Whether you’re shifting your worldview, your parenting style, your relationships, or your values—you’re allowed to evolve. Your needs are allowed to change. Your priorities are allowed to shift. And your life doesn’t have to look like anyone else’s to be valid. 

Somewhere along the way, you internalized messages about who you should be in order to be accepted, safe, or loved. Maybe those messages came from caregivers, teachers, culture, religion, or peers. Maybe they were loud and cruel—or quiet and implied. Over time, they became a kind of mental background noise.

New parents, however they got there, are going through a massive adjustment with a rapid change to their daily life to focus on their baby’s (or babies’) survival. But who is there to nurture these new parents? With old adages like “it takes a village,” one would think that there would be a better understanding of how to attend to the parents; but where is this village?