, etc.

xo Melina

Thank you for your patience as I’ve spent the past few months taking in others’ writing more than producing my own. Trusting my own creative process is coming more easily these days. Still, I’ve missed connecting with you and it feels good to be back.

I don’t always write about culture explicitly, yet it is always in the forefront of my mind when I’m writing. Similarly, I don’t always feel a need to use the word culture when consulting with families, although it is at the root of all of our conversations. Culture is like air. It is everywhere, difficult, if not impossible, to see except in contrast.

This piece relies on a set of memories from a distinct setting to explore where my ideas about how to parent come from and how those interact with my embodied experience of being parented and parenting. All of these ideas and experiences are shaped by culture. The respectful parenting approach I was first exposed to as a nanny is not a universal truth, though it is often presented that way. While those tools and understandings have served me well and speak to a longing within myself, the alchemy of these adopted ideals and my less consciously accessible knowledge of how to relate to a child results in an intensity of sensation. Sometimes the tension is something I can make sense of. Sometimes it overwhelms. There's nothing like a public tantrum to raise the heat on a situation.

If you’re curious to do a little exploration of these ideas yourself, there is a prompt at the end to guide you.

Thanks for being here with me,

Facing the Elephants

I walk quickly past the herd of elephants without glancing up. It is the eye contact that sets off the panic. Their glassy stares shrink me, make me feel powerless and accountable all at once. The thunder of school groups running around the mezzanine above echoes through the hall to provide the sounds of the stampede. The animals charge forward, frozen in their movement, their skins pulled carefully over metal, clay and plaster frames. That is what the sign says, but my sweaty palms and the back of my neck are not convinced. They know what it is to be trampled.

The Museum of Natural History attracts many kinds of visitors. I have been each of the following at one time or another. The tourist with a must-see list. The field-tripper giddy to spend a day out of school. The novice nanny trying to keep up with her charge. The experienced nanny with a mental map of every bathroom, elevator, and exit. The graduate student with after-hours access. The parent with the stroller that floweth over with coats, snacks, water bottles, and toys that were definitely not going to leave the house. It is a different museum to each of us.

I know this museum better than my own apartment building. I’ve walked every staircase, sat in every theater, seen the exhibits change, seen the Christmas tree go up and come down. In my twenties, on rainy days, I would shuttle the children I nannied here to spend the morning exploring the exhibits at their pace. Now I bring my own children and sit on the same benches, sneak the same snacks to them in the same quiet corners. I try to remember the slowness of being 25 with nowhere to go and no urgency about naps or meltdowns or work that isn’t being attended to.

The first time I panic under the elephants I have someone else’s toddler in tow. A guard helps us find a place to sit and sip water until the room stops spinning. Afterwards, my boyfriend comes to meet us. The reason for inviting him is, of course, the elephant issue and wanting someone to make sure we make it home safely. There is also the matter of inspiring in him a vision of what things could look like for us in the hopefully not-so-distant future.

Shortly after he arrives, the toddler has a tantrum on the fourth floor under some dinosaur bones. Where others might stumble, I move with confidence. I have my toddler-taming toolbox pulled together from a blog about respectful parenting and some books the kid’s parents left lying around that make decent nap-time reading (this was before Instagram). I gracefully guide us out of the museum, meeting the child’s rage with self-satisfied steadiness. Unruffled, as it were. “You’re going to be such a great mom,” my boyfriend says afterwards, confirming my instinct that he should witness the master at work.

Several floors down, on the uptown side of the museum, is the planetarium. A glass cube containing a giant white sphere that houses two theaters, with several other smaller spheres in its orbit, the planetarium is a scale model of the universe. If the giant sphere represents the sun, which is much larger than you think, then the other spheres are the relative sizes of the planets in the Milky Way. The spheres can also be used to scale galaxies, stars, and even atoms–which are smaller than you think. Even smaller than that.

The theater in the bowl of the giant sphere exits onto a 360 foot long spiral ramp that tells the history of the universe. Every stride you take moves you a million years through time. You begin at the Big Bang and pass through the formation of the planets, the emergence of life on Earth, the age of the dinosaurs, and so on. At the very end of the ramp, human history is captured in the width of a single human hair. I’ve chased an errant toddler down this ramp countless times before finally taking the time to examine it closely during my night class in graduate school.

