Today is World Mental Health Day. The Surgeon General recently issued a warning about the mental health of parents. Parents are stressed out about everything. (more here)
The warning contains great suggestions for how every aspect of society can support parents and help alleviate the crisis.
But there’s one piece missing. In addition to all sorts of ways we could better care for and support parents, we need the spiritual awareness of our belovedness as humans. We need to know that we are good enough as we are, for all our flaws. We need to know we are loved before we’ve gotten things right and after we’ve gotten things wrong. We need to connect to sources of love outside of ourselves, ground ourselves in that belovedness, and allow that same love to animate our relationships with ourselves, our fellow caregivers, and our children.
I learned this need to know my belovedness, and to know our children’s belovedness, when our daughter Penny was born with Down syndrome. I could strive all I wanted as a parent, and she still wouldn’t meet the developmental milestones at the pediatrician’s office. I could allow the stress of all the therapists and specialists and educators to keep me up at night, and she would still learn and grow at her own pace. Or I could start to rejoice in who she was as she was. I could start to receive her as beloved and understand the same about myself. That, even as her mom, I wasn’t loved because I found the best orthotics for her feet or because she wore cute clothes or because I read 27 books about Down syndrome. I was loved because I was loved. And I could love her out of that deep and unending source of love.
We need to change our approach to parenting in the United States in all the ways Dr. Vivek Murthy suggests. And we also need to change our mindset about ourselves and our kids. We need to receive our own belovedness as the foundation of our being so that we can create communities not based on stressful striving, but communities of belovedness.
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MORE WITH AMY JULIA:
- Self-Care in Seasons of Stress
- Like Trees, We Need Stress in Our Lives
- S7 E6 | How to Become a Worry-Free Parent with Sissy Goff, LPC-MHSP
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