There are things women are taught to carry quietly.
I learned that the hard way.
When I had my miscarriage, I learned how quickly pain gets pushed into whispers. How some losses are treated like private burdens, too tender or too inconvenient to say out loud. And when I finally did speak, when I stopped carrying it alone, I was stunned by how many women around me had walked that same road in silence. Heavy loss. Hidden grief. Whole stories tucked behind polite smiles.
I remember thinking: how are we all carrying this and calling it normal?
Then I became a mother, and met a different version of that same silence.
Not silence around tragedy this time. Silence around the daily hard. The ordinary hard. The kind that shows up in spit-up on your clean shirt, in dinner burning while a baby cries and a toddler wraps herself around your leg, in the strange loneliness of being needed every minute and still feeling invisible somehow.
The kind of hard that doesn’t look dramatic enough to earn understanding.
I remember answering someone honestly when they asked how I was. I said I was tired. Because I was. Deeply, bone-level tired. The kind of tired that comes from three hours of sleep chopped into tiny pieces and a body that doesn’t belong only to itself anymore. And the response I got was simple, sharp, and familiar: “We all did it.”
And something in me rose up.
Because yes, maybe they all did.
But many women also carried it quietly. They were told to smooth it over. To be grateful and glowing and gracious. To skip right past the truth and hand over the approved answer instead.
I’m good.
So blessed.
Loving every second.
But what if you’re not good?
What if you’re grateful and overwhelmed?
In love and at the end of yourself?
What if the day is full of beautiful things, and also you hid by the garbage cans for one minute just to hear your own thoughts?
Why doesn’t that count too?
The first time your toddler’s constant “no” makes something sharp jump out of your mouth.
The first time you sit in the bathroom and realize privacy is now a historical concept.
These are not side notes in motherhood. They are motherhood.
And sometimes what a mother needs most is not a better system. Not another tip. Not one more cheerful reminder to cherish every moment.
Sometimes she needs to name the hard parts. She needs someone to say, this thing right here, this moment you thought was too small or too ugly or too ridiculous to say, it counts. And you are not alone in it.
That is the gift of recognition.
The quiet relief of finding words for what you’ve been carrying.
The exhale that comes when someone says it out loud first.
The mercy of realizing you are not the only one standing in the kitchen, touched out and tearing up because everybody needs something and nobody sees how much you’ve already given.
And for the women who stay long enough to look beneath that moment, beneath the surface frustration or ache or guilt, there is something even deeper there too.
God is there. Right in the middle of the noise.
In the prayer that sounds more like “please” than poetry.
In the moment you are too stretched thin to offer anything but presence.
He’s also in the off-key lullaby your toddler sings to you when your nerves are about to snap at bedtime.
In the way love and laughter sneak in through absurd little moments.
These are the parts I started writing down. The forgotten firsts of motherhood. Because so much was happening in moments too small for a baby book and too important to lose.
Because you forget the way her laugh used to sound like a monkey. You forget what it felt like to rock her at 2AM. You forget how hard some days were, and how holy they felt, too.
You forget the way God meets us, again and again, in the chaos and the quiet.
This is where I name these parts before they disappear.
