Navigating (Parental) Uncertainty
Recently, I enrolled my 16-month-old daughter in daycare. Up until now, my in-laws had cared for her during the weekdays since my husband and I returned to work when she was around six months old. However, due to a recent move, we now live 40 minutes away from my husband’s family and our friends, and three hours away from my side of the family. While our new home is beautiful, I can’t help but feel a sense of uncertainty about whether the people watching her will care for her as deeply or have her well-being as a first priority. And now, I have this lingering uncertainty if we did the right thing.
Uncertainty, for me, brings about a state of emotional paralysis. My mind twists and races at all hours. Sometimes, I find it difficult to even move; the crushing weight takes a toll and leaves me utterly exhausted.
I can’t help but wonder: are we providing her a better life if, in these first few years, we are not surrounding her with people who we know have her best interest? It takes a village, they say, but what if your village isn’t your family? How do you handle this kind of uncertainty and all the uncertainties that come with being a parent, especially when you’re in a constant state of angst that you may be failing them?
However, amidst this uncertainty, there’s also an opportunity to build emotional resilience. And in an attempt to be optimistic, I’ll put into words what I tell myself whenever friends and family and I get together to help each other work through difficult times.
Big Picture Thinking
I was perpetually stressed out by pregnancy and giving birth. Black women face a much higher maternal death rate, 2.6x higher than White women, and all the stats around black pregnancy and motherhood freaked me out.
What kept me surprisingly sane was my family telling me about their experiences. My grandmother told me about giving birth to my mother with no pain medication for 48 hours of labor in a country Virginia hospital. My great-grandmother had 19 children in the countryside of Virginia Beach, Virginia, and this story is not uncommon for her generation. To help me relieve the anxiety of giving birth, I thought about the women in my family and the centuries of strong black women who gave birth without pain medication or the comforts of the modern hospital.
Stress expert Elissa Epel also notes on the Andrew Huberman podcast that stress dissipates when you're 65+ years old because you feel like you’ve already overcome numerous challenges throughout your life. The accumulated life experience allows you not to take any situation too seriously.
With my current daycare situation, I think that this 1.5 years left of her being in daycare rather than at home with her grandparents is only a blimp in her life that she’ll have memories of for a short while, but the home that we’re building for her, the schools that she’ll eventually go to, the friends that she’ll make being in a neighborhood with younger families will be much more beneficial to her in the long run. In the grand scheme of things, this decision is also one of many that I will face throughout my motherhood journey. And I hope with time, the gravity of the situation will diminish, and things are, in fact, likely to work out positively.
If you thought through your decision leading to the situation, removing yourself from the immediate world and zooming out to see the broader context, you could gain perspective to help alieve some of that uncertainty. Moreover, many situations over our lives show that we're a lot stronger than our current situation will let us believe, and it helps to remind yourself of that.
Getting Stress-tested
In the Psychology of Money, author Morgan Housel says navigating uncertainty is a lot easier when the issue and the stakes are not too extreme; I think you can apply this financial principle to everyday life.
Testing yourself and putting yourself in uncertain situations where you have some cushion to fall on is a good way to test your resilience and develop that muscle.
Expressing Radical Candor with Yourself and Others
I have no filter, which gets me into trouble. Yet it also makes me a reliable source of feedback and honesty for friends and family, which (I hope) they appreciate. This unfiltered perspective also makes it easier to help me navigate uncertainty.
So after putting the situation into perspective, I also try to express radical honesty by approaching my situation with facts.
Self-coaching
Journaling, of course, is helpful, but coaching and having someone to help you work through certain situations can be a more powerful tool*. However, for someone with limited time (and money), paying for an executive coach isn't a top priority. So I've implemented a self-coaching practice, where I check in with myself every two weeks and try to coach myself, thinking through the problems I'm experiencing, getting honest with myself on the gravity of the situation, and giving homework to help relieve the stress.
Self-coaching example
Here’s a self-coaching example I wrote a few years ago. It's a bit manic and emotional, but I think the simple questions it asks can be beneficial, and overtime it helped me get clarity.
Questions to Ask Yourself
I'm also a naturally judgmental person. On the Myers-Briggs personality chart, I’m an INFJ and ranked 78% judgmental. So to combat my judgmental nature and remain objective towards my situation, I try to get curious and ask open-ended questions. Here are a few over the years:
What's the real challenge for you?
What's on your mind?
If you could change just ONE thing right now, what would it be?
What else?
How does that serve you?
Why?
I also use these questions on my friends and family to get a fuller picture of their uncertain situation and help them navigate their problems.
Sometimes, New Seasons Are Just What You Need
A friend called me after the store she was working for was closing, and she was unsure if they would let her work under her current boss at his new location. She didn't like the employer she was working for but loved her team, and now that the team was dismantling, she debated whether or not to apply to a different job, even though she had been with the company for 10+ years.
What we landed on is that everything has a season, and sometimes new chapters in your story may not always be bad; the important thing to remember is that you had a wonderful season, and now it's time to enter another. She did apply and got a new (better-paying) job, and hopefully, I’ll be entering a joyous season now.
Don’t Hold Yourself to Something You Committed to Before
I am a fan of quitting. I don’t think it’s wise to hold yourself to something you committed to before you knew the actual situation, or worse, you continue something because you have already invested significant time, money, and/or effort.
While the new situation may be uncertain, you shouldn’t keep the current one because of some sunk cost fallacy.
Getting Creative when “Chatting” with Friends
Call me old school, but I remember when you could stay on phone calls for hours chatting it up with a friend, talking about your problems, and essentially, venting your way through the situation. I’m lucky enough to have ten close friends that are my people, and I still lean on long phone calls with them to talk through certain situations. But as you get older, there are times when they are simply not available.
In that case, I tend to leave 4-5 minute voicemails detailing my issues and letting them listen and respond in their free time. You’ll also catch me sending essay-length text messages, or as the designated event planner of my friend group, I’ll plan outings for us where we can kick back and then dump all the things that are going on in our lives onto each other.
The single-handedly best idea that my close friend group came up with was to have a quarterly sleepover. While we can’t always be there for each other on a day-to-day basis, that sleepover has been a haven for me just to be and rejuvenate.
I’ve chatted about uncertain and difficult situations at night clubs, book clubs, in car rides, and honestly, wherever. People’s attention is hard to get nowadays. I think it’s perfectly okay to be vulnerable in nonideal places to help you relieve some of that angst. That’s the culture my friends and I have developed, and I think we have been able to adapt and maintain a lovely friendship over the years.
For daycare, I found myself expressing how worried I was within a group thread after discussing my friend’s pictures from a Beyonce Renaissance concert. Not surprisingly, the response from everyone was supportive and uplifting. In those few minutes, they reassured me that everything would be fine and that my daughter, Addy, would adjust to this new experience.
Uncertainty is a part of life. Sure, it helps build resilience, but it doesn’t make it easier when you’re in the thick of it. With all the parental anxiety and uncertainty I’ve been feeling, I long for stability I don’t quite have in my life. But bubbling up to the bigger picture, getting honest with myself about why I’m feeling this way, and getting more vulnerable with friends, will help me manage some of it. And in the end, it will likely all work out.
