Parenting
Parenting is some of the most meaningful work a person can do, and some of the most depleting, and the culture is strangely silent about the second part. We are told to treasure every moment, to be grateful, to make it look easy, while the exhaustion, the self-doubt, the lost sense of self, and the resentment that sometimes rises go unspoken. We make room for the whole of it, the love and the hard parts alike.
This work holds many parts of the parenting experience, including:
- The relentless daily labor of raising children, often without the village earlier generations relied on, inside a culture that privatized care and then called the exhaustion a personal failing
- The loss of self that can come with being needed all the time, and the difficulty of holding onto your own identity, needs, and limits inside the role of parent
- Parental guilt, the sense that whatever you do, it is never enough, and the impossible standards that produce it
- The resentment, frustration, and ambivalence that can live right alongside deep love for your children, and that are so rarely allowed to be spoken
- The way your own childhood surfaces when you raise a child, including the patterns you are working hard not to pass forward, and the grief of realizing what you did not get
- Parenting through hard seasons, including a child’s struggles, illness, or disability, family conflict, separation, or your own mental health
- The particular weight carried by parents who are also holding jobs, households, and everyone else’s needs, and the cultural expectation, especially on mothers, to do it all without complaint
Parenting does not happen in a vacuum. It happens inside an economy that offers almost no paid leave or affordable childcare, inside communities whose support structures have been dismantled, inside a culture that expects parents, and especially mothers, to do an impossible amount with almost no help and then to perform gratitude about it. Much of what gets experienced as not coping well is the predictable result of carrying a load that was never meant to be carried alone.
For folks parenting inside marginalized communities, the weight compounds, including the cultural expectations about what a good parent “”should be””, and the experience of raising children who will face a world that is not always safe for them.
What this work can look like at MLC:
- Making room for the full emotional range of parenting, including the resentment, doubt, and exhaustion that are not supposed to be said out loud
- Working with parental guilt and the impossible standards that fuel it
- Helping you hold onto your own identity, needs, and limits inside a role that is always asking for more
- Working with the patterns from your own childhood that surface in parenting, so you can choose what to carry forward and what to set down
- Supporting you through hard parenting seasons, including a child’s struggles, illness, or disability with care
- Naming the structural conditions, including the absent village and the privatization of care, rather than locating the whole struggle inside you
The therapists at MLC understand that parenting can be both the most meaningful and the most depleting work a person does, and that it has too often been met with cheerful platitudes instead of real support. We bring care for the whole of it, the love and the hard parts alike, and we want all of you in the room, not only the parts that are managing.
