Ask me anything

Over the next couple of weeks I’ll be posting extracts from an interview I did in March with the very gorgeous and soulful Lisa Blainey-Lewin from the Sacred Creative Gallery in Maleny. Here’s the first.

What brought you to write Parenting with Soul?
Parenting with soul is my fourth book. The others are about other peoples’ voices and experiences – and that’s something I’m passionate about, telling people’s stories. But I felt that it was time to write about my story. And at this point in my life, my story is very much one as a parent.
When my first child was born, I leaned very heavily on books to work out how to be a parent. I was in an unusual situation: both of my parents died within two weeks of my daughter being born, so I felt absolutely and unexpectedly cut adrift. Reading and words have always ben important to me, so it seemed natural to turn to books for advice. What to Expect When You’re Expecting, Robin Barker’s Baby Love, Kaz Cooke’s Kid Wrangling – they all helped me through the first years.
But I felt that I was getting lots of advice about the physical and emotional side of parenting, but not so much about the spiritual side. Particularly with the loss of my parents, I felt that my identity had been shaken to the core, and I wanted to connect with something that would help me to make sense of that. But most of the books I picked up were too dogmatic, or too dense and hard to read in between naps and feeds and nappy changes, or just not meant for parents. So this is the book that I wanted to read myself, as well as the book that I wanted to write.