on anxiety and motherhood

I’ll be honest with you––I’ve been dealing with crippling anxiety. And when I say crippling, I mean crippling. It stops me in my tracks and I feel like I can’t move or breathe. It’s a weight on my chest that won’t lift; a deep, deep fear that I can’t shake or pinpoint.

It’s not that I’ve never had anxiety or panic attacks before. It’s just that I had more space to process it in the past. Now I have a very needy toddler who needs a very functional mother. And some (can I say most?) days I feel hardly that.

I don’t share this with you to earn your pity or as a cry for help. I share it with you to normalize it. So that we can all finally admit that life is hard and motherhood is hard. The kind of hard that makes you not want to get out of bed in the morning, which scares you and makes you feel like the worst mother in the world.

But we keep going. We keep getting up for our kids. Mothers are the bravest people I know.

I’m learning that I’m stronger than I think I am. That even when I wake up at 5:30 with my heart pounding and my stomach in knots, I can still make it through the day. I can put on my clothes and brush my teeth and feed and dress a toddler and get out the door to go explore a new trail. I can function.

My whole life I have felt weak and not enough. I have told myself I can’t more times than I could ever number. My natural disposition is one of defeat. When things get hard, I give up.

But God is showing me a new way. I can’t escape motherhood and it’s demands like I’ve been able to escape so many other hard circumstances in my life, so I have to find a way to walk through it. And the way through is by leaning on Him, receiving His strength. Moment by moment, day by day, year by year. Learning to tell myself I can, through His strength. And He’s given it to me, just as much as I’ve needed.

I pray that I will look back on this season and have deep compassion for myself. I pray that I will thank God for bringing me through this, for making me a stronger and more resilient person––a person who can help other women in the throes of darkness. I never wanted to be so intimately familiar with the darkness, but perhaps it’s the only way I can ever truly help bring others out.