This book has a two part mission.

One, the mission is to create time and space for parents to stop, and think about the heart of the matter, about what parenting is for us, what it has been, how we were parented. There’s great value in taking time to sit and remember things, think about them, and ponder how they make us feel. We too rarely take time to do that;  a mission of the book is to provide that space, that time.

Two, the mission of the book is to encourage parents, that’s it. By bearing witness to the wonderous and perplexing spectrum of events, trials, emotions and ruminations that come with parenting of children, Apparently This is what parenting feels like aims to lift up and accompany. Parents are so busy, knocking themselves out trying to do it all — yet it’s easy to feel empty and somehow not good enough at times. This book aspires to encourage parents, through illustration in a thousand different ways, that, in the final analysis, it’s your love of your child that makes you good enough, nothing else. A demanding love to be certain, but ‘just’ love. The rest is details.

Okay … there are a lot of details.

Still.

The mission of the book is to allow the reader time to step back and ponder the experience of parenting, and in doing so, be encouraged, through consideration of what he or she already knows to be true.