Maybe I'm Just Weak?

I have one child, I built my life around having one child, and I am still drowning.

I was lying on the floor of my living room, about to do a set of bridges while my daughter napped, when my phone buzzed. My friend had texted me: “My daughter is the meanest person I have ever met.” I laughed so hard I didn’t even attempt the bridges. I just lay there on my back, staring at the ceiling, feeling lighter than I had in weeks. Because that is exactly how I have been feeling about my own daughter, and I hadn’t figured out how to say it out loud yet.

My daughter will be 3 in a month. She is wonderful and truly hilarious and wild and I love her with a ferocity that scares me. She is also in a sleep regression and has become, to put it as gently as I can, a nightmare. She wakes up at 5am every day. She’s up at least once during the night. Bedtime has turned into an hour-long negotiation of false starts where she’s almost asleep, then she’s not, then she’s almost asleep again, then she’s crying. And because she’s not sleeping enough she’s in a terrible mood most days. Of course, this makes everything harder, which makes us exhausted, which isn’t great for household morale. It’s a loop that feeds itself and I cannot find the off switch.

So I have been crying in my car. I have been hiding in work. I have been texting my friends with a frequency and intensity that I myself find embarrassing — four messages in a row before anyone responds, all some version of “is this normal?” and “what is wrong with me?” and “please tell me this is a phase.” My friend’s text about her daughter being the meanest person she knows was the first thing in a while that actually cut through. Not because it fixed anything but because it made me feel like maybe I wasn’t losing my mind. Or if I was, at least I wasn’t the only one.

But, I only have one child and I designed my entire life around this. I wrote publicly, in this very newsletter, about how having an only child felt like the best of both worlds. How I could keep one foot in my career and one in parenthood. How my plate felt full and I didn’t want to add more. I was so sure that the reason other parents seemed miserable was because they had too many kids and not enough help, and that if I was deliberate enough about my choices I could avoid that.

So what does it mean that I’m drowning anyway?

My husband and I have been having this conversation lately that I don’t think either of us feels great about. It usually happens at night after we’ve finally gotten her down, when we’re sitting there in the quiet looking at each other like two people who just survived something. One of us will say, “I think our kid is just hard.” And then there’s a pause. And then one of us says what we’re both actually thinking: “Or maybe we’re just weak.”

I genuinely don’t know the answer. I’ve been turning it over and over trying to figure out if there’s even a way to know, and I think the honest answer is that there isn’t. Not unless you have multiple kids and can compare, which we are not going to do. So we just sit with this unanswerable question, night after night. Is she particularly difficult, or are we particularly bad at this?

She also won’t really accept help from babysitters right now, which feels like its own kind of cruelty. Nobody warned me about this. My daughter likes her grandparents, and one babysitter. And even the babysitter she loves (who comes almost every week), she only seems to be able to tolerate for a few hours. And my husband and I must leave the house in order for her not to scream and cry for us the whole time. Tori is literally wonderful… she brings crafts! But it doesn’t help. It feels like my approach about “refusing to be a martyr” has a glaring hole in it.

She goes to daycare! She thrives there. So I did not plan for my daughter to scream until whoever I hired to watch her called me to come home.

I think the thing I am trying to figure out as I write this is why I feel so embarrassed. Because I do. I feel genuinely ashamed of how hard this is, and I keep trying to understand why. I think it’s something like this: I conflated being deliberate with being protected. I thought that if I was thoughtful enough about my choices — if I planned enough, outsourced enough, only had one child, went to therapy, maintained my identity — I could build a version of parenthood that wouldn’t break me. Not a perfect version. I knew it would be hard. But a manageable one. One where I wouldn’t be lying on my living room floor crying at a text message because someone finally said the thing I was feeling.

Maybe that was naive. Maybe parenthood just has phases that break you regardless of how many safeguards you put in place. The sleep regression doesn’t care that you read all the books. Your toddler’s developmental stage doesn’t check whether you have backup childcare arranged. And the voice in my head doesn’t care about any of that either, because all it says is: other people have two kids, three kids, and they are functioning. You have ONE. What is wrong with you?

I know comparison is unhelpful. I literally tell people this for a living. I am a therapist who writes a newsletter about how it’s okay that parenting is hard. And yet here I am, wondering if I’m just too weak for the thing I chose. Or if sharing this is the most unhelpful thing ever?? I don’t know how I would feel if I read this before having a child.

I think part of what makes this so disorienting is that I’ve written through a lot of hard things in this newsletter. The mom guilt piece. The overstimulation piece. The one about how parenthood is a rollercoaster. In all of those I had some distance from the feeling. I had processed it enough to find the shape of it, to say “here’s what I think this means” or “here’s what I learned.” This one I haven’t processed. I am just in it. I’ve been in it for a while and I don’t know what the lesson is yet. Maybe there isn’t one.

Photo by Gabriela Braga on Unsplash

And as she gets older, I've become increasingly aware that I am writing about a person who did not consent to being written about. I have watched too many parenting influencers build platforms on the backs of their children's most vulnerable moments, and the idea that I could be doing something similar makes my stomach turn. I don't ever want to shame my daughter or talk badly about her. She is a toddler going through a developmental phase, and she deserves to not have her hardest moments broadcast to thousands of strangers. So I have been wrestling with this whole substack as a whole if I’m being honest. I’m trying to figure it out.

Anwyas, if you’re on the fence and reading this, I don’t entirely know what I want you to take from it. I guess I want you to know that people will warn you that parenting is hard but what nobody tells you is that the hardness itself becomes a source of shame. That you will feel embarrassed about struggling. That you will wonder what is wrong with you specifically, rather than recognizing that maybe this is just what it’s like sometimes and everyone else is also texting their friends from the floor.

And if you are a parent in the trenches right now — even if your setup was supposed to prevent this, even if you only have one kid and feel like that means you don’t get to complain — I am right there with you. My friend’s text made me feel less alone for about fifteen minutes, and I have been chasing that feeling ever since. Maybe reading this can give you fifteen minutes too.

I keep wanting to end this with something wise, some observation that ties it all together. But I don’t have one. I’m still in it.

I’ll let you know when I figure it out.

Would love to hear from you!
Xx,
Amanda