Mom Guilt, the Mental Load, and the 52 Tabs Open in My Brain

Today, a post by Psychologist and Maternal Mental Health Advocate Dr. Emily Guarnotta stopped me mid-scroll:

“Women will literally give birth, sleep in two-hour increments, redefine their entire identity, carry the mental load, and still go to bed feeling like they didn't do enough.”

Whether it was a sign, something I desperately needed to hear, or my algorithm doing its thang, it found me.

The timing felt almost rude.

The Inner Critic Has Been Working Overtime

For the past several weeks, my inner critic has been relentless. Loud. Exceptionally committed to the bit. For the sake of professional decorum, I’ll leave out the thoughts laden with profanity, but the general programming has sounded something like this:

You’re a terrible mom.

These are the most important years of their lives, and you’re barely around.

You’re not ‘present’ even when you’re present.

They’re going to need so much therapy. Might as well start saving now.

I’m messing them up.

They deserve more. Better. So much more than me.

That last one is particularly painful to put into writing.

I’m putting it here because I suspect some of you have heard a version of it in your own voice, in your own kitchen, after your own children have gone to bed. And because being a therapist who works with mothers does not grant me immunity from being a mother who struggles.

I can recognize the self-criticism. I can understand the context. I can know what I would say to someone sitting across from me reciting the same internal monologue.

AND

It can still hurt.

The List Behind the List

The past few months have been full. A summer booked so tightly there was little room to let the pressure out or catch my breath. The transition to kindergarten, with its particular maternal ache: being proud, excited, worried, and vaguely heartbroken while also trying to remember which day requires sneakers and what day we are supposed to practice our sight words.

Growing a private practice. Supervising clinicians. Networking meetings. Community events. Birthday parties to plan and host. Halloween costumes and trunk-or-treats to plan.

Interest rates. The economy. Groceries. Gas. The news. The things we read that follow us into the next room (or next day), even after we put down our phones or turn off the TV.

Then there is the quieter list.

Remember the birthday gift. RSVP. Send back the permission slip. Check whether the kids have clothes that fit. Transition the closets from summer to fall, then back to summer because it is somehow 82 degrees in October (Mothers in the Northeast understand that the seasonal clothing rotation is a prolonged negotiation). Refill the prescription. Schedule that mammogram. Pay that $4 LabCorp bill.

Keep a marriage alive in a season when conversation can start to sound like two mildly irritated coworkers coordinating a shift change.

Did the kids get their flu shots?

Are their universal health forms up to date?

Are they getting enough fiber in their diets? Why do they only seem to eat dairy? Is there such thing as TOO much dairy?

Did I miss camp registration? Why are we registering for summer camp when I have not yet emotionally processed back-to-school night?

Did I schedule that follow-up appointment? Why wasn’t the doctor’s calendar open when I was physically standing in the office, prepared to schedule it? How do they expect me to remember to call back?

Why can’t I remember?

What is wrong with me?

I’m a terrible mom.

That is the progression. Sometimes it happens in seconds.

A task slips through the cracks, and suddenly I’m questioning whether I am giving my children a childhood they will need to recover from.

Physically Present, Mentally Everywhere

This is the mental load of motherhood that we still do not talk about enough. The 52 tabs open in the browser of our brains. The running stock market ticker of responsibilities, to-do lists, and don’t forgets.

One of those tabs is playing music. We cannot find it. Three others have frozen, and something important probably needs updating.

And somehow, we expect ourselves to sit on the floor and play with the full, peaceful attention of a person whose mind is doing only one thing.

Then we feel guilty when we can’t.

There is a particular ache in being physically beside your children while mentally trying to keep the rest of their world running. You want to hear the story. You also just remembered the permission slip that is due. You want to enjoy the bedtime snuggle. You are calculating whether there are enough clean clothes for tomorrow.

You miss them while you are with them.

And then you criticize yourself for that, too.

