Hannah M. Clipston

To spoil this post before it’s begun: in the end, Parenthood remained on Netflix. But imagine it’s the 14th November 2025. Instead of rewatching Gilmore Girls, I decide to spend autumn watching a new programme that embodies all the reasons I return to Stars Hollow year after year. The natural choice was Parenthood. I take my time as I usually would, dipping into the family Braverman and casually enjoying time together every so often, only getting so far as the beginning of series 2 in a three month stretch, when they announce that the programme will be removed from Netflix in one month.

I abruptly inform everyone that I have a new priority, count the episodes for each series and estimate the time I need to finish the whole programme before the month deadline. It was just about manageable, if I squeezed every piece of spare time I had. So, every chance I got, I was watching Parenthood. It had been a while since I’d binged a programme like this, but I made it work, finding small pockets of time in each day: my lunch break, while folding washing, during workouts, even taking the chance to chip away a few minutes while brushing my teeth and applying moisturiser. Anything to reach the final episode.

When I had said Parenthood was my new priority, I hadn’t meant it lightly. But one night, at 1am, under a canopy of dreams relying on me to make them true, my eyes burned open after a long evening of binge-watching, plot lines and dialogue staying like static in my mind, making sleep impossible, I found the humour in what I was doing. How easy I had found the time to dedicate to this task. Which led me to think on all the times I had complained about not having the time to dedicate to other avenues. In particular, writing.

And so this post isn’t just an outlet to complain about them taking Parenthood off of Netflix, which in the end, never happened anyway, but to lay out those midnight thoughts.

(If you came to this post because you are interested in my thoughts on Parenthood, they are included at the end.)

The irony and the downfall of my discipline is that all my deadlines are self-made. Writing is my passion, not my job. I rely on it for catharsis, not a paycheque or a meal. My relationship with writing is similar to any other: it is there for me when I need it, and I am there when it calls for me.

Committing myself to finishing Parenthood highlighted that I had more time to write than I was admitting to myself. It awakened a larger question inside of me: why had I been rejecting the call to write? At the time I was making changes in my life that made a step towards greater self-love. I wondered if a break-up with writing was a natural part of this step. Whether I should accept that, along with the parts of me I’ve lost throughout my twenties, writing was another version of myself to bury in the backyard. But on that night, lying awake at 1am, I made my choice. I needed to rekindle my relationship with writing in order to completely become myself. Without writing I don’t know who I am: the time I had spent avoiding it, regardless of the reasons, had solidified that for me.

When the New Year came, so did the time for resolution and resurrection. The best gift we receive is another year. Many of us will have made resolutions; many of us will have repelled resolutions; maybe some of us are repeating resolutions from previous years. Either way, it’s natural to think about how we’d like to spend our gift of time. To be a writer, I knew I didn’t have to dedicate all my time to writing. Just enough of it to set our relationship straight.

It’s not as easy finding time to write as it is to watch Netflix. I can’t write while folding laundry, or brushing my teeth, or spending time with loved ones. It’s not practical to dedicate every hour of the day to it. Finding time almost becomes a creative pursuit of its own. But it’s possible. It starts with the small pockets of time we find to commit to ourselves. Eventually the habits settle in and the pockets of time grow, and you no longer want to do. You just do. And so far it has served me well.

As I mentioned before, they didn’t take Parenthood off of Netflix in the end. I’m not sure who at Netflix is responsible for the unsolicited panic that triggered this revelation within myself, but I thank them. I have been writing longer excerpts that capture my thoughts as well as events, in my personal diary. I have been working harder on my novel manuscript. I have been enjoying writing poetry and finished a short story for the first time in a long time. I have also been more forgiving of myself when things do not go as planned. Such as, my resolution to post on my blog once a month…

I remember when I first started blogging, I was posting three times a week. I can’t remember how I decided what to post or where I found the time: only that I was interested in posting about everything. Being able to write whatever I wanted was an unequalled freedom. Blogging was easy because it was fun. As the years passed, I desired to streamline my writing. Somewhere along the line, I’d adopted the concept that all the work I put out had to be the best quality possible. It’s not that I’d regretted anything I’d posted. But I changed, as everyone going through their twenties does. I wanted to post work I felt best represented me, my opinions, feelings and style at the time, and a lot of my older blog posts no longer reflected the person I was.

I still hold this standard for myself, and writing meaningful non-fiction is still a challenge because of it. We are changing all of the time: sometimes it’s difficult to keep up with. I’m also glad to admit non-fiction is not always a genre I enjoy to write. I’m a fictionist at heart. But I am glad to have persevered with (and enjoyed writing) this post even if I have been writing it since January. Even if I had to cut 2/3 of the notes I wrote to recognise what the point of sharing it with you was.

Forgiveness. That is the best advice I can give to anyone trying to make a change in their life. You won’t get far with any resolution unless you can forgive yourself, be kind to yourself. Jokes aimed at the likelihood of breaking a resolution are everywhere, but no one mentions that it’s OK to drop the ball and pick it back up again. Sometimes you need a rest to recuperate your joy. Forgiveness and rest are integral to progress.

For those of you who are here because you want to hear about Parenthood, I managed to finish the series and I loved it! I don’t like to give spoilers on my blog, but I will say the storylines cover a vast landscape of themes. The script was incredible and perfectly conveyed by all the actors. A lot of the time I forgot there was a script as they seemed to be a genuine family having genuine conversations. The themes they explored were well balanced, so you weren’t constantly pummelled with heaviness, and could find some humour and some love in each episode. It was a perfect, binge-worthy programme. At the time of me finishing this post, Parenthood is (mercifully) still available to watch on Netflix (UK)!