Jun 21 • 1HR 3M

Episode 6: "There is no 'being' a grownup. There is only growing up."

Asha Dornfest talks about the transformative, "devastating" time since her father's abrupt death in 2020, and how a pair of long-term road trips with her mom has helped clear the path forward.

 
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Appears in this episode

When the Flames Go Up
Asha Dornfest
Writes Parent of Adults Subscribe
After we divorced, we started a blog about co-parenting to learn how to work together until our kids were grown. And now that they are, and the world is so busy disrupting and disavowing what we thought we were working for, we're looking to our community to help us all keep up.
Cross-post from When the Flames Go Up
This week, I'm using Substack's cross-posting feature to share a wonderfully warm, insightful conversation I had with Doug French and Magda Pecsenye for their podcast, When the Flames Go Up. Doug and Magda are co-parents and friends who are also each others' ex-spouses. AND they are two of my oldest OG blogger friends. We talked about all sorts of things (I mean it, dildos were mentioned), but the focus was my road trip with Mom and the bigger topics of grief and renegotiating family relationships as we get older. Doug and Magda asked amazing questions and made such thoughtful observations. They helped me see these road trips (and the last three years) in a whole new light. There was plenty to laugh about, too. I invite you to have a listen & subscribe to their Substack. -
Asha Dornfest

Asha Dornfest
is one of those special OG blogger friends who went on to provide real-life support in both of our real-life lives. You can tell from her writing that she has one of those minds you can trust your troubles to.

That community-building mind created Parent Hacks and co-created the Edit Your Life podcast with

Christine Koh
, and her third act is
Parent of Adults
, a Substack newsletter about missing her adult children, fulfilling bucket-list plans with her husband, and making the most of the time she and her mom have left together.

Asha says she really “hadn’t been operating properly” since her father died right before the pandemic hit, in part because of the kid fears that had manifested so abruptly. When she talks about writing her dad’s obituary, selling her childhood home, and moving her mom from the Bay Area to a retirement community in Portland, she still marvels at how this self-described “fake grownup” was able to pull it all off.

Asha planned the mother/daughter road-trips to ease her mom’s transition through monumental life changes and jumpstart their new normal as new neighbors. But the trips’ other vital benefits were far less expected.

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