Recently, I was on a Clubhouse chat and I said something about not truly knowing fear until I became a mom. Up until that point, I don’t think I ever admitted publicly how scared parenting made me. I’ve shared my fears with friends over the years but only bits and pieces. Even as I type this, my inner voice is screaming at me to just be quiet.
The thing is though that fear grows in the quiet. When we don’t speak on our fears they become bigger and bigger until we are completely suffocated by them. When we find the courage to share them we allow them to be supported by those in our village. Even if they don’t share or understand our fears they can still support us through the fears. My fears around parenting are in some ways very similar to what I imagine most parents worry about. Am I a good mom? Am I doing enough? Am I raising my daughter to be self-sufficient? Am I raising her to be a good human?
Those are the manageable fears. Those are the ones that are easy to discuss with my village. Those aren’t the ones that sometimes paralyze me in my parenting. They’re not the ones that keep me up at night. They’re not the ones that I have difficulty sharing. Those fears come from a different space. Some stem from being a solo parent. Some from my ever-growing anxiety. Some stem from the generational curses that I am still working to break.
The thing is, we all have fears. It has nothing to do with bravery or courage. Fears help us grow when we are willing to face them. When we don’t face them we give them strength. We feed them and they become more overwhelming to the point that we cannot see through them. That isn’t the space that I want to parent from.
When we parent from a place of fear, we are not being fair to ourselves or our littles. When we parent from fear we cripple ourselves and our littles. When we parent from fear we can’t see all sides of a situation.
Parenting is going to come with fears. Fears can be a healthy part of life. Fear can be a warning sign of something dangerous. We just have to be able to move past the fear. We cannot let it keep us stuck in one place. We cannot allow fear to make decisions for us. I am pledging to parent without fear. I will parent through L.O.V.E. AND T.R.U.S.T.
