The guilt which has no end

These days, I lose my patience faster than I recognize myself.

The maids haven’t come for days.

The house keeps slipping out of control.

I clean one thing while three more unravel behind me.

By afternoon, there’s already too much noise inside my body.

“Mumma.”

“Mumma.”

“Mummmaa look!”

“Mumma she did this!”

“Mumma he’s not listening!”

Some days, even hearing my name again makes something inside me tighten.

And that sentence fills me with shame.

Because these are the same voices I once longed for.

The other day, I was wiping water off the floor while answering a work message in my head and mentally calculating dinner and laundry and tomorrow’s deadlines.

One child knocked over the bottle.

The other immediately started crying about whose fault it was.

And I remember this terrible thought flashing through me:

Please. Just stop needing me for one minute.

Then I yelled.

Not loud in the dramatic movie way.

Sharp.

The kind that cuts through a room instantly.

“BAS. ENOUGH.”

And everything went quiet.

One child looked down immediately.

The other became very still.

I don’t know why that stillness hurts more than crying.

Maybe because children go still when they are trying to feel safe again.

And the worst part —

the absolute worst part —

was the relief I felt in my body when the room finally became silent.

Relief.

I have replayed that moment so many times since then.

The look on their faces.

Mine.

How quickly exhaustion can turn a loving mother into someone her children suddenly become careful around.

As a therapist, I know what moments like these can do.

Not one moment alone.

But repeated moments.

Children start studying you.

Your footsteps.

Your tone.

The way your face changes before your voice does.

They learn when not to ask.

When not to interrupt.

How to become smaller around overwhelm.

And lately, I have had the unbearable realization that my children are beginning to read my exhaustion before they read my warmth.

That thought has been sitting inside me like grief.

Because I am not angry at them for being bad children.

I am angry because my body has crossed its limits too many times without enough rest, help, softness, pause.

And children do not experience the reason.

They experience the mother in front of them.

I repair after.

I hold them.

I apologize.

I lie next to them longer at bedtime.

But some nights, after they sleep, I sit beside them and feel this crushing guilt rise in my throat:

What parts of me will become their childhood memories?

The loving mother?

Or the exhausted one?

The playful one?

Or the mother whose nervous system entered the room before she did?

And maybe this is the truth I am only now understanding:

Motherhood itself is not what is breaking me.

It is the absence of support around motherhood.

The way mothers are expected to keep absorbing —

noise, touch, responsibility, emotion, mental load —

without ever reaching a point where someone says:

You look tired. Sit down. I’ll hold the rest for a while.

Some days I wonder how many mothers are carrying this same private shame.

Loving their children deeply,

while quietly grieving the version of themselves their exhaustion keeps becoming.