Watch What We'll Do Together

Dear friends, 

The words of essayist Elizabeth Stone have been looping through my mind these last few weeks while trying to take in the headlines.  “Making the decision to have a child—it is momentous.  It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking [...or be] around outside your body.” It's been difficult to not feel despair at the vulnerability of that right now.  

Parenthood is one of life’s most sacred and profoundly transformative choices.  It is for this reason that it must be entered freely.  We are in a moment where this choice feels increasingly perilous as we see reproductive choices increasingly restricted and as the world feels particularly hostile to our tiny humans. Gun violence, formula shortages, inflation, abortion restrictions, and an on-going pandemic with no vaccine options for our small children—all these things are weighing heavily on the parents we are seeing.  The always-harrowing journey of parenthood feels extra precarious and heavy-laden right now.  

Parents and children need to depend on their communities to keep their children safe.  Through COVID, we have seen parents feel increasingly abandoned in their hour of need as they struggle with a lack of childcare, a lack of resources, and a lack of options to keep their children healthy.  During the current formula recall, it’s been heartbreaking for families to grapple with a lack of safe food for their infants, the lack of care that led to that absence, a lack of trust from their community that they have made the best feeding decisions for them and their child.  We need to trust our communities to make the choices necessary to keep our children safe in our stores, our classrooms, and our neighborhoods.  And while many of these conditions are broadly impacting Americans, they are disproportionately felt by those from marginalized identities--people of color, women, and queer people to name just a few.  

As we enter Pride month, I find myself even more conscious of the long journey toward liberation of which this moment is only a part.  When things feel bleak, I can look to the collective resilience and agency that humans have used throughout history to work to understand the sources of their oppression and act collectively to change their environment.  I am reminded that throughout history people have taken the time to listen to each other’s experiences, and from that understanding they’ve been able to build change. Like all things in life, parenthood is not a monolithic, one-size fits all experience.  We each bring our own unique needs, wants, values, abilities, and experiences that influence the choices we make for ourselves and our families.  When we trust each other to know our own unique needs and work together to meet those needs for each other, we can do powerful things.  Trust can be a radical act—to be worthy of it, to offer it, to uphold it. 
 
And because so much of our work is in maternal mental health, I want to speak directly to the collective resilience of mothers.  Women are no strangers to attempts to limit their agency, their choices, and their power.  And mothers in particular feel the weight of needing to make the world a safe place for their children to grow up.  When faced with oppression, women and mothers will do what they have always done—stand together to meet each other’s needs and advance change. 

You need only to look at the way that moms have banded together to community-source enough formula in formula banks and buy-nothing groups to find ways to do what our nation could not do—ensure that mothers can feed their babies.  You see it in the way that mothers lead the advocacy for change in our local government.  You will see it in efforts both national and individual to support each other in accessing their choices and protecting their children.  

Like our beloved Fred Rogers would say in the wake of tragedy, "look for the helpers" -- the version for me right now is, "watch what women will do for each other." Know that we at the Center will be right here to help heal the fractured places within, and to work in our small corner of the world to make it feel safer for part of your heart be outside of your body.  There is strength in numbers, might and persistence! 
 

With you,

Kellie Wicklund, LPC, PMH-C
Owner + Clinical Director 

Christina Moran
Executive Director