Dear Kimberly: I’m Drowning in the Chaos of Motherhood

       Listen to the audio edition here:

Kimberly McGlonn is back with gentle wisdom to help you navigate life’s tough situations. Have a Q for Kimberly? Fill out the form here and we’ll do our best to feature it in an upcoming column.

Dear Kimberly: As the parent of a child with a disability, I love my toddler son with every fiber of my heart and soul and would move mountains and lift cars for him. But I also feel constantly overwhelmed, and sometimes, just lost. I carry a persistent sense that I’m inadequate, which leaves me feeling exhausted and sad. Even thinking about myself and my own needs makes me feel ashamed, especially knowing how much more my child is dealing with. How do I do better? — Mothering to the Max

Dear Mothering to the Max,

Thank you so much for sharing your feelings. No matter who our children are and what journey they’re on, motherhood is hard. I know a version of your fatigue and strain. When my daughter, who’s now a teenager, was about eight, she started getting fevers of 105 degrees — I felt so overwhelmed and confused, and so helpless. She ended up being admitted and spending almost two weeks at CHOP, as we navigated dealing with what presented as joint issues, and then fluid in her lungs and around her heart. I kept asking myself, How do I make this better? and How do I find my own breath when I’m drowning under a sense of exhaustion and failure? During that moment, I also felt responsible to my colleagues and to what my career was asking of me from afar.

It took some time before my daughter was diagnosed with a rare kidney disease. Thankfully, she’s in full remission, but I know what it’s like to be a parent of a child who has to face a unique obstacle. Parenting — being consistently responsible for another life — is a burden, and it’s one that each mother carries differently. Culturally and sometimes due to circumstance, we can feel forced to shoulder more than our fair share of the management of their lives.

As a mom who has known what it’s like to toggle between the demands of being available for the needs of my child and the pressures of showing up across the lanes of my professional and adult identities, my first bit of advice is to recognize that you don’t need permission to have your own needs! I want to suggest that you “mother” yourself with the same loving patience that you try to hold for your child. When we’re at capacity, what we need most is time for restoration, and that doesn’t have to look like an expensive or time-consuming spa weekend with the girls (though that would be nice, and there will be time for that). Not everyone has childcare that affords us a lot of time for leisure, but we all do have windows that we can turn into “micro-moments” of self-awareness and self-care. Those can be powerful opportunities — they definitely have been for me.

That said, consider how you can carve out a few minutes to be in silence or to be still. Find and force moments that allow you to be alone. For some of us, those moments happen in the bathroom, in the shower, or when we’re sitting in our car. In those moments, it’s so helpful to be fully still and to settle into our breath — to be with ourselves. Seven minutes free of scrolling, free of texts, and free of phone calls. Just be. Perhaps take seven minutes and go sit in your yard or in a public space near your house or workplace.

If you’re someone who has more time, say, an hour, it can be valuable to do something that inspires your creativity or curiosity or speaks to who you’ve been before or who you long to be. The library, a museum, a dance class, some way of remembering that in the arc of your life, there’s still the “little you” who also deserves your time and attention. And taking care of her first can be the thing that empowers you to take care of everyone else. It’s a mindset shift. (If you are the parent of a child with special needs, ask your child’s care providers about respite resources that would enable you to get a longer stretch of alone time with the reassurance that your child’s needs are being met while you’re away.)

Often, we moms have a knee-jerk reaction to this kind of advice because we don’t think we have the time or that we are entitled to this kind of dedicated attention. But what that actually reveals is how our culture has fed us a sense of negative judgement in needing or wanting support. I’ve had to work to truly accept that my needs are valid — and so are yours. It doesn’t matter what those needs are. Let’s all push back on the notion that to need help is to be weak, or to feel exhausted is something to feel embarrassed about. Let’s move past that.

I want you to be conscious of the idea that as we care for our children, or maybe our own aging parents or anyone else we “parent” around us, we need to think about how we parent ourselves. How are we being the best version of the mom that we sometimes wish we had or that we wish we could be – to ourselves? When I think about it that way, that empowers me to love on myself radically and to tell myself in the most tender language that sometimes I need to go and take a damn nap! The mothers I’ve always admired the most understood that those little moments of quiet are essentially revolutionary.

The journey of being a mom over the long haul is a marathon. Let’s not try to run it like a sprint. Let’s instead hold our time, and this journey, as sacred. And let’s protect our time, accordingly.

With courage and care,
Kimberly