Embodying the Parent You Want to Be - So You Can Savor the Little Moments Today & Lay the Foundation for a Fulfilling Future

A 6 part series for queer parents (and prospective parents) who love their kids so fiercely, they refuse to settle for a family where there are conditions on love, support, and belonging.

This post kicks off a 6 part series about embodying the kind parent you aspire to be. Because parenting isn’t just about what you do—it’s about who you are. And your ability to both fully enjoy parenting and feel confident in your choices comes from shifting your inner world.

So, maybe a parenting challenge, big decision, or question brought you to this community. Or maybe there is a gap between the kind of parent you want to be, and the kind of parent you are showing up as today.

Queer families begin with imagination and intentionality. But, once our kids arrive, once the routines settle in, once life gets full and complicated—it’s easy to let the big questions fade into the background.

Not because we don’t care or aren’t thoughtful. But because life moves fast, and most of us are just trying to keep up.

And so, without even realizing it, we slip into familiar rhythms. Patterns from our own childhoods. Cultural expectations that surround us. Small, daily choices that feel automatic. Some of these inherited patterns are helpful, but others pull us out of alignment with our values. So, the question is: How do we stay connected to our values even in the messy, stressful moments of parenting?

Because parenting as a queer person isn’t just about raising kids—it’s about creating something extraordinary. Without rigid norms or societal molds to fall back on, queer families have the unique opportunity to lead with intention, embrace what makes them different, and craft family cultures rooted in pride, joy, and belonging.

That’s what we’re here to explore in this series.

So, whether you’re deciding if you want to be a parent, navigating tensions with family who still don’t fully see your role, or figuring out how to raise your child with pride when the world still makes queerness invisible—these moments aren’t just about making a single choice. They’re about something much bigger: building a family that reflects who you are, without constantly questioning if you’re doing it “right” in a world that was never built with you in mind.

Every parenting challenge (decision or question, big or small) is an invitation—a moment to decide what gets carried forward, what gets reshaped, and what ends with you.

The opportunity within these challenges is to not ONLY solve the challenge for good, but to align more deeply with your values. ***And alignment is about making sure your automatic responses don’t betray your values.***

And alignment is a SKILL.

👉 So, how do we build the skill of alignment—so that our daily choices, big decisions, and deepest values stay connected, even in the hardest moments?

Using my master certification in Jungian coaching, two decades of personal development and a decade of coaching others through major life transitions and redefining success, I built The Alignment Practice™ Framework (APF).

A structured process for moving through big (and small) parenting questions and challenges with clarity, confidence, and self-trust. Centered on the queer parenting experience.

What Is The Alignment Practice™ Framework?

It gives you a repeatable process to uncover why something feels so heavy, what’s actually holding you back, and how to move forward in a way that aligns with your values—so that when the next big challenge comes up, you already know how to navigate it.

The framework has two core parts:

✔ The Clarity Roadmap → Helps you unpack the real issue beneath the challenge (because the obvious problem is almost never the real problem).

✔ PAVE → Anchors your insights and keeps your clarity accessible—so as you move through the weeks that follow, you can deepen your insights, test small shifts, and turn them into breakthroughs. And the more breakthroughs you have, the more these shifts become second nature—until alignment with your values isn’t something you have to think about, but something you live on autopilot.

Over the next few weeks, I am going to share the details of the The Alignment Practice™ Framework. (Want to skip ahead? Take a listen to the watch the free 25-minute overview here) In the next post, I’m going to share the first key shift inside the Clarity Roadmap—one that instantly makes any challenge feel lighter.

But until then, over the next few days, I would encourage you to think about a pressing decision or challenge you’re facing. Somewhere you have an inner conflict, or the kind of parent you envisioned being, is in conflict with your actions. Because the Alignment Practice™ isn’t something extra to do—it’s a tool designed to help you move through whatever is already most important in your life today. Whether it’s a parenting decision, a tough conversation, or an ongoing tension - use that as your lens. So that by the end of the series, you can create an immediate shift and experience the power of the Alignment Practice™ Framework in your own life.

P.S. Learning the framework is just the first step. Mastering alignment—the kind you can count on in messy, high-stakes moments—takes practice and refinement. The Lab is where you do all three, so that alignment isn’t just something you know—it’s something you live. And when alignment becomes a skill you have mastered? You can soak in the everyday joy—the messy ice cream faces, the surprise “I love you” out of nowhere, the deep belly laughs —while knowing how you’re showing up is shaping their lifelong sense of worth.

✨🌈TL;DR:

Parenting isn’t just about what you do—it’s about who you are. This six-part series explores how to align your daily parenting choices with your values, even in messy or stressful moments. Using The Alignment Practice™ Framework, you’ll learn a repeatable process to uncover what’s really behind challenging moments and respond in ways that reflect the parent you want to be. Alignment is a skill—not something extra to do, but a way to navigate decisions, tensions, and challenges with clarity and confidence. By mastering this skill, you can create a family life that reflects your values and fully savor the joyful moments along the way.