The Cost of Resilience

When you are navigating parenthood without support around you, chances are you are, or have built, quite a bit of resilience. 

You are able to withstand a lot of stress, emotionally challenging times, and have adapted to circumstances that are a bit more difficult. Maybe you’re able to handle everyday stresses really well, maybe you are really good at looking at things from a positive point of view, and maybe you have built excellent systems for how to keep your family and home life running and feeling steady and safe. 

Resilience is something to be proud of, and a great tool, but sometimes it can be a bit of a double-edged sword. 

It can mean that things feel harder than they look on the outside. It can get to a point where you have adapted so well to not having support around you, and have harnessed an incredible amount of strength, that from the outside people don’t think you need any help. The gap between how you feel and what things look like might be a bit bigger.  

Something interesting can happen here. You can have adapted so well that you are now often the person that others’ come to for help, when you have no help yourself. It can be so tricky because it is really great to be resilient, but sometimes parenting without external support can also slide into chronic independence and people thinking you don’t need any help.  

Sometimes the skills that we have built in parenthood in this context just feed the loop of not having support around. 

Either, because no-one thinks you need any support and are managing things so well, or because you have lived without it for so long that you don’t reach for it any more. 

Sometimes the first can feed into the second, because it feels like such a compliment when people view us as someone who is managing so well and doing such a good job. We don’t want to give them a different impression of how we are managing when the picture they have feels so flattering. 

And then other times we are just so very used to doing things the way we have been doing them that we are worried if we accept or ask for more support that things will change or that it will throw things off in some way. We have built such a level of chronic independence that reaching out or allowing someone to help in any way feels so alien. 

Both of these things then feed into us keeping in the context of not having a village or external support, or community that we actually lean on for things. Which in turn makes it all a bit harder. 

If this feels like you, you have built incredible resilience. But you also deserve a soft life, too. It doesn’t make you weaker to want things to be softer. It doesn’t make you less than if you want things to be a bit easier. 

You deserve support and you deserve to put your armour down for a minute. You deserve to be seen for what a wonderful job you are doing, and also to receive help and softness. 

Be gentle with yourself this week.