V1L1 | I Thought Hard Days Meant I Was a Bad Mom — Turns Out They Were Just Days

I didn’t have a dramatic breaking point.
No screaming.
No sobbing on the kitchen floor.
No cinematic “this ends now” moment with swelling music.
(Which honestly felt a little rude, given the emotional effort involved.)

It was much less impressive than that.
It was a regular, exhausting moment.
A kid upset.
Me already tired.
My patience thinner than it had any business being.
Nothing actually went wrong.

And yet—
inside me, everything did.

Because instantly — without asking permission — my brain went there.

See? You’re failing.
See? Other moms wouldn’t lose it over this.
See? This is why you always feel like a bad mom.
(My brain has never waited for evidence.)

And the worst part?
I believed it.

For most of my adult life, hardship didn’t mean life is hard.
It meant:
I’m bad at life.

Kid upset?
→ Bad mom.
Running late?
→ Can’t get it together.
Feeling overwhelmed?
→ Weak.
→ Not cut out for this.
(No appeals process.)

Later that night — after the house was quiet and the adrenaline had worn off — something shifted.
Not in a magical way.
In a tired, honest, huh way.

I replayed the moment again.
And for the first time, instead of asking,
What does this say about me?
I asked something different.

What if this isn’t proof I’m failing?
What if this is just a hard chapter?
Not the whole story.
Not a verdict.
Just… a chapter.
(A very loud one, but still.)

That question landed differently.
Because suddenly, the moment wasn’t screaming bad mom.
It was whispering human mom.

Once I noticed this, I couldn’t unsee it.

The moments I’d labeled as failures weren’t big, dramatic disasters.
They were painfully ordinary.

Snapping when I was overstimulated.
Forgetting something important — again.
Feeling resentful and immediately guilty for feeling resentful.
Wanting quiet more than connection
and wondering what kind of mother that made me.
(The kind who needs quiet, apparently.)

That constant background hum of feeling like a bad mom didn’t come from one big mistake.
It came from stacking meaning
onto every small one.