Scratch That: Parenting & ReParenting Off Script

Today we bring you a mini mid-week episode to tell you about a resource Caitlin created, fueled by the specific needs of their neurodivergent brain that has expanded into a tool, a practice, a piece of art in so many other homes.

Tune in to hear:

🎂 A tiny update on how Caitlin has been processing their neurodivergence, especially as they cross the threshold of a birthday that feels big.

✨ A poignant insight from a dear friend.

🌱 Caitlin learning to recognize some of the tangible beauty that comes from their specific needs.

💓 Several ways that people use the calendar Caitlin made, including: a visual guide, a way to help kids understand long passages of time, tracking big dates.

☀️ Rebekah's use of the calendar as a daily practice for tuning into embodied memories.

Order/Download the Calendar Here 

Today we're thrilled to bring you our conversation with the aunt you always needed, the one with the funniest memes and all the colors, we can't imagine the internet without her — Nina Tame! Nina is doing powerful, hilarious work to revise the scripts we have around disability that has made its way across the globe (if you don't yet follow her Instagram, go forth and consume), but maybe the most profound evidence of this rewriting shows up in her own little family. Nina grew up disabled and is now the mum to three boys, the third of which shares Nina's disability. Listening to her reflect on parenting as she tends to her younger selves feels like a tangible moment of re-parenting that I imagine many of us need.

Tune in to hear about:

📜 The early inheritance of a script that disability is bad.

🧑‍🧑‍🧒 A gentle/honest reflection on what it was like to be parented as a disabled kid.

⚡️ Nina's hard-earned insights on the best practices for parenting a disabled kid.

💓 The lifelong work of teaching our younger parts that they're not a piece of shit.

👯‍♂️ The transformative shift of disability as a medical experience to a social experience.

🌱 The multitude of ways that disability enhances a family ecosystem.

Mentioned in this episode:

📖 Nina and Rebekah both have essays coming out in the forthcoming YA collection, Owning It: Stories From Our Disabled Childhoods. (While the target audience is around 9-13, we think it's also for anyone who's ever been 9-13.) Pre-ordering from Blackwells (linked above) includes free shipping to the U.S.

Where to find everyone:

Follow Nina on Instagram @nina_tame

Follow Rebekah on Instagram @sitting_pretty

Follow Caitlin on Instagram @caitlinhasfeels

We don't have a lot of words right now. No hot takes. No three step plans. We feel heavy, confused, and scared. And while we might have the impulse to shut down, we want to be intentional to bear witness to the untidy snarl of this moment. It didn't feel right to carry along with our regularly programming when so many of us are grieving & afraid right now. So here's a tiny conversation to hold space for a greater pause — for feeling our feelings, for taking deep breaths, for listening to more stories & reflecting on the stories we hold, for making plans to support the ones around us, for whatever we need to feel the ground beneath us.

And in the meantime, here are some poems & essays that are speaking to us right now.

What do you turn toward? by Lisa Olivera

MAGA Hat In the Chemo Room, by Andrea Gibson

For My Sister, by Kate Baer

I don't want another black president: a love letter, by Kaplan Villacorte Trudo

How Dark the Beginning, by Maggie Smith

The conversation we bring you today is especially tender. We decided to sit down to talk about internalized ableism, because Caitlin is grappling with a potentially new diagnosis that has brought up a lot for them. We hope you'll listen to this one with care — as we process together, we lift the lids on some of the ugliest wounds ableism inflicts. And so much is still fresh.

The two of us experience internalized ableism differently for a host of reasons — Caitlin feels wobbly even claiming the title of disability and would embody a combination of old and new, non-apparent versions of the word, while Rebekah moves through the world in a very visible wheelchair, and has for most of her life — but as we talked, we bumped into a host of thought-provoking overlaps and deviations in our experiences.

Tune in to hear us explore:

🌪️ The wide range of layered emotions that can come up with a new diagnosis.

🦆 The definition of ableism through the metaphor of a duck on water.

🌊 The messy intersections of postpartum depression, internalized ableism, and ADHD/autistic burnout.

👍 The feeling of needing to prove we can be trusted to care for our kids, especially in public.

❗️ The ways pregnancy and postpartum can become disabling experiences, especially in a country that does not support new parents.

💵 How money changes the experience of disability.

♟️ Strategies for navigating mental health struggles as a parent.

🌱 A hope that adjusting to a new diagnosis can be a beautiful process, too.

Mentioned int this episode:

📖 Easy Beauty by Chloe Cooper Jones

🌀 Andy J Pizza shares a lot about his experience of ADHD as a creative — find him on Instagram or his podcast, The Creative Pep Talk Podcast.

🫧 KC Davis creates conversation around neurodivergence & parenting — find her on TikTok, her podcast, Struggle Care, or read her book, How To Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organizing.

⚡️Katherine May's book The Electricity of Every Living Thing

🌿 The Neurodivergence Skills Workbook for Autism and ADHD: Cultivate Self-Compassion, Live Authentically, and Be Your Own Advocate by Jennifer Kemp and Monique Mitchelson

We would love to keep the conversation going in the comments. How do your experiences with internalized ableism overlap/deviate from the experiences we talk about in today's episode? How are you coping? What feels hard? What do you understand now that you didn't at first?

Find us on instagram @sitting_pretty ✨ @caitlinhasfeels

When we sat down for this conversation, we fully intended to dive into the tricky choices we have to make when deciding if/how to share about our kids — on social media or a podcast, in writing or conversation. And while we do spend some time trying to parse out that particular challenge, the conversation that unfolded quickly became much deeper. Because a conversation about representing another human is also a conversation about storytelling, perspective, autonomy, and relationship boundaries. And so we ask —

👀 What if we don't see things the same way that our kids/parents do?