I want to be careful here, because I do want time with my children to feel different. I want more room to enjoy them. I want to notice when work has taken too much, when my phone has become a reflex, when everyone is getting the exhausted version of me.

Those things deserve my attention.

But what I can tell you with certainty is that I have yet to find a way to become more available to my children by telling myself how undeserving I am of being their mother.

That voice? That voice takes whatever gas I have left in the tank.

It turns a moment I could respond to with I was distracted tonight; I want to put my phone away tomorrow into something sprawling and devastating: I’m failing them. I’m missing everything. It’s already too late.

There is no useful next step inside “They deserve better than me.” There is only pain.

And usually, underneath it, there is a mother who is tired, frightened by how quickly her children are growing, and trying to carry more than she has room for.

A Forgotten Permission Slip Is Not a Verdict

Spoiler alert: we forget things.

We miss the email. We lose track of the appointment. We forget to respond to the text. We remember the spirit day approximately seven minutes after school begins.

A forgotten permission slip tells you that a permission slip was forgotten. It cannot tell you the whole story of how you love your children.

When the demands exceed the room we have to hold them, something will slip. That deserves an honest look at our capacity, our support, and what we are asking of ourselves.

It does not need to become a referendum on our motherhood. Or our personhood, for that matter.

I’m trying to catch that leap in myself.

To notice when I need help with this becomes I should be able to handle this.

When I wish tonight had gone differently becomes I ruin everything.

When I miss my children becomes I have no right to want anything outside of them.

I don’t always catch it early. Sometimes I’m well into the closing arguments before I realize I’ve put myself on trial again.

But I’m trying to ask a more useful question, and I invite you to ask it alongside me:

What would make tomorrow a little more manageable?

Sometimes the answer may be an apology and a few minutes of reconnection. Sometimes it may be a boundary with work. A conversation with my partner about who is remembering, planning, and following through. Something we stop doing. Something someone else takes responsibility for entirely.

Sometimes I need to acknowledge that I’m sad about how quickly this is all moving, and that no amount of perfect scheduling will let me keep every version of my children.

That part hurts, too.

I don’t have a tidy ending in which I close all 52 tabs and become serenely available for imaginative play.

I am writing this from inside the season. I still have appointments to schedule. The closets remain confused. My inner critic will almost certainly have feedback about this blog post. But tonight, I want to make room for a fuller account of the day.

And sometimes, when we’re having the hardest time seeing ourselves kindly, our children hold up a different mirror.

The Things My Inner Critic Missed

Last night, I found something in my daughter’s backpack.

Her class had been asked to cut out leaf shapes and use them to create something meaningful or special.

She made me.

There I was, in all my leaf-body glory. Right beside her. With her kindergarten best attempt at “I love you” written on the page.

I had spent so much time inside my own account of the mother I’ve been lately that I wasn’t prepared to see hers.

She had been asked to make something special, and she made us.

I keep thinking about that.

While I’ve been tallying the moments I was distracted, the evenings I worked, the things I forgot, she was sitting in her classroom making a little leaf version of me. Giving me a place beside her.

There was something almost unbearably tender about finding that ordinary piece of schoolwork among the things to unpack, sort, sign, and remember. Another item in the backpack, in the middle of another busy evening.

And there we were.

It doesn’t erase the moments I wish I could do over. I still want to make changes that give us more room for each other. But I want to let her picture count, too. I want to take in the possibility that some of the love I worry I’m failing to communicate is reaching her.

That we get things right even on days when the inner critic gives us no credit.

That our children are having moments with us we may never think to include in our assessment of ourselves.

I don’t know which moment she was thinking of when she made it. Maybe she wasn’t thinking of a particular moment at all.

I just know that, given a pile of leaves and the invitation to make something meaningful, my daughter chose me.

And tonight, when the house gets quiet and my mind starts its familiar inventory, I want to remember what I found in her backpack.

I want to offer that little leaf mother some compassion, understanding, and grace.

I imagine you deserve that, too.