If the sphere is the size of the ego of a graduate student being granted special access to the private inner hallways and offices of a storied cultural institution, then the human hair is the size of that ego upon realizing how insignificant she actually is. So insignificant that her entire life can’t even be lifted off a bathroom floor with an unlicked finger. Conversely, if the human hair is the size of her ego by the time she reaches the end of the ramp, the giant sphere represents the freedom that anonymity grants her, however slippery and difficult to hold onto.

It is evening and our children are asleep. “None of my students feel free,” my now-husband says in some disbelief. He brought the question to the undergraduates enrolled in his class on art and the unconscious. “What do you mean by free?” I ask, knowing it is too late to start the conversation and still get enough sleep. “Maybe you have different ideas of what it means.” A pause. “Do you feel free?” he asks. My seven hours of sleep, which are already not enough, evaporate. 

He drives the kids to school the following day. I stay behind and ugly cry on our tech-enabled stationary bike. A ragey girl pop-rock song blasts on repeat from a speaker thrown onto our bed. Her voice drowns out the encouraging words of my virtual instructor. I wallow in the question until my answer transmutes from desperation to indignation. I match then surpass my best time, leaving myself in the dust. “Who is free now?” I laugh triumphantly as he walks back into the soggy scene unfolding in our bedroom.

The blue whale that swims through the lower level of the Natural History Museum has a six foot long bandaid on its arm. The Hall of Ocean Life is a Covid vaccination site. Usually the cavernous room feels impossibly deep. You are already underwater when you enter it, the sun glistening on the ripples overhead. With the lights turned all the way up the floor is too close, the whale too heavy.

Our eldest gets her first shot of the series here, in a maze of temporary cubicles that are too angular. We are ushered through quickly. I bounce her infant sister, too young for the vaccine, and my husband tries to talk our eldest through the process. At the last moment, fear creeps in. “¡No estoy lista!” I recognize the panic in her eyes. “She’s not ready,” I affirm, heart pounding, stepping in with my tools. The child in the neighboring cubicle shrieks and tries to escape too many arms reaching towards them. They writhe on the floor. Our baby fusses. A young nurse appears twirling a fidget spinner on her forehead, “Look at me!” Her smile is too big. None of us are convinced, but it is over and there are high fives and stickers and more fidget spinners.

We sit and sip water together in the great hall, catching our breath with neighbors, more four year olds celebrating their birthday with a jab and lollipop. Fifteen minutes later we are free.

The elevator is by the elephant seals. A mating pair, they rest on land, immobile, almost crushed under their own weight. In life this is where they spend the least of their time by far, the width of a hair at most, in comparison to the time they spend in water, where they travel enormous distances and reach great depths.

In the theater, my youngest sits heavy on my lap. Heat radiates from her toddler head and I bury my face in her hair for a moment to feel it more fully. Her sister sits next to me, straight backed with her hands folded in her lap, her fingers interwoven, ready for the Serengeti 3-D to begin. Lady hands we called them when she was a baby. “A scene from a million years ago,” the narrator’s deep voice echoes. An elephant enters stage right and walks towards the center. More heat from her head. Under my hand, her tiny heart speeds up, bringing mine with it. The elephant turns to face us. I pull my daughter into me and close my eyes.

We exit the theater through the gift shop, of course. I take photos of the toys that are too big to buy now but a great idea for your birthday! It is too early to cave. We are sure to pass through at least another three gift shops before I am out of tools and they are out of patience. They will plead their case loudly, counting on my embarrassment to pave the way towards the treasure reflected in their glassy stares. In a moment of hesitation they will detect weakness and rush forward with a request so reasonable it only makes sense to acquiesce. Just some rock candy! I’ve always wanted to try rock candy! “You are such a great mom,” I imagine they’ll say, the curves of my satisfaction inflating like a giant orb. For a brief moment I forget myself in the fantasy only to wake up under their feet. A hair on the bathroom floor. “I wanted papá to open it for me!”

Prompt for reflection.

Start by finding a comfortable seat with your feet on the ground, if possible. Pay attention to how your weight falls through your feet and legs as they make contact with your seat or the ground. Spend a moment getting comfortable here. You can return to this place as needed.

