Tenderness & Freedom

‘Adolescence is a time when, in order to understand a child well, we sometimes have to remind ourselves what it was like. But not by explaining that I made it, so you’ll make it too, but more deeply, by wondering what I actually experienced’, says Barbara Pietruszczak, the author of the first Polish body-positive guide for pubescent boys.

I could really know everything about our child, and yet I felt like an incompetent parent in the eyes of many people. This may be specific to Poland, but most of us assume that parenting is a mother and her child

There are many women who associate breastfeeding with a state of bliss, and the thought of ending it is associated with loss

The cool thing is that when something is going on, people don’t say, ‘Jesus, what for?’, they simply say, ‘Jesus, that’s cool!’.

In the workshop, a girl impersonated my illness. We stood in front of each other. She looked deep into my eyes. And then she suddenly knelt down. She started crying. And repeated: ‘I won’t kill you! I won’t! I’m just here to teach you something’. Łukasz Pilip talks with Magdalena Bator and Weronika Szwejk, who run the Stacja Czułość [Tenderness Station] foundation for cancer patients and their families.