Parenting Through Division: Grieving the World, Our Expectations, and Finding Grace

When grief isn’t just about losing a loved one, but navigating a fractured world without becoming what we oppose.

Last week, I shared how the pain of missing my sister Corinne on her birthday, combined with a heartbreaking email from one of her childhood friends, brought fresh grief to the surface. We walked through the five stages of grief together, reframing them not as a checklist out of our pain, but as an ever-shifting landscape.

But as I sat with that piece, and with the messages so many of you sent me, I realized something important. We aren’t just grieving the people who have physically left us.

We are grieving the expectations we held for our families. We are grieving the safety we thought our kids would have. And we are profoundly, deeply grieving the state of our fractured world.

The Unspoken Grief of Parenting

When you’re raising a child, especially an LGBTQ child, there is an invisible grief that parents often feel deeply ashamed to admit. It’s the grief of “what we thought it would look like.”

I often refer to this as “letting your movie reel explode.” It’s mourning the timeline you had in your head, perhaps the wedding you imagined, the casual assumptions about grandchildren, or even how your child would move through the world. It’s the sudden realization that the world isn’t as consistently safe or kind for your child as you once believed. And it’s sitting with the discomfort of that explosive mess, acknowledging each frame, and letting them go.

And sometimes, it’s the grief of losing relationships with family members or friends who simply refuse to unlearn their bias or hold space for your beautifully expanding family. Recognizing that means you’re expanding your capacity to hold many truths, many emotions at once. It’s understanding that a loved one’s refusal to unlearn their bias is often rooted in fear; fear driven by long-held beliefs, cultural expectations, a fixed mindset, or a combination of all of the above.

To the parents sitting in that specific, heavy tension right now: I see you. You are allowed to mourn those expectations. You are allowed to grieve the loss or change in those relationships. Acknowledging that grief does not mean you do not fiercely love your child. And it does not mean those relationships are permanently gone. Naming it is exactly what clears the path to truly embrace your child and to hold space for the complexity of the relationships you’re navigating.

Grieving the Collective

And then there is the macro. The weight of the world right now is staggering. We’re bearing witness to intense division, a deeply unserious administration, the catastrophic failure of DHS, and extraordinarily harmful rhetoric aimed at transgender youth, just to name a few. (Sending love and strength to every parent, medical professional, and policymaker fighting for these kids and for trans people in general. We cannot give up now.)

When we look at this through the lens of grief, the collective exhaustion makes sense. We get stuck in the Anger stage: the cortisol-fueled, wide-awake doom-scrolling at 2 a.m. We slip into the Depression stage: the bone-deep fatigue that asks, “does any of this even matter?” We wander into Bargaining: the loop of “if I just call one more representative, share one more post, donate one more time.” These aren’t just personal; they’re playing out on a national scale.

The Antidote: Curiosity and Grace

It’s all too easy to let this grief harden us or to retreat into numbness. But I truly believe we can advocate fiercely for our kids and our world without becoming what we oppose.

That balance is not weakness. It is strength. And the pathway there is the very first pillar of the More Human. More Kind. movement: Curiosity.

Curiosity is the ultimate antidote to judgment. It simply says, “Tell me more.”

Try this with me for a moment, right where you are. Notice how your body feels when you judge yourself or someone else. Do you feel tightness in your chest? A clenched jaw? Shallow breathing?

Now, take a deep breath and ask yourself to feel curious. What happens in your body? In your mind? Can you feel space open up? Does your jaw relax or your breath deepen? Perhaps you can even feel the connection between mind and body.

And here is what becomes possible: from curiosity, you can hold the grief and take action. You can feel the sadness and show up at your kid’s school board meeting. You can be furious and still lead with compassion instead of contempt. Every time you practice this, you expand your capacity for understanding, for complexity, for nuance.

When the world feels broken, and your grief feels too heavy to carry, pause and shift into curiosity. It doesn’t mean you tolerate harm. It doesn’t mean you’re quiet about injustice. It simply means you refuse to dehumanize others and yourself in the process.

If this resonates with you, you’re not alone. Sitting with parental and collective grief is its own form of courage, which allows us to see that grief and love can exist in the same space, and mourning expectations doesn’t diminish love; it deepens it. My own grief in losing Corinne (among other losses) has taught me to recognize patterns in the collective, and naming them is the first step toward not carrying them alone.

Next week, in the final part of this series, we’ll move from realization into repair: exploring the messy, beautiful rituals that help us heal.

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Until then, be more human and more kind.