Created by
Jayal Chung,
Fellow, I Love My Gig Ontario 2025
Published
February 17, 2026
Introduction
To every type of parent and caregiver offering love to support another human being while healing, struggling, & trying to balance life — you’re courageous. You are loved.
This zine offers affirmations & prompts for reflecting on inner resources, talking about mental health, and building community. Parenting and care work is political.
Flexibility, connection, playfulness, and rest can feel far away somedays, especially when focused on survival of meeting basic needs. Care work and love languages can often be invisible labour.
The little human beings we are in relationship with are gifts. As we tend their growth alongside our own, may we find and make community where we need.
Thank you to ArtsPond & everyone I met during the 2025 fellowships for support to reflect on care and the pandemic.
Becoming a parent is a daily practice & process of being human.
parent /pâr′ənt, păr′-/ noun
A female person whose egg unites with a sperm or a male person whose sperm unites with an egg, resulting in the conception of a child or the birth of a child.
A female person who is pregnant with or gives birth to a child except when someone else has legal rights to the child.
A person who adopts a child. A person who raises a child. An ancestor; a progenitor.
An organism that produces or generates offspring. A guardian; a protector.
— The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition
Acknowledgements
Becoming a queer parent with my wife, Carly, has been an intentional process. We’re parenting two children with our cultural identities being Chinese and Scottish, living in Thunder Bay-Anemki Wequedong, Territory of Fort William First Nation, Robinson-Superior Treaty.
Part dreaming, conversations, & appointments—joy, tears, anxiety, and exhaustion. Learning to ask for support still feels vulnerable and necessary. Gratitude to family, friends, and everyone who offers ongoing support and love.
We worked during the COVID-19 pandemic up to Carly birthing our first-born which coincided with strict lock-down restrictions; she is a nurse and & I worked as a systems navigator supporting youth and families, including new parents. Though we have some privileges and access to healthcare, there were ways we faced isolation, and navigated our own barriers. I try to bring my presence and patience into parenting, but feel urgency to fight and advocate for good housing, food, childcare, water, care, etc.
As I parent, I ask myself: how do I tend to myself better and what loving actions can I do to resist colonialism?
- What helps you feel cared for?
- Can you observe and describe a giving and receiving relationship in nature?
- Who or what place offers you space to feel heard, seen, and accepted?
- What is a strength you offer to those you care for?
- practicing, learning, and getting better at holding boundaries and needs
- examining where my need for productivity and constantly doing came from
- releasing self-judgement; balancing harsh inner criticism and lack of being/doing enough
Proud of myself for_220809_214933
Sometimes I feel like I process things very slowly and I just don’t have words to concretely talk about
what’s happening immediately.
Now I can identify it: I am feeling grief. I am ok.
When S. was born it was the height of strictest precautions. It was weird to not celebrate and have family and friends over. S. being sick brought up grief about the isolation.
Notes_221206_040409
Constants
Spend even a few moments quietly with an element of your choice. Visualize or directly connect with your senses. Notice any qualities such as colour, temperature, sound, the change in movement for example. What is your relationship to this element? What is unique about the element?
Over time, these constants have helped me connect to my body, find inner strength when feeling overwhelmed and release grief.
Can you connect with an element and offer yourself an affirmation? What affirmation or reminder can an element offer to you? To your baby? Your loved one?
It has been so helpful for me to access somatic therapy with Anabel Khoo (R.P.), applying medicine wheel teachings and Five Element Theory of Chinese Medicine.
- Sun
- Moon
- Breath
- Air
- Water
- Trees
- Fire
- Heart
- Gut instinct
- Earth
Love languages
Ideas for partners, friends, family members, caregivers. Add your ideas.
Acts of service
- delivering food, snacks, coffee/tea, groceries
- cleaning, organizing
- accompaniment to an appointment
- a ride
- research
- cooking, preparing meals
- laundry
- childcare support
Gifts
- memes
- playlists
- lending tools, baby gear, books
- cash, gift cards
- pre-loved baby clothes and toys
- recipes
Quality time
- listening ear
- visiting, going for a walk
- check-ins by phone, video-call, text, notes
- sharing knowledge & experiences
- group chat to share activities & plan meet-ups
- singing songs together, singing a lullaby
- reading books
- celebrate moments
Physical touch & considerations
- hug
- communicating needs, risk-exposures
- wearing a mask
- hand-holding
- gentle caress of fore-head
- holding baby
Affirmations
I am doing enough. I am doing what I can with what I have and what I know.
I am making decisions with the knowledge and support that I have at this moment.
It is reasonable and ok to feel sad, to feel grief, or feel overwhelmed, sometimes.
I am cherished. My presence offers comfort.
My advocacy, my instinct & my experience help me to get my needs met.
I am learning, growing, and changing each day.
I am creative. I will find ways to keep pursuing my passions.
I make mistakes, and I’ll be kind and accountable.
I can do things differently.
I hold space for play, grief, hope, anger, and joy.
I enjoy and welcome the glimmers.
I set boundaries to take care of my needs.
I offer my presence and tenderness.
I am powerful when I say no.
