Hope Isn’t a Strategy, Honesty Isn’t the End Goal

One without the other leaves us stuck. What matters is how we use both to keep moving.

©MarioGuti via Canva

I don’t always catch it in real time, but there’s a pattern I’ve started noticing.

I see it in conversations with friends.
In essays. Podcasts.
In the way I narrate my own days to myself.

The tension between being honest about how hard parenting is and holding onto some sense of hope while I do it.

Some of us tend to lean toward hope—white-knuckling belief that things will get better, easier, smoother.
Others camp out in honesty—naming every hardship, collecting evidence of the struggle, building a home in the hard parts.

Both feel useful.
Both feel responsible.

So, ideally, we look for balance.
The perfect emotional formula.
The optimum percentage of each.

But what if it has nothing to do with balance and everything to do with how we use them?

Hope and honesty aren’t two ends of a seesaw. They’re tools. They serve different purposes. But neither works unless we use them to move—not just reflect.

Honesty Isn’t the Villain—but It’s Not the Finish Line Either

We talk about honesty as if it were the heavy one.
The gritty one.
The friend who says the thing everyone else is avoiding.

But useful honesty isn’t harsh. It’s clarifying.

It’s not the spiral.
It’s not the vent session.
It’s not the “just keeping it real” performance that builds followers but solves nothing.

Honesty—the kind that changes us—is quiet.
Precise.
Subtle enough to disrupt, but strong enough to stick.

But here’s where it gets tricky:
Honesty feels like progress. It feels productive to name what’s wrong. But if we stop there, we start confusing awareness with action. And awareness, unconverted, begins to rot.

We sit in what’s broken instead of building something different.
We sharpen our language but remain stuck in our patterns.
We make peace with the pain but stop looking for joy.

And slowly, without realizing it, we become experts in the hardship but strangers to the one in the mirror.

Honesty is meant to surface truth. But it’s never meant to become identity.

It should help us reorient, not fuse with the struggle.

Hope Isn’t Naive—but It’s Not a Strategy Either

Hope gets framed as something soft and sentimental.
But often, what we call “hope” is really self-protection—a way to delay what feels too hard to face.
In these instances, that’s not hope.
That’s denial dressed up.

Genuine hope is muscular.
Resilient.
It doesn’t need promises or blindfolds to hold its shape.

And it’s not for show—it’s for endurance. It’s what keeps us showing up when there’s no instant feedback loop. What keeps us coaching, guiding, modeling—long before it pays off.

But hope can also trick us.

It delays the change we don’t want to face.
Keeps us saying, “Next week will be better,” when what’s needed is a more complicated conversation today.
Makes us expect growth to feel easy—when meaningful change often feels like loss at first.

When we use hope as insulation, we lose our edge. We become so focused on a future we’re aiming for that we ignore what’s happening now.

We stop asking the hard questions.
We gloss over patterns that need confrontation.
We wait for things to improve instead of disrupting what’s keeping them stuck.

Hope only works when it’s tethered to awareness.

It should point us forward—but not exempt us from honesty on the way there.

Unanchored hope isn’t optimism. It’s outsourcing responsibility to time.

It’s Not About Balance, It’s About Motion

Here’s the thing I can’t get around: The result of balance is passive.
It’s stationary.
Suspended.
Something we maintain.

But parenting isn’t still.
It’s iterative.
Ongoing.
Evolving.

So instead of chasing balance, let honesty pull us into clarity—what’s real, what’s needed, what’s not working. And let hope pull us into momentum—what’s possible, what’s worth trying, what’s still unfolding.

When honesty roots us and hope stretches us, we move better.
Not easier.
Not faster.
Just more truthfully.
More capably.

That movement matters.

Because stillness in parenting often defaults to survival mode. And survival mode may keep us busy, but it rarely keeps us intentional.

What Our Kids Learn from Watching Us Hold Both

Our kids learn how to hold their contradictions by watching us hold ours.

They watch how we respond when something is challenging and not changing.
How we handle the emotional complexity of loving someone and being stretched by them.
Wanting rest and choosing presence.
Being unsure and staying in the conversation anyway.

They learn from how we show up—not because we explain it clearly, but because they feel it consistently.

They learn how to be real without being ruled by it.
They learn that naming something hard doesn’t mean they’ve failed—and believing in something better doesn’t mean they’re weak.

Over time, that becomes internalized. Not as a coping mechanism, but as emotional fluency. A way of staying present with their own lives without losing themselves to the extremes.

What Carries Us Forward

It’s not about comfort. It’s about motion.

Living with both feet grounded in truth, and our eyes still looking forward.

It’s learning to trust the voice that says, “This is hard,” without letting it silence the one that says, “Keep going.”

It’s resisting the cultural impulse to pick a side—either total burnout or performative optimism—and instead saying:

I can be clear-eyed and soft-hearted.
I can tell the truth and still see beauty.
I can be exhausted and still hopeful.
Not because I’m faking it.
But because I’m learning to use both voices as cues for action.

Honesty tells us what to tend to. Hope tells us what’s possible. Together, they move us forward.