By Joanne McHugh 
During my oldest daughter’s freshman year of college, I started being haunted by a recurring dream of an old-fashioned suitcase—one of those hard-sided ones that’s as big as they come.
In the dream, when I open the suitcase, it’s overflowing with clothing, shoes, and all kinds of stuff that belongs to me and each of my three daughters. Everything in the suitcase is all jumbled together.
Nobody else in the dream is worried about sorting through everything, but I am totally stressed about it. To top it all off, I have to deal with this suitcase while preparing for a huge graduation party for one of my daughters.
Desperate to make the dream reruns stop, I pondered its meaning. Eventually, I came to a realization: as my daughters reached milestones like proms, graduations, and going off to college, it was triggering memories of what it was like to be their age.
Any time we discussed the future, we only talked about the upside. I gave no hint that young adulthood inevitably includes minor and major struggles and dilemmas.
I suppose I didn’t want them to be discouraged, or maybe I hoped they’d magically avoid any pitfalls. And yet, how realistic was that?
Eventually, I decided that if I started unpacking my experiences and was honest about what young adulthood really looked like, that damn suitcase would stop haunting me.
Since I like to write, I got to work. I wasn’t interested in telling my daughters how they should live their lives (and they wouldn’t have listened to that anyway). But I’d read that research shows people learn best when someone tells them a story because they can take away what they need most. So I committed myself to writing candidly about what I’d encountered during my young adult life and sharing honestly–even about episodes when I’d looked less than sharp.
I told them everything. How I recovered from picking the wrong college major. That even though I did everything right, I didn’t immediately find a job after graduation that financially rewarded and delighted me. How planning a wedding wasn’t as much fun as I thought it would be
I confessed that even though I married my perfect match after four years of dating, newlywed life still featured arguments and adjustments. That it was harder than I thought it would be (and I was older than I thought I would be) when I decided I was ready to take the leap of becoming somebody’s mother.
And that learning how to cope with my first newborn was so hard that it had me wondering whether it was possible to return early from maternity leave.
Essentially, I talked about everything we parents tend to keep mum about, even when they’re the very subjects our kids might most appreciate hearing about. My hope was that my hard-won wisdom might save my daughters a little trouble as they wrestled with their own dilemmas.
Writing the book I named Things Your Mother Should Have Told You took me about two-and-a-half years. On Valentine’s Day 2020, I presented my daughters with my self-published work. They were stunned since they had no idea I was writing it. My two older daughters read the entire book in a day.
My middle daughter told me it was the best Valentine’s present she’d ever received. And there was a gift in it for me too; once I delivered the book, I stopped having dreams about unpacking that giant suitcase.
When my daughters asked to share the book with their friends, I realized hearing someone speak candidly about the challenges of assembling an adult life must have resonated.
When I poked around, I discovered there are surprisingly few trustworthy sources of wisdom twentysomethings can turn to for guidance as they begin “adulting.” It seems that once kids graduate, we tend to let them loose in the world and figure they’ve got this.
According to a recent Pew Research study, 86 percent of parents of young adults felt they had done a great deal or at least a fair amount to prepare their children to be independent adults. However, that same study found only 66 percent of young adults felt their parents had prepared them to be independent adults. So maybe the kids aren’t quite as prepared as we think.
So I did what anyone who produced her own handwritten magazine as a kid does when she sees a problem that words combined with some wisdom might solve. I created an online newsletter and website designed to help twentysomethings navigate young adulthood.
My goal for Things Your Mom Should Have Told You is simple: Deliver an instruction manual for life, one week at a time. I hope you’ll check it out and share it with your favorite twentysomethings if you think it will help better prepare them for what to expect while adulting.
And by the way, if there’s anything you wish your mom (or someone) had told you before you entered the wonderful world of adulthood, drop me a line. Together, we can help our kids be better prepared.
by Shelby Spear 
by Carolyn Moore 
by Ashley Stevens 