Mapping care
This has been a helpful way of having conversations and planning care. Maybe just oneperson comes to mind when you begin to reach out for care. Identifying a few people forhelping with childcare, illness, emergency, meals, general check-in and recovery from surgeryare some examples.
One way to build your own network is by starting a pod map. A pod map is a sketch of the people and resources in your network. Begin with your name in a center circle. Around your name, add additional circles with other names of specific people you can count on and who can count on you. Ideally, these circles would also contain the supports and resources that each person listed can provide. You might already know what these supports and resources are, or you might need to have some conversations with these people to understand what they might be able to provide and to let them know what you can offer.
More resources
growing one’s pod is not easy and may take time. In pod work, we measure our successes by the quality of our relationships with one another and we invest in the time it takes to build things like trust, respect, vulnerability, accountability, care, and love.
— Mia Mingus
Ways of staying connected online
Online baby shower
ER nurses online party
Gallery exhibit opening
Video call check-ins
Lockdown restrictions meant care-partners couldn’t stay in the hospital after the baby was born.
Online peer support & creative drop-in
- A casual/online drop-in via zoom on Sundays around (1-2:30pm-ish when baby naps) about bi-weekly/monthly.
- Purpose: for joy and fun, collective learning/practice, writing, peer support, organizing.
- General format: prompt/excerpt read offered – individual reflection, writing time – brief discussion, sharing/feedback; closing.
- Sometimes we can also hold sessions focused for sharing/practicing creative work and critique/feedback.
Parenting insights
Excerpt from Parenting insights_230408_125533
10 Things I have learned about myself as a parent that I wish I knew earlier.
2. Reading about polyvagal theory, the nervous system, and the immune system are interesting ways my interest in embodiment/somatics practices developed from creative movement and mindfulness. The pandemic and becoming a parent has been portal of transformation. Balancing full-time work, parenting, some periods of more care and support to family took adjusting to saying no to opportunities and outlining clearer boundaries. Accepting the space, tenderness, slowness, processing, inbetweeness of feeling into change brings me to grief and grieving. Which opens me to accepting and receiving love and care and that love that was there and so available for me.
3. I realize I seem to experience overstimulation when it comes to sounds, visual clutter, and sticky surfaces. Sometimes I struggle to process identify/ describe my overall feelings immediately, though internally I could be feeling/ sensing intense energy and feel overwhelmed and flooded. I reflect that I had limited examples of coregulating and a lack of personal space to express a variety of my emotions especially anger when I was younger without shame, or feeling wrong. Staying quiet, and retreating alone was a learned response for me. I am unlearning some of this shame and I have been trying to tend and learn about these effects. Trauma, intergenerational trauma. I can relate to having meltdowns, and shutdowns from time to time which are exhausting, and takes alot for me to love myself when these moments happen. Reading about neurodiversity, childhood development, adverse childhood experiences and post traumatic growth over the years has been helpful.
It was many years ago where I was sitting with a friend in the car getting ready to go to a social event that my friend had an anxiety attack, and I sat feeling for the first time that I could identify and relate. A similar feeling– it was recently seeing a TV show character named Quinni on Heartbreak High who was on a date and this scene I felt it captured so well what happens for me sometimes–
What’s the story behind your child’s name?
We waited to meet our babies, before we named them.
4:30am water broke
about 9am oxytocin started
3:47pm pain medication
might need probiotics
preemie suits
newborn diapers
icicle pads
ice chips
note 02/2021
induction
day of inauguration
birth-date of late great
grandmother –
a sign
coldest winter day
twinkle lights, lauryn hill
doula, midwives, and doctors
note 01/2025
Recipe
During the pandemic and when our babe was starting solids, I found myself reconnecting with food as comfort, wellness, memory, and exploring culture.
What is your favourite food or a dish from childhood?
Resources
Children’s books
- Change Starts With Us – S. Beer
- Love Makes A Family – S. Beer
- Bell’s Knock Knock Birthday – G. Parker & S. Orchard
- Booby Moon – Y. Reid
- Families Grow – D. Saks
- We are Water Protectors – C. Lindstrom
- Ploof – A. Chou & B. Clanton
- The Colour Monster – A. Llenas
Baby & child development
- @milkmatterspt
- @riseandsigntherapies
- @solidstarts
- The Bump: How to teach a baby sign language
Indigenous storytellers, knowledge & advocacy
- Treaty Words – Aimee Craft
- feathersofhope.ca various graphic novels
- nativeyouthsexualhealth.com You Are Medicine
- @giiwedinindizhinik
- @among_the_wildflowerss
On care
- Fumbling Towards Repair: A workbook for accountability facilitators – Mariame Kaba & Shira Hassan
- Caring for yourself is a radical act by ArtReach.
- SOIL Pod Map Worksheet
- Mia Mingus’ Pod Mapping Article
Personal and collective healing
- kaiyinspells spellworksomatics.com
- @acufunkture
- @tending.the.roots
- @repairing_the_nervous_system
© Jayal Chung, 2025.
All artworks, images, and texts are published with the permission of the artist. The creation and publication of this work was made possible with the support of Canada Council for the Arts, Government of Canada, Ontario Arts Council, and Government of Ontario.