📚 What happens when family members have conflicting true stories of shared experiences?

📷 How do we document our kids' childhoods without bringing an audience into their experiences.

👯‍♂️ How do I untangle where my story ends and yours begins?

🧑‍🧑‍🧒 How do we learn to tell our own stories when we've deeply absorbed a family narrative?

🪢 How do I hold onto a sense of myself when parenting/caregiving consumes so much of me?

🐣 And why even share about our kids at all?

In the episode, we mention...

Rebekah's recent Substack essay, " Dear Son of a Disabled Mother,"

Caitlin's collaborative artwork with Charlie, including the "Am I a Real Mom?" piece.

We would love to keep the conversation going on our Patreon. Have you found a way of representing your young people (online or anywhere else) that honors both your experience and theirs? Do you have tensions within family systems that hold multiple, differing true stories? What do you find especially sticky about the questions being asked in this episode?

Find us on instagram @sitting_pretty ✨ @caitlinhasfeels

Today, we share with you a tender conversation with the one-and-only deep-feeler, wholehearted Emma Parker.

Emma is a photographer who longs for deep connections, feels inspired by the ways we are all different and also the same, and, for the last two years, has experienced infertility and miscarriage. Emma generously agreed to share some of her story, experience, and insight with Caitlin and Rebekah – two people who do not share this experience – with the hope that it could help give all of us in the Scratch That community new scripts for processing our own unique experiences and showing up for the ones we love. We are so grateful she was willing to have this vulnerable conversation with us – and y'all, she showed up with such honesty and heart💛

Tune in to hear about:

🌟 Fumbling through uncomfortable conversations.

🚫 The scripts we want to avoid when someone is going through infertility or miscarriage.

🌗 Growing our capacities for feeling more than one thing at a time.

🌱 Showing up for our hurting people by learning to sit with our own pain & discomfort.

❤️ Practicing new scripts for how to engage our kids when they are struggling.

📦 Miscarriage care-packages!

🌊 Better scripts for when our loved ones are experiencing unresolved/ongoing suffering.

Where to find everyone:

Follow Emma on Instagram @emmybeephotog + visit her website

Follow Rebekah on Instagram @sitting_pretty

Follow Caitlin on Instagram @caitlinhasfeels

We love books. And the best part of loving books is sharing them with our friends.

So we’re very excited to kick off our book report series — mini-ish episodes where we’ll talk about our favorite books that guide us as parents and people.

Our first pick is the amazing What Makes a Baby by Cory Silverberg and Fiona Smyth.

Tune in to hear us gush about this book that will help you explain reproduction to your two year old. Then join us on Patreon to request future book reports and share your fave reads!

More from us:

• Follow Rebekah on Instagram @sitting_pretty
• Follow Caitlin on Instagram @caitlinhasfeels
• Mentioned in the episode: Ericka Hart, What Makes a Baby, Sex is a Funny Word, You Know, Sex

✷ And if you loved this episode, please join us on Patreon for show notes, transcripts + more!

Today we’re taking on the impossible question: do we have another baby? 😵‍💫

Caitlin opens us with a beautiful poem from Joy Sullivan, and then we each share the joys, fears, and swirls of question marks coming up as we consider having a second kid.

Listen in as we unpack our feelings about fertility, age, baby fever, finances, mental health, desire, and more — including how an oracle card is helping Rebekah figure out her answer.

Then join us on Patreon to continue the conversation! We’d love to hear how you’re approaching this question with your families. ♡

More from us:

• Follow Rebekah on Instagram @sitting_pretty
• Follow Caitlin on Instagram @caitlinhasfeels
• Mentioned in the episode: Instructions for Traveling West by Joy Sullivan, Haley Brown’s Tearwater Oracle Deck, Why Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu Miller

✷ And if you loved this episode, please join us on Patreon for show notes, transcripts + more!

Alex Wegman is one of our absolute favorite people on (and off) the internet.

She’s a writer, storyteller, homeschooling mom of two, and a lifelong wheelchair user who tells stories about life at the intersection of disability, parenting, friendship, and generally existing in public.

Everything she shares has deeply impacted how we approach parenting. So we’re thrilled to have her as our first guest on Scratch That!

Tune in to hear about:

• Cultivating independence for parents & kids
• Disability representation in Alex’s childhood
• Confronting ableist attitudes toward pregnancy & birth
• Deconstructing the nuclear family
• New scripts for intimacy & home-building
• Learning to love the act of asking for help
• Indulging in our joy

More from us & our guests:

• Follow Alex on Instagram @alexwegman + visit her website
• Follow Rebekah on Instagram @sitting_pretty
• Follow Caitlin on Instagram @caitlinhasfeels

✷ And if you loved this episode, please join us on Patreon for show notes, transcripts + more!

Hello and welcome to Scratch That!

We (Caitlin & Rebekah) are so thrilled that you — yes you listening to this right now — are here tuning in to this episode.

So we wrote you a letter! And had a quick chat about who we are, why we started this show, and how becoming parents ushered us into a new era of reparenting ourselves and rewriting our scripts for family, motherhood, childhood, and so much more.

We hope you’ll press play, subscribe wherever you listen, and join us on Patreon to continue these conversations.

xo, Rebekah & Caitlin

Mentioned in the episode:

• Basil Kincaid
• Scratch That Patreon