On the parts of motherhood we hide, and what it costs to keep hiding them.
There's a sentence I've never said out loud to another mother's face, and I'm only typing it here because I think you might need to read it as badly as I needed to feel it.
Sometimes I miss who I was before.
Not all the time. Not even most of the time. I would walk into fire for my three, and they are the best thing I have ever been part of. But every so often, usually late, usually when the house has finally gone quiet, a small ache shows up for the woman I used to be. The one with whole afternoons that belonged to no one. The one who finished a thought. And the second that ache arrives, so does the guilt, fast and total, like a hand clapped over my own mouth. Don't say that. Don't even think that. Good mothers don't feel that.
Except they do. We all do. We just don't say it.
I started noticing how much we don't say after I watched a horror movie, of all things. I won't rehash the whole thing here, but there's a film called Hereditary, and in it a mother says the unsayable to her child, the resentment, the grief, the part of love that has teeth. I watched it and felt the floor drop, because I had never once heard a mother say those things plainly. Not in a book, not in a movie, not in a single conversation at a single playground. And there it was, said out loud, and the relief of it almost knocked me over. Someone had finally admitted the thing.
That's when it hit me how much we're all carrying in silence.
Think about what we don't say. We don't say that we grieve our old selves. We don't say that some days are just to be survived. We don't say that we can love our children completely and still, in one exhausted flash, wonder what we gave up. We don't say that the rage surprised us, or that we cried in the pantry, or that we sometimes feel desperately lonely in a house that is never, ever empty. We swallow all of it, smile at pickup, and answer "good, busy" when someone asks how we're doing.
And here's what that costs. Every one of those swallowed truths convinces us we're the only one. The silence doesn't protect us, it isolates us. You sit in your kitchen certain you're the only mother who feels this way, and three houses down another woman sits in her kitchen feeling the exact same thing, and neither of you will ever know, because we've all agreed to pretend. We're lonely together, separated by a wall of things we don't say.
I don't fully know why we do it. Some of it is the soft-focus story we've been sold, the glowing tired mother who always lands back in gratitude by the end. Some of it is fear, that if we admit the hard feelings, someone will decide we don't love our kids enough, or worse, that we'll have to face it ourselves. So we keep the lights off on those rooms and hope they stay quiet.
But the rooms don't stay quiet. The feelings you won't name don't leave, they just go underground and run the place from down there. The resentment you won't admit leaks out sideways. The grief you won't speak hardens into a numbness that fogs the good days too. The thing about the dark is that refusing to look at it doesn't make it smaller. It just means you're carrying it blind.
So here is what I've come to believe, and it's the whole reason I write any of this. The bravest, most loving thing a mother can do is turn the light on in those rooms. Not to dwell there. Just to look, and to say the true thing, even if only to herself, even if only once, in the car. I miss who I was. Today was hard. I love them and I am so tired. I felt something I'm ashamed of and it doesn't make me a monster.
Saying it doesn't make you love them less. It never did. It just means you stop spending your strength holding a door shut.
I'm not asking you to announce any of this at the playground. I know better. But I am asking you to consider that the feeling you've been hiding, certain it makes you the only one, is the most ordinary, most universal, most human part of this whole impossible job. You are not the only one. You were never the only one. We just never told each other.
So consider this me saying it first. The dark parts of mothering are real, and they don't cancel out the love. They live right alongside it, the way warmth lives inside a dark room. And you're allowed to sit in there and finally admit what's true.
You don't have to say it out loud. But you can stop pretending it isn't there. That alone will lighten what you're carrying.
