Dear Natural Resources Community,
Let’s get real, though pregnancy, birth, and early parenting is filled with some exceptional moments of joy and love, there are a lot of moments along the way that don’t always manifest as a rosy image perfectly cropped and shiny and ready for a social media post.
Our mission at Natural Resources is to offer EVERY family in our community a glimpse into the raw, emotional, nitty-gritty experience of the parenting journey with honest education and non-judgemental support. This means intentionally pivoting away from the trauma-focused* stories in popular culture around birth and parenting, but also without only pushing the flipside of the glossy lure of the “happy baby” or “perfect” parent. Somewhere in the middle lies some beautiful and challenging reality. We believe these stories should be shared.
This is why we’re launching a campaign called #LetsGetReal -- real, raw, honest stories of the childbearing year and onward. We’re asking our community to share their images and stories to help us on our mission to help families find their empowered voices and understand there’s no one-size-fits all “right” way to parent.
You can contribute to the conversation by posting with the hashtags: #letsgetrealpostpartum, #letsgetrealparenting, #letsgetrealbirth, #letsgetrealpregnancy, and tagging us @naturalresourcessf on your social media pages. If you feel compelled to share some longer thoughts with us, you can reach out via email to potentially be featured in our blog or newsletter. We want to know what got you through, what more did you wish you knew, how did your community come through for you, how did you triumph, how are you coping with still moving through your challenges -- get real with us.
Each week we’ll be sharing some resources and tips from our educators and staff for how best to prepare for these emotional moments. It takes a village. You’re not alone.
*It is worth noting that even though we are looking for radical openness in these stories, we are not intentionally seeking stories of when everything goes wrong. That narrative is all too common in our culture already and breeds far too much fear and disempowerment.