Gloria Alamrew is Loving the Journey
"Seeing myself — and my own parents — as human first has been the most liberating and redemptive lesson I’ve learned so far."
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Raising Mothers has been here in entirety for a little more than a week now and I'm still making my way through formatting, but the gang’s all here. It’s been exceptional summer weather in Europe this summer and the family walks have been epic: 5km or more almost daily.
Today, we’re featuring Gloria Alamrew and she takes us inside her world to talk about parenting and share some of her favorite things.
You know what I love? Vlogs. I am so the target audience for vloggers it’s actually embarrassing. I love sitting at the table, doing my work, and watching vlogs of random people go about their day. Some content creators are definitely better at it than others, and I think I’ve watched enough vlogs by now to know that there is definitely a formula to them, but I think what I love most about them is that it can literally just be anything. Watching people’s morning routines (bonus points if they’re moms), what they do at work, running errands, going to the gym, what they get at the grocery store, how they turn down their house in the evenings, I’m here for it all.
I guess it’s voyeuristic in the sense that it’s stuff that normally people who aren’t your friends or family wouldn’t get to see, but I think for me, I am really drawn to the normalcy and plainness of the content. Yes, I love watching all the luxury content too but there’s something about seeing a tired mom try her best to get her and her kids out of the house with less than five meltdowns, and reading comments like, “This is so real.” just GETS me. I love that shit. Inject it. I’m so here for people being honest about their lives. Being honest about finances. Being honest about how hard motherhood is sometimes. Being honest about what it feels like to exist in a world where genocides are happening and we’re supposed to just respond to emails. Like I said, I love the creators who give us glam and luxury and opulence, too, but there’s something really… nice? about knowing that your life is normal. And normal can be just as appealing as anything else.
What has parenting taught you about your relationship with yourself and your own parents?
Whew! How much time we got? This is really the ultimate question. Being a parent reintroduced me to myself. I’ve had to grieve so many parts of my old self and I’ve had to make room for new parts of me that are asking to come out. It has been the single biggest challenge of my life trying to reconcile how I think I should show up and how my child needs me to show up. I think of Toni Morrison’s reflections on motherhood, where she said, “The person that was in me that I liked best was the one my children seemed to want.” And now, when I look at my parents, I realize that there is so much forgiveness required in parenting. I know now that we all do the best we can with the tools we have available to us and that this is their first time in this world, too. All parents make mistakes. I make mistakes every day. Seeing myself — and my own parents — as human first has been the most liberating and redemptive lesson I’ve learned so far.