Adapt: This edition encourages a shift from 'doing' to 'being' as a renewed approach to parenting amidst grief.

I’m Suzanne—a mum, occupational therapist, and long-time listener to the quiet wisdom that families carry. Lead Together is a space where parents lead, services follow, and your vision for your child’s life is honoured from the start. You are the expert. I’m here to walk beside you.

Dear fellow parent,

Thank you for being here. Maybe you’ve arrived in that hazy stretch of the day when your mind is full and your body is weary, when one more decision feels like too much.

Last time, we engaged with small steps alongside grief — learning that movement doesn’t have to be dramatic to be real. This week, we turn toward Adapt — shifting from doing to being.

In a world that praises action, doing can feel like proof of love. We fill the calendar, chase the next intervention, stay awake late researching, as if our busyness can save the people we love. But grief has a way of asking us to stop — to listen instead of fix, to be, instead of perform.

Some days, the most radical act of parenting is to pause. To sit beside your child without an agenda. To let the silence speak for you. To remember that love doesn’t always need an action plan.

This is what being can look like:

• Sitting and listening to your child breathe as they sleep.

• Sitting in a coffee shop and people watching, not feeling the urge to lift our phone and scroll!

• Saying, “I don’t know,” and letting that be a complete sentence.

  
  

In these small moments, something remarkable can happen: your nervous system, long trained for vigilance, begins to soften. Grief, too, begins to loosen its grip. It doesn’t disappear, but it sits down beside you, less like an intruder and more like a trusted friend who knows you’re tired.

Adapting from doing to being doesn’t mean giving up. It means acknowledging that care has many forms. Doing keeps the world spinning; being keeps our hearts beating. We need both.

So, when you notice yourself rushing through the day, chasing completion, take a breath and whisper: “I can rest in being.”That simple phrase is a bridge — from control to compassion, from productivity to presence.

And if you find that stillness makes you fidgety or guilty, know that this too is part of the adaptation. You’re learning to inhabit a new rhythm, one that honours both motion and rest.

This week, try this:

Choose one moment each day to pause and be. No agenda. No goal. Just presence. Sit with your child. Sip your tea. Listen to a favourite song all the way through.

If the grief voice rises — “You should be doing more” — answer gently: “Today, being is enough.”

A Glimpse Ahead:Next time, we’ll arrive at the “D” in our L-E-A-D framework: Discover — uncovering the quiet gifts that grief may leave in its wake.

Before you close this email, take a breath for yourself, and a breath for your child. Not the child in the reports. The child who called you into becoming.

May we adapt gently in the company of grief. May we remember that presence is a kind of medicine. And may we smile when the ladybug lands on the steering wheel, doing absolutely nothing — yet somehow reminding us that being is already enough.

Take all of the care,

Suzanne

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