The Parenting Place: Please Allow Me to Introduce Myself

Talya Knable, psychotherapist and Jmore parenting columnist, stands in her Lutherville home. (Photo by Steve Ruark)

Talya Knable’s parenting blog will appear on jmoreliving.com every Tuesday and Thursday.

Hello, Jmore readers! I am so excited to be joining this team and bringing you some wonderful content!

Some of you may know me, and some of you are meeting me for the first time, so let me take moment to introduce myself. My name is Talya Knable. Professionally, I am a Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor. I have worked in the field for 14 years and still have a hard time admitting I have done anything that long!

I have a private psychotherapy practice in Lutherville, and am also the Assistant Clinical Director at Shalom Tikvah. I live in Lutherville with my husband, Stephen, and two adorable children, Jack and Leigh.

In my free time, I love working out, spending time with my husband and kids, and online shopping (sometimes a little too much, at least according to my husband — but what does he know?).

I have “awful” taste in TV and love watching whatever reality show happens to be on Bravo or TLC (I do believe all of the “Real Housewives” and the cast of “Southern Charm” were meant to be my friends, and I not so secretly want my single friends to fall in love with someone out of the country and be on “90 Day Fiancé”!).

So what am I doing here? I will honestly admit that I have little professional writing experience (too late to back out now, Jmore). However, I do have a lot to say – and hopefully a lot that people want to hear.

Through my career as a psychotherapist, I spend my days supporting people who are struggling. But personally, it is not always easy to take to the same support I give others. This became even more evident once I became a mother.

In the early stages of being a parent, during many middle-of-the-night feedings, I started to feel very alone. I started to wonder how many mothers (and fathers) were doing the same thing I was right now, and feeling the same way I was.

Talya Knable with her daughter, Leigh. (Photo by Jenny Lynn Photography jennylynn-photo.com / Courtesy of Talya Knable)
Talya Knable with her daughter, Leigh. (Photo by Jenny Lynn Photography jennylynn-photo.com / Courtesy of Talya Knable)

So I started to think, how could I connect with these people? How could I share with them some of the things that have helped me, and subsequently hear what might have helped them? I am a psychotherapist by profession, but I am also a woman, mother and wife, and as such I try to see the struggle that is motherhood from both angles.

And from this, I created The Mother Fix, a motherhood support blog combining my expertise as a psychotherapist with my experiences as a mom. It was developed out of the desire to share advice and connect with others, especially other moms, and it has turned out to be unbelievably cathartic for me in the process.

At the time, I had zero knowledge of how to create blog (I think I just noticed a theme of me signing up for things I don’t know how to do). I bought a domain name, set up web hosting and started writing. The more I learned about the blogging world, the more I realized I had to learn. I almost gave up many, many times. I felt like I was in over my head and this was never going to become something I could be proud of or feel good about.

But I kept going. And I realized this process was actually very similar to how I felt about parenting. It was something I thought about doing for a long time before it became a reality, but when it did, I realized I had no idea how to be a mother.

Prior to having my son, I had no idea how to swaddle or feed a child solids for the first time. I had never heard of Pack n’ Plays, babywearing, or “PAW Patrol” (and now I know the words to every single episode). I wanted to give up many, many times. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. And if I could be a mother to two of the most amazing children I could have dreamed of, I could create a blog.

Or at least that’s what I told myself.

So welcome to this journey we will take together. While I have a desire to share advice, experience and what I hope is expertise, my deeper aspiration is to develop a network of support for those who choose to read what I have to say. I want to create a community of parents and friends who can use this blog as a platform to support each other and to know that you are not alone. That we all have struggles, and we all have solutions!

Each of us has something to teach as well as something to learn. So let’s get started!

Talya

Talya Knable, psychotherapist and Jmore parenting columnist, stands in her Lutherville home. (Photo by Steve Ruark)
(Photo by Steve Ruark)

Jmore parenting columnist Talya Knable is a psychotherapist who lives in Lutherville with her husband, Stephen, and their two children, Jack and Leigh.Her website is tkpsych.com/ She is also the assistant clinical director of Shalom Tikvah (shalomtikvah.org/) , a local non-profit organization that supports Jewish families facing mental illness and other challenging life circumstances.

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