Grieving the Parent You Thought You Would Be

When many of us imagine becoming parents, we carry quiet pictures in our minds.

• Who we’ll be.

• How we’ll respond.

• What we’ll do differently than those who raised us.

• How we will show up for our own kids.

• How we will be attentive and attuned. 

• How we will be present.

And then we meet the child we actually have.

Parenting often asks us to grieve—not because we don’t love our children, but because loving them requires letting go of who we thought we would be. This grief is rarely named. Instead, it shows up as shame, frustration, self-doubt, or the sense that we are somehow doing it wrong. 

Francis Weller’s work on grief offers a powerful framework for understanding this experience. His Five Gates of Grief remind us that grief is not only about death—it is about loss, change, and the ways life initiates us into deeper truth.

Parenting is one of those initiations.

Gate One: Grief for What We Love

The first gate holds our grief for what we love—and are afraid of losing.

In parenting, this often shows up as grief for the version of ourselves we cherished:

• The patient parent.

• The gentle parent.

• The parent who would never yell, never lose control, never repeat the patterns they grew up with.

We grieve the loss of certainty.

• The illusion of control.

• The fantasy that love alone would be enough.

This grief doesn’t mean we are failing.

• It means we cared deeply about who we wanted to be.

Gate Two: Grief for the Places We Have Not Known Love

The second gate invites us to mourn the ways we ourselves were not met.

When we become parents, many of us realize—often painfully—that parts of our own childhood are still asking for care. Childhood, regardless of circumstance, involves a lack of agency. There is adultism, unmet needs, and often an absence of the village required to truly thrive.

We may find ourselves trying to give our children what we needed instead of what they need.

This is not selfishness.

• It is grief asking to be acknowledged.

Without space to mourn what we didn’t receive, our inner child can quietly take the lead in our parenting sometimes. 

Gate Three: Grief for the World as It Is

The third gate holds grief for the world we are parenting in.

Many parents today are raising children without structural support, without community care, and under systems that demand productivity over presence. We are told to parent better while being given less time, fewer resources, and little rest.

No wonder it feels hard to stay regulated.

• No wonder patience feels thin.

Struggling in this context is not a personal failure—it is a human response to an inhumane system.

Gate Four: Grief for What We Expected and Did Not Receive

This gate is where many parents linger.

We grieve the parenting experience we imagined.

• The child we thought we would have.

• The ease we hoped would come once we “healed enough.”

We may also grieve the belief that if we were worthy, things would have been different—both in our past and now.

Naming this grief matters. Unspoken grief often turns into rigidity, self-criticism, or despair. When it is honored, it becomes a doorway to compassion.

Gate Five: Grief for Ancestral and Collective Pain

Parenting does not happen in a vacuum.

We carry ancestral trauma, cultural expectations, gendered messages, and generational wounds into our families. For many of us, being raised in systems shaped by religion, patriarchy, whiteness, capitalism, and violence informs what we believe about worth, obedience, and care.

When we parent, we are not only responding to our child—we are responding to centuries of inherited stories.

This grief is not ours alone to carry, but it moves through us.

Letting Grief Do Its Work

Grieving the parent you thought you would be is not about giving up.

• It is about making space for truth.

When grief is welcomed, it softens our grip on who we should be and opens us to who our child actually needs. It helps us separate the needs of our inner child from the needs of the child in front of us.

This is where coaching can be powerful—not as a place to fix or perfect, but as a place to sit with grief, complexity, and becoming.

• You are not behind.

• You are not broken.

• You are being initiated.

A Gentle Invitation

If you are navigating grief in your parenting—spoken or unspoken—you don’t have to do it alone. Support can help you move from self-judgment to understanding, and from survival to presence.

Grief is not the end of the story.

• It is often the beginning of a more honest one.