Welcome to my new column, Pretty Interesting! Capsule has given me the opportunity to write about some truly epic humans I have met who march to the beat of their own drum and who have genuinely inspired me recently.
I feel oddly proud that I have mended my algorithm enough to no longer be force-fed a constant stream of negative news and collective trauma when I scroll. There is a privilege in protecting your mental health this way, even if it means remaining a little ignorant to certain things. And yet, if I am honest, a lot of feel good stories can lack the punch to really hold my attention. There is a strange duality in wanting something juicy and compelling without feeling like you are reading a glossy puff piece.
This column is my attempt to sit right in that tension – human, honest and a little sharp around the edges.
You can read previous columns – a chat with Kiwi writer/director Taylor Nixon, restauranter, Michael Dearth, writer/director Rachel Ross, my own mum, Jill Arkley, Toni Anne Glover, who is one of the geniuses behind the Kinloch Wilderness Retreat and entrepreneur, Nyssa Waters.
This week I chat to author of F*ck Up Your Kids with Grace & Humour: The Truth About Parenting, Jacqlin Richards.
I reached out to Jacqlin because I wanted to talk about writing a book. Well, that’s what I told myself anyway.
As someone who is currently staring down a blinking cursor most days while trying to write a book of my own, I thought there was something comforting about speaking to someone who had recently crossed the finish line. I imagined we’d talk about deadlines, self doubt, publishing, and whether there comes a moment when you finally believe you’re qualified enough to tell your story.
But instead, we talked about addiction, perfectionism, motherhood, identity, intuition, nervous systems, adoption, shame, healing, and why so many of us spend our lives trying to become someone else before we allow ourselves to begin living.
I hadn’t just met an author. I’d met someone who had done the incredibly messy work of becoming herself. And honestly, I couldn’t stop thinking about her.
It’s funny how quickly we can make assumptions about people. If you’ve come across Jacqlin online, it’s easy to believe she’s always been this calm, grounded, deeply self aware woman. The kind of person who seems to have cracked some secret code to life while the rest of us are still trying to remember where we left our keys, phone or drink bottle.
People assume she’s always been this way, she tells me, but nothing could be further from the truth.
If she could sit down with the version of herself from ten years ago, she doesn’t think that woman would be most surprised by the book, the business or the recognition she’s received. “I think she’d be most surprised by how at home I feel in my own skin,” she tells me. “It’s like I’m truly, finally okay being me. More than okay, actually. I actually dig me.”
It’s a surprisingly emotional thing to hear someone say so matter of factly.
For 40 years, she explains, she genuinely believed it wasn’t okay to be herself. So much of her life was spent trying to earn love through achievement, through perfection, through proving her worth. Like so many women, she’d confused doing with being. Somewhere along the way though, she stopped fighting herself. “I found grace,” she says. “And to me, grace isn’t perfection. It’s acceptance.” (And for those who know me well, you’ll realise why this excited me so much!)”
The irony isn’t lost on her that everything people recognise her for now, the speaking, the coaching, the book and the work she does with parents, only came after she stopped chasing those things. They became the by product of the internal work, not the destination.
Listening to her, I realised this wasn’t going to be another conversation about parenting. It was going to be a conversation about humanity.
Long before she became a Parenting Alchemist, Jacqlin was an architect living in London. From the outside, life looked exactly as she’d hoped it would. She was working for one of the biggest firms in the world, living overseas, building a successful career and ticking every box she’d once imagined would make her happy.
Inside, she was falling apart.
“It wasn’t one dramatic rock bottom moment,” she tells me. “It was the slow, undeniable realisation that my entire life had become an escape from myself.”
Every evening revolved around alcohol. When she stopped drinking, cocaine quietly took its place. Perfectionism wasn’t simply a personality trait. It was survival. Achievement became another way to outrun the belief that she wasn’t enough. Looking back now, she sees those behaviours differently.
“The alcohol, the drugs, the perfectionism, the achievements… they were never the real problem,” she says. “They were coping mechanisms. Different attempts to escape the same painful belief that there was something wrong with me.”
As someone who had been adopted, that belief had roots she didn’t yet understand.
Everything changed with a letter.
She sat down one day and wrote ten pages to her partner. In it she admitted, for the very first time, that she was using cocaine every day. She planned to end the relationship, but somewhere between the first sentence and the last she realised she wasn’t really ending the relationship at all. She was ending the version of herself who had spent years pretending everything was okay.
That honesty changed everything.
