Engage: Tackling grief's waves with small, steady steps of quiet resilience in parenting.

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 at the end of a long day of forms, phone calls, or quiet worries that no one quite understands. Maybe you’re reading this in the car outside of therapy, or in the pause between bedtime stories and dishes. However you’ve come, I’m grateful we’re side by side.

Grief can feel like a giant wave, and some days it’s hard to know how to keep moving.

Last time, we leaned in with grief — noticing how it lives in the body, in our stories, in the breath that connects us to our children.

This week, we turn to Engage — and remember that even when grief feels overwhelming, we can take small steps.

Grief often whispers: “It’s too much. You’ll never get through this.”

But small steps answer back: “Yes, but I can take one thing at a time.”

When parenting feels like walking uphill with a backpack full of emotions — love, fear, guilt, fatigue — it’s easy to believe that progress must look like a leap. But most of the healing, the advocacy, the tenderness, happens in quiet increments. One step, one moment, one breath at a time.

Small steps matter because they honour your reality. They meet us where we actually are, not where we think we should be.

A small step might be sending one email you’ve been avoiding. It might be taking a two-minute walk, or making that phone call with shaky hands. It might be choosing to rest instead of rushing, trusting that pause is not failure. It might even be smiling at your child when everything inside you feels uncertain.

Each small act tells your nervous system, “We are still moving.” And movement — even the tiniest — is a form of hope.

Grief is often a clever storyteller. It tells us we need to be stronger, faster, more capable before we can begin. It insists that we have to fix everything at once, or not at all. But engaging in small steps disrupts that story. It says: “I can start where I am, as I am. I don’t have to wait until the storm passes to take a breath.”

Small steps also remind us that grief isn’t something to conquer. It’s something to walk with. When we move in small, steady ways, grief learns to travel beside us rather than ahead of us. It stops dragging us down and begins to find its rhythm within our days.

If you listen closely, you might even find that small steps have their own kind of music — the sound of continuity, of quiet resilience.

This week, try this:

Notice one very small step you can take. Write it down. Do it. Then pause and acknowledge it — not as a minor thing, but as an act of courage.

And if you don’t take the step right away, that’s okay too. Sometimes the noticing itself is the step.

A Glimpse Ahead:

Next time, we’ll move toward the “A” in our L-E-A-D framework: Adapt — learning how to shift from doing to being, and finding the strength that emerges when we let go of constant motion.

As always:

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 take small steps alongside grief.

May we trust that even tiny movements matter.

May we remember that even a ladybird, with its polka-dot steps, travels far.

And when we can’t move at all, may we trust that stillness, too, is part of the path — a pause where new life quietly gathers its strength.

Take all of the care,

Suzanne

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