I had originally intended to steer this week’s column towards my experience of viewing Queen Charlotte on Netflix. I’d finally gotten around to committing to the mini-series. I had no expectations and the first two episodes felt really slow, filled with what felt like dead time, but I realised later, this was perhaps intentional. The viewer needed to fully empathise with the new queen’s predicament of having to ‘wait’ for some elusive event over which she had little control. I suppose that watching the series made me reflect on the violence of waiting and the different degrees to which we have to contend with it based on the extent of the oppressiveness of the worlds we inhabit. Towards the final episode, I was struck by how the show managed to pitch this particular prequel, of sorts, as a love story between a king and queen but was more intentionally about female friendship as a salve against loneliness and alienation and a dynamic against which one could more fully dwell on one’s personhood. Towards the end, I was teary-eyed for this reason.

Yesterday, however, I saw a post on Instagram that deigned to offer parenting advice. I am so wary of these because it is the result of some algorithm that is now specific to my feed. Most of the advice comes from white women and demands a criticality that few mothers are able to offer during moments of fragility. Also, as a mother, I often rely on social media for a break from parenting, so it is annoying when you begin to be inundated with posts concerning the things you want, momentarily, to escape. Still, three simple words flashed in the centre of the post. ‘Don’t postpone joy’. And it really spoke to me, because I am on the cusp of turning 38 and have been thinking a lot about how this one feels different from all the others I’ve had.