Think back to a time when your ideas of how you want to raise your child(ren) have come into tension with the knowledge of parenting you were raised with. A good place to start might be considering a behavior your child engages in that you find emotionally challenging to navigate. Drop into the memory and notice what sensations you feel. Where in your body do you feel them?

If you’d like, you can post your response to this prompt or today’s essay in the comments section, or email me personally at hello@parentpueblo.com. I’d love to hear from you!

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Me elsewhere.

This past February my husband, children, and I spent some time in San Antonio as residents at Parts & Labor.

“Located in SouthTown San Antonio, Parts & Labor is a non-profit organization which offers mid-career artist residents focused time, space, and resources in their pursuit of creative work. Tailored to meet the unique needs of caregivers, the residency provides the necessary support and infrastructure to “free up” artists to work.”

It was dreamy.

You can read Mike and my takes on the experience (and catch some of the paintings he made) on their website.

Here is a sneak peek:

So I’m putting this out here with a request. If you feel called to, share an idea or line that stirred something in you and what it brought up. No need to have a well thought out response. It can be a memory, a word, a thought, a feeling. Comment if you want, or feel free to email (hello@parentpueblo.com) if you’d prefer privacy. I’d love to hear from you.

-Melina

My parents are walkers. When I allow my thoughts to drift backward in time towards my childhood this is how I remember them: walking circles around our backyard, around the neighborhood, and up and down the beach. My brother and I would trail behind filling our pockets with treasures–shiny rocks, pennies, the occasional dropped earring–or speed ahead on rollerblades. We were moons orbiting a single planet. My parents walk en amoureux, hand in hand, and always in impenetrable conversation.

During the first couple of summers I spent home from college my mother and I began to walk, too. Every day after dinner we would set off along our suburban street. We’d walk past my old junior high school, my brother’s old elementary school, the tree where a horsefly bit my ankle leaving me with a permanent fear of flying insects. We’d stroll up streets I knew well and side streets I had never stepped on. All-American streets named after trees. Sycamore Lane. Beechwood Place. Cedar Avenue.

These were not happy walks. At points they bordered on interrogation. To be clear, it was always me with the questions. There was storytelling, the airing of grievances, blame pitched and volleyed, and many questions asked and answered. Our conversation would often devolve into tears, much to the embarrassment of my younger brother who still had to live out his high school years in that town. We would keep walking until we had reached an understanding. Bitter tears would sweeten. Hours later we would return laughing arm in arm. I relished the catharsis and the jealousy in my brother’s eyes when we’d walk in.

The thing about walking is you don’t have to look each other in the eye. When you are side by side you are talking to yourself as much as you are to the other person. Risks are easier to take, mistakes more easily forgiven. It is the same with driving in cars, which is why my mother chose our car as the place to drop her bite-size lesson about babies when I was in high school. Babies–a euphemism for sex that was as confusing at first as it was embarrassing once I realized what she meant. Yes, even as a former hippie, photos of whom clearly reveal a sexual being living the liberatory ideals of 1960s and 70s feminism, my mother’s Latina side (her Catholic upbringing? Or was it fear? Or experience?) took over as I hit puberty and slammed the door on passing any of the language of those ideals to me.

Anyway, on our walks, just a few years later, it was easier to talk about the hard things. More importantly for me, it was easier to talk at all.

Spanish is my first language and it’s the language I still speak with my parents. I cannot bring myself to speak English with them. Just thinking about it makes my scalp tingle with discomfort. I don’t remember being told that I couldn’t use English with my parents, but I internalized this message at some point because when I lob those same words at my daughter in a moment of frustration I have a sense of déjà vu.

I don’t feel good asking her to speak Spanish to me. It happens as a last resort once I’ve exhausted every strategy to surreptitiously draw it out of her. When I ask her, I feel like I do after I’ve yelled or said something I know I shouldn’t have. I’m not sure it’s wrong to ask her to speak Spanish with me, but it doesn’t feel right either. I want her to want to speak it. Like how, in spite of myself, I want her to choose fruit over candy without any prompting. I imagine myself apologizing at birthdays, “She’s just not that into sweets.”

