Cultural Isolation in Grief and Parenting
There are so many parallels between grief and parenthood. Yes, a part of becoming a parent is mourning a loss of what life looked like before you became a parent. But that’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about the isolation that comes from entering into something that our culture has largely deemed to be an individual experience, and not a collective one. This cultural signaling does not mean that it is right, or best, or useful. In fact, it is detrimental to our healing, our growth, and our sense of well-being.
What does this emphasis of individual experience lead to? In parenthood, it can lead to the undeniable feeling of confusion that accompanies the thought “how the f*ck am I supposed to juggle it all?” The concerns around finances, logistics, not having enough hours in the day. But instead of looking at it from a universal lens, it can feel like a personal failure. “Why am I the only one who can’t get it together?” And don’t get me started on social media, and the way it reinforces that feeling.
In grief, the cultural signaling of grieving as an individual, private act does two harmful, unnecessary things. First, it protects the non-griever from feeling personal responsibility for the support and care of the griever. For the griever, it ushers in a felt sense of isolation, loneliness, and disconnection. Let’s break these things down, because I think they are so important.
For non-grievers, we are letting ourselves off the hook in a difficult, uncomfortable, maybe foreign situation. Because often we don’t know what to say, how to act, or how to show up. And so looking at grief as being an individual, private experience gives us an out to just *not* act at all. It also allows us to distance ourselves from the loss, protecting us from feeling the true universality of death and grief. However, that doesn’t make it true. Eventually, we all experience loss. We all will be the griever, eventually.
For the griever, isolation and loneliness can be so detrimental. We can feel like we can’t talk about our loved one who died, because we believe that people won’t know what to say, or that they can’t handle it, or that they don’t want to hear it. We can feel like maybe the anger, confusion, or guilt we feel is ours alone, rather than being normal emotional responses during grief. We can lose friendships, a sense of community, a sense of belonging. All this, in addition to having already lost someone we love.
So what can we do about it? The antidote to loneliness is community. Community in grieving, community in parenting. By asking for help when we need it. By showing up for a friend or colleague or neighbor when we know they are struggling. You don’t need to know what to say when you do it. If you need a line, try these:
In grief:
“Can I give you a hug?”
“Do you want to talk about [name of person who died]?”
“I love you.”
In parenthood:
“Can I give you a hug?”
“Do you want to talk about what’s feeling hard right now?”
“I love you.”
I think many of us are fighting the battle for community in parenting. It goes beyond the kitschy dream of living in a commune with our friends. It is within reach, in our day to day lives. We know that feeling when you share something that’s been a struggle and a friend says “yes, me too. Yes, that is so hard.” That relief, the loosening in your jaw that comes from knowing YOUR hard thing is actually just A hard thing.
We need more of that in our lives. We are all going to experience losses, challenges, and struggles that leave us yearning to feel seen. I trust that we can show up for each other in ways to radically shifts our feelings of loneliness into feelings of connection. Two of the hardest experiences we will have in life are parenthood and grief, and we don’t need to go through either of them alone.