Together they stopped drinking, stopped using drugs, threw themselves into mountain biking and decided to start trying for a baby. She remembers telling her partner that it would probably take a year.
It took two weeks.
She laughs now as she tells the story, joking that her nervous system clearly heard, “Let’s create a peaceful new life,” and responded by adding pregnancy immediately.
Motherhood arrived quickly, but rather than fixing everything, it exposed everything.
Pregnancy, birth and postnatal depression cracked open years of conditioning she’d spent trying to outrun. The woman who believed she had to be perfect suddenly found herself responsible for another tiny human while still carrying the weight of her own childhood.
That’s where her work really began.
Today Jacqlin describes herself as a Parenting Alchemist, a title that initially sounds wonderfully mystical until she explains it.
Alchemy, she says, is the process of turning lead into gold.
For her, parenting alchemy is about taking the messiest, most reactive moments of family life and allowing them to become opportunities for transformation rather than shame.
It’s not about pretending the hard stuff isn’t there.
“It’s turning wounds into wisdom. Pain into purpose. Mess into magic.”
The more parents she worked with, the more she realised something. We aren’t struggling because we don’t have enough parenting strategies. We’re struggling because we don’t have the capacity to use them.
“We’re trying so desperately to parent the future with tools from the past,” she tells me.
That sentence stayed with me.
Children today are growing up with social media, artificial intelligence, constant comparison, online pornography and algorithms designed to capture attention, yet parents are still searching for behaviour management techniques as though the world hasn’t fundamentally changed.
“The question isn’t, ‘How do I get my child to behave?'” she says. “It’s, ‘Who do I need to become so they want to?'”
It’s such a subtle shift, but it changes everything. The conversation stops being about controlling children and starts becoming about understanding ourselves. Again and again throughout our interview, Jacqlin returned to the same idea.
Children aren’t here simply to be taught.
They’re here to teach us.
She tells me that nobody warns you your children will become mirrors. They’ll reflect your impatience, your perfectionism, your need for control, your fears, your childhood conditioning and every unresolved story you’ve been carrying for decades.
“The hardest part of parenting isn’t raising your child,” she says. “It’s meeting the parts of yourself your child reflects back to you.”
It reminded me so much of the conversations many of us have in therapy (or with each other). Except instead of sitting opposite a psychologist once a week, you’re having those conversations every single day with a tiny person who refuses to let you hide from yourself.
Perhaps the most surprising part of our conversation came when I asked what healing looks like to her now.
Years ago she believed healing was the destination. One day she’d finally arrive, fixed, complete and no longer triggered.
That day never came.
Now she sees healing completely differently.
“I don’t create because I’m healed,” she tells me. “I heal because I create.”
As someone currently trying to write a book, that sentence landed somewhere deep.
How many of us are waiting until we’re confident enough, thin enough, qualified enough, healed enough or successful enough before we’ll allow ourselves to begin? Jacqlin believes that’s backwards.
When we create something meaningful, whether it’s a business, a relationship, a family or a book, the things that need healing naturally reveal themselves. Not because we’re endlessly analysing our past, but because creation asks us to grow into the person capable of bringing it to life.
It’s an idea I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. Before we finished, I asked her what belief she’d change for women if she could wave a magic wand.
Her answer came without hesitation.
“That they don’t have to become someone else to be loved.”
It feels like the thread that runs through every chapter of her story. The architect trying to prove herself. The woman hiding addiction. The new mother confronting perfectionism. The parenting coach helping others break generational patterns. The author finally writing the book she felt called to write.
Every version of Jacqlin was searching for the same thing until she realised it had never been missing in the first place.
By the end of our conversation I’d almost forgotten we’d started by talking about a book.
Because yes, Jacqlin has written one.
And if you’re a parent, I think you’ll find yourself nodding along page after page.
But I also think this book will resonate with people who don’t have children at all.
Because beneath every chapter about parenting is a much bigger conversation about what it means to be human. About noticing the stories we’ve inherited. Questioning the beliefs we’ve accepted without examining. Choosing curiosity over certainty. Grace over perfection. (I’m working on this one) Creation over waiting.
When I first reached out, I thought I was interviewing someone who had written a book.
Instead, I met someone who had rewritten herself.
To me, that’s infinitely pretty interesting. The book is called F*ck Up Your Kids with Grace & Humour: The Truth About Parenting, but it’s not really about “parenting advice” in the traditional sense. It’s about helping parents understand what’s driving them, create more capacity, and raise emotionally resourced, resilient humans by becoming more truthful, conscious and human themselves.
You will love it!
