Dundurn | Discover a new story

Tony and I are writers, so when life lobbed us a hardball, we went to our desks and wrote it all out: the fears, the doubts, the questions. Four Umbrellas: A Couple’s Journey Into Young-Onset Alzheimer’s is the result.

It was a three-year project, and in many ways the process helped us cope. Tony explains:

A girl I went to school with disappeared. Nobody talked about what happened to her, but years later it was revealed that she’d joined a cult. I was intrigued. What exactly is a cult? Why do people join them? Why do they stay? What happens if they try to leave? How do they heal afterward?

I’m a tired parent right now. I’m fatigued from trying to figure out what inside activity to do with the kids each weekend. I’m worn out from booking a COVID test every time one of us gets a cold. And I’m burnt out from trying to figure out how to be okay and raise kids that are okay while the world feels so scary and out of control. What makes this even harder is that us parents are trying to navigate this within what I call the culture of impossible parenting.

The culture of impossible parenting works hard to convince parents of six core (and annoying) messages.