That my Spanish is closer to a child’s keeps us in familiar roles even as we have outgrown them.

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I can speak Spanish and understand it. I know it well enough that I’m reminded of words I’ve forgotten existed anytime I read in Spanish, which I can do, though not quickly. I have to chew on the words and work to extract the meaning. I can write it, too, but I never get the accents right and, if I’m being honest, I double check my work using google translate most of the time.

I don’t trust my Spanish, which is why my first draft of this essay began like this:

I don’t have the words. I don’t have the words to ask my mom what it was like for her when she was raising me. To ask her how it felt to hear me speak English. To ask her if she felt alone like I sometimes do. I don’t have the words to ask my father what it was like to hear a Chilean accent on me when I returned from studying abroad. Did it cause him to wonder at what could have been?

Except that the more I wrote the more I realized that, actually, I do have the words. I’m pretty sure I could find a way to ask them. It might not be as eloquent or nuanced as their answers, but I can get my point across even if I have to pepper in a word or two in English to get there. Questions, I can ask. So long as we are walking and they don’t correct me too much, I can get the words out.

I don’t have the words to explain to my daughter that her sister doesn’t actually need convincing to share with her. I stumble over words trying to explain the three year old mind, landing on something that feels untrue in its simplicity and is unhelpful at best.

This feels closer to the truth. I don’t have the words to speak with my daughters as I would like to. Not in Spanish. They are only 6 and 3 and yet I find myself working to keep pace with them. I google words like “slimy” so I can translate our Halloween books as we read. When I come to the word “spooky” I throw an “e” in front of it and call it good. It is a relief to realize my mom doesn't know these words either. She’s not the only one.

I don’t have the words to speak with my parents as I would like to either. I can get the conversation started. It is much harder to keep it going. That my Spanish is closer to a child’s keeps us in familiar roles even as we have outgrown them. I am the mother now, except when we are together and I return to being a child. Challenging conversations are difficult. Winning an argument is impossible, so long as I rely on only a part of who I am. This benefits none of us. For one, I have a lot to say. I am excellent at carrying a conversation, convincing others, and, though it may not come across in my writing (yet!) I can land joke after joke without breaking a sweat. For another, I’m ready to step into a different role.

I thought I was raising bilingual children. It turns out I’m also raising a bilingual me. The same strategies apply. I’m talking with anyone willing to join me in conversation, both in Spanish and about the complexities of raising US born Latine children. (No, our Spanish does not make me or my daughters any more/less Latina. Yes, it ties us to our histories.) I’m listening to audiobooks in Spanish and collecting turns of phrase to try out later. I’ve even started doing my Pelotón rides en Español.

I’m also working on accepting that there are some things I can only say in English, and that this probably will not change. Bilingualism is not double monolingualism. Perfection is never a useful goal, so I’m letting my mistakes go.

I want to leave things there and wrap this up neatly, as if the “working on accepting” is working. The truth is that I’ve sat on this essay for months because nothing about this is tidily resolved. Maybe this is not even about language at all. Maybe the struggle is in the impossibility of fully sharing ourselves with each other without risking disappointment, or disappointing. Walk side by side and you can keep your eyes to yourself, decide how much to reveal, how much to take in. My Spanish is vulnerability and armor all at once.

On Tuesdays I take my eldest to a musical theater class uptown. (I am trying to be chill about the fact that she shares this interest with me, but internally I am THRILLED.) We sit next to each other on the subway and walk down the street holding hands. Her hand feels big in the space that is usually filled by her younger sisters’. The commute is long enough for us to move past the small talk.

“Solo hay a few Hispanish kids in my school,” she tells me, counting them on one hand. I can’t see her eyes so I search her voice for clues as to how she feels about this. At her age I was just learning English and hiding my Spanish from my peers. She adds to her list a child who moved to another school, because “he has a Hispanish mom like me.” Her tone is matter-of-fact. She asks me to text his mom, but I don’t have her number.

I decide to ask my own mother about her experience. What was it like when my brother and I started speaking English with each other? How did it feel? Was it hard for her? She seems confused by the question. It felt fine. Normal. We were living here, of course you were going to learn English. I didn’t really think about it.

I haven’t stopped thinking about it.

It probably helped that you always spoke Spanish with me.

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