A Letter to the Mum Who Feels Like She’s Failing

Feeling like a bad mum is not unusual. I think most of us have days when everything just seems to go wrong. And you think to yourself that these kinds of things just don’t happen to other mums. But they do. They happen more than you think. It’s just that we get into the mindset that there is something wrong with us and we don’t want to tell anyone. It’s easier to hide away and pretend like everything is okay.

Because everyone else seems okay. Better than okay, in fact. They couldn’t possibly have days when it seems like everything is falling apart around them.

The thing is, no one knows what’s going on in someone else’s head. You don’t know what is going on in their lives unless they tell you.

And if no one talks about it, everyone feels like it just happens to them.

We are ashamed to admit that there are days when we feel like we can’t cope. When the whole world seems to be closing in on us, and we can’t see a way out. We don’t want anyone to look down on us and judge us because we can’t do what “we are supposed to do” as mothers. The things that everyone else seems to have no trouble with.

Being a parent involves a lot of rough patches. Even the mums who seem to always have it together have rough times too, they’re probably just better at hiding it. Because they probably don’t want you or others thinking less of them either.

But nothing will stop the bad days from happening. But we can change how they make us feel.

Letter to the mum who feels like she’s failing

To the broken mum,

To the broken mum who is crying quietly on the floor, wondering how it could have got to this. Wondering what she could do have done differently.

The mum seeing and feeling the stares of everyone judging her as her child has a tantrum on the floor of the supermarket.

To the mum who feels like she’s the worst mum in the world because her kid won’t stop crying and she feels like she’s about to break.

To the tired, utterly exhausted mum who is kept up all night, every night with a baby who just doesn’t want to sleep.

The mum that looks enviously at everyone else’s well behaved children and wonders why hers can’t be like that.

To the mum who wants to break down and make it all go away because it feels like her head is going to explode.

I see you.

I hear you.

I am you.

I have been there more times than I can count.

More times than I ever thought I would.

I have been broken, torn down and felt like I was the worst mum in the entire world.

I have spent days crying alone in my room, just wanting to be separate from the world.

I have wanted to get away from everything, but at the same time not really wanting to go away at all.

I have been confused, I have been terrified, I have been lost. I have been everything. Sometimes all at once.

To the broken mum,

I have been there and it is not easy.

Bad days come, and they can break you down easier than it is to admit.

Motherhood is hard. It is wonderful, too. But it can take so much from you that there are times you feel like you have nothing left to give.

You can only bend so far before you snap. We all have our breaking point.

We reach a point when all the stresses and struggles have built up too much and it weighs you down so much that you just break.

We need to remember that our failures and weaknesses are  not who we are. It is how we pick ourselves up and keep going even when we don’t think we can. 

There will be better days, they won’t all be like this.

There will be days when life seems so filled with happiness and joy that these bad days seem so far away, almost as if they never happened.

But as hard as it is now, try and remember, tomorrow is a new day. And anything can happen.

At some point it happens to all of us. We just have to get through the storm.

Have you felt broken as a parent? How did you manage to get through it?