Today isn’t about one thing. Today is about everything. It’s about how quickly a day can become a weight too heavy to carry with two hands, and how being a mom means you keep walking anyway, even when your body is begging you to stop.
Today is wrestling districts for both of my girls… and my bonus daughter too. The whole day has that big-day energy… brackets, nerves, running from mat to mat, the loud echo of a gym that never really quiets down. The endless stairs feel like their own obstacle course, just getting from one side of the auditorium to the other. I’m doing what I always do… trying to be everywhere at once. Watching, cheering, tracking kids, tracking matches, tracking brackets like your heart depends on it. I don’t want to miss a single second of my girls’ matches. But somewhere in the middle of all of that, I got it wrong. I misread the bracket.
Other people did too, but that doesn’t matter. I did. After my daughter won a match, I told her she had punched her ticket to state. I said the same thing to my bonus daughter. I believed it. I said it out loud. I let them feel that moment… the relief, the pride, the excitement, the joy. And then it turned out I was wrong. My daughter ended up getting sixth, which means she’s not going to state.I don’t even know how to fully explain what that feels like as a mom. It feels like I handed them a celebration and then had to take it back. It feels like I let them stand in a moment of victory, only to watch it collapse underneath them. It feels like I set them up to fall, even though I never meant to. Talk about a mom fail. If there were an award for the world’s worst mom, I feel like my name would be stamped across it today.
I’ve been emotional all day. Little breakdowns here and there. Sometimes in the bathroom while I’m changing my gauze, hidden away in a stall where no one can see my face. Sometimes the tears just start falling while I’m walking, and I don’t even have the energy to fight them back. Everything my daughters do makes me tear up… the good and the bad. I feel like a crybaby. But the truth is, I feel worn thin in a way that has nothing left to hide behind. My body hurts so bad.
It hurts to do anything at this point. My head feels like it weighs twenty pounds. My shoulders ache from carrying my backpack everywhere because I have to… because my life requires supplies and backup plans and the things my body cannot go without. It hurts to walk. The stairs today were brutal, and I’ve done so many of them that my legs feel like they’re vibrating. Right now I’m sitting in my car with tingly legs, a heavy head, aching shoulders, and a heart that feels wrung out, just trying to catch my breath and let my body rest for a bit.
Underneath all of this is an ache that feels even deeper than the physical pain. I’ve noticed I’ve pulled back a little from my girls… not because I don’t love them, not because I don’t want to be close, but because my body hurts. My skin hurts. My joints hurt. My muscles hurt. It hurts to be touched. It hurts to be climbed on. And that breaks my heart, because I don’t want to pull away from my kids. I don’t want to lose these moments. I don’t want to be the mom who is present in the room but guarded inside her own body. Every day like this feels like losing time I can’t get back.
My heart aches because I want to sit with my girls more… engage more… laugh more… be softer with them. With my husband too. But the truth is, my body is making even basic connection feel complicated. I want closeness, and at the same time I want no one to touch me because everything hurts. I hate that both of those things can be true at once.And as if life didn’t already feel full enough, my husband and I are building our home together from the ground up. Starting with dirt sounds romantic until you’re the one living inside all the decisions. There are so many choices to make, and boy… it has been a little tense at times. I really didn’t want carpet everywhere. I only wanted carpet in the bedrooms. Carpet is harder to clean. Really, once it gets dirty, it never feels truly clean again. The labor of it matters to me more than most people probably realize… the vacuuming, the edges, the baseboards, the physical effort of keeping it up. Non-carpeted floors are just easier on my body.
Then there’s Guy… my IV pole. My youngest had just turned two when I got my feeding tube. When I came home from the hospital, she kept asking over and over, “What’s that Guy?” and somehow the name stuck. So my pole became Guy, and Guy has been Guy ever since. The problem is, Guy doesn’t roll on carpet. He just face-plants. My backpack is too heavy, which makes him top-heavy, and carpet does him no favors. So yes… in the grand scheme of life, it’s a small thing. But I lost that one too. Carpet everywhere except the bathrooms, laundry room, kitchen, and mudroom. Oh well. I’m over it… mostly. It just hit me in a special way, maybe because so much of my life is already shaped by what my body can and cannot do, and even the floor beneath me feels like one more reminder.
But even with that, I’m still excited for our house. I really am. It will sit right where we got married, tucked into a hill, with a back deck where we can watch the sunset. That part feels sacred to me. I really can’t complain. This is all my husband. He made this happen. I helped as best I could, but he made this happen, and I’m proud of him. I’m proud of us. I can already picture us growing old together there… in that house tucked into the hill, watching the sun go down from the back deck, after all the noise of life finally settles.
That’s part of what makes days like today feel so heavy. It isn’t just the bracket. It isn’t just the stairs. It isn’t just the tears I keep trying to swallow down. It’s all of it at once. The pressure. The pain. The decisions. The guilt. The effort it takes to keep showing up in every place I’m needed while my body keeps whispering… and sometimes screaming… that I am running on empty.
I’m trying not to let one mistake have so much power. I love my kids fiercely, and I showed up. I was there. I was watching. I was cheering. I was trying. I have been trying so hard.
I feel depleted. I feel worn thin. I feel like my emotions are spilling out through cracks I used to be able to seal shut. I don’t know how to keep doing all of this… be the mom, be the wife, be the steady one… while my body keeps demanding more than I have to give.
I know I’m not a bad mom. I’m a human mom with a hurting body, standing in the middle of a loud gym full of pressure, trying to hold three kids’ worlds in my hands without dropping any of them.
Today, it feels like I dropped one.
#MomWithATube
