Mommy Is Not Always Well

navigating motherhood and mental health challenges.

self-portrait.

While I am now more intentional about the way I speak of my mental health challenges — so as to not claim them as my identity — I’m open about the fact that depression and high-functioning anxiety are experiences that I do navigate while simultaneously having to mother in the midst of them.

It isn’t easy.

We live in a society where motherhood is largely romanticized. I can name all the beautiful things I was told about “the hood” before becoming a mom, but I can’t name one time someone got real with me — gave me the gritty, yet necessary truth that motherhood can be so damn hard and ugly at times. No lie, I feel like I got jumped in y’all!

Having a child has always been a desire of mine and is one of the best things that has ever happened in my life. My son has expanded my heart and my world in so many unfathomable ways. Yet, I must admit that new motherhood was a very hard adjustment period for me and three years later, mothering can still sometimes be a very hard experience — especially as I navigate mental health challenges.

My mental health noticeably plummeted after I gave birth. Postpartum depression hit, but I didn’t seek real help until nearly a year or so later. Since then, everything has just felt out of whack. Dealing with hormonal imbalances, a heightened state of perpetual fear and sadness, enhanced emotional sensitivity. And sometimes these emotions are ones that I struggle to get up from under for days, weeks, months at a time.

What this does to me — the act of simultaneously mothering while navigating mental health challenges — is make me question the mother that I am.

There are moments when I feel guilty that this is my son’s experience, even though he’s not necessarily at the age where he fully understands it yet. Somedays, all mommy wants to do is sleep. Somedays, it’s too bright outside and mommy needs to close the blinds. Somedays, mommy doesn’t have as much patience or energy to play. Somedays, mommy is not well.

I often feel like my child deserves better from me — a better I don’t always think that I can give as someone mothering while navigating such mental unease. But I know that I am trying my best — not just for him, but for me. I’m in therapy. I’m serious about my health. I’m doing the work. And so somewhere in there, if I just give myself a little grace, I can tell myself that it will all be OK.

If I give myself permission to feel my way through this, I will make it to the other side of these days that feel so heavy and gloomy. If I take myself out of the mold of expected “perfection” that is cast upon every mom, I will remember that though I am a mother, I am also a human.

A human who feels, struggles, gets sad, gets overwhelmed, and isn’t always at her best — even when she tries her hardest to be.

And those things don’t make me any less of a mother.

I want mothers who are struggling with their mental health to have safe spaces to land. To have arms that hold them and fingers that wipe away their tears.

I want for them to not be judged to the point where they are shamed into silence, for their silence does not hold them well. It devours them alive.

I want mothers to be given a place to unravel when needed, to not be expected to hold it all together.

I want them to hang up the capes they’ve been assigned. Moms are not superheroes — damn the ones who thought that was the most esteemed way to honor the women who create generations from their blood.

They need rest. They need exhale. They need ease.

From one mother to another,
Mariah Maddox

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