“Mom… I can’t do this anymore.”

Those were the exact words my daughter spoke to me while I was at home in Park City, Utah, and she was in Miami, Florida for spring break.

She had been throwing up all day. She was exhausted, depleted, and at the edge of herself. It was the third time this had happened since she picked up a gnarly stomach bug in January. This time, I was more than halfway across the country, listening through the phone, feeling the distance between us in every cell of my body.

And in moments like this, something immediate rises in me…Not panic. Not confusion. Knowing.

I knew I needed to do two things. First, encourage the mother she was with to take her to the emergency room for an IV and testing. She needed care now. Second, I needed to get on a plane that night, the red-eye to Miami.

This feeling of knowing is not new to me. If you are a parent, it may not be new to you either. It’s that moment when something inside you becomes crystal clear and the urge to act is un-ignorable. There is no committee meeting in the mind. There is no hemming and hawing. There is simply the next right step.

You pick up the phone, schedule the appointment, ask the hard question, sit beside the bed, and board the plane.

You act because love knows what to do. Always.

I have lived this many times over the past 21 years as a mother. And, this particular muscle of knowing when to act strengthened in me years ago with my son Riley, my comeback kid (read his story here). After a fluky and major knee injury in 2020, he faced paralysis in his leg, and I was immediately initiated into a different kind of mothering. The kind that asks you to become fierce and steady, informed and prayerful, resilient and willing to search for pathways others cannot yet see.

When your child needs healing, something in you expands. Mama bear reveals herself.

You learn to listen and to advocate, to trust your instincts even when the path isn’t clear. You learn how to hold hope and fear in the same heart at the same time. You learn, slowly and without a manual, how to lead.

That season changed me. It taught me that there are moments in life when a mother simply knows it is time to act. And here it was again.

“To be a mother is a blessing and a breaking.
A constant giving, a constant awakening.”🎶

Motherhood has been the most beautifully rewarding and profoundly challenging role I have ever known. It has stretched me beyond who I thought I was. It has brought me to tears and to awe. It has cracked open a tenderness I didn’t know I carried. It has exposed my impatience, my fear, my need for control, and the places in me still learning how to receive love, not just give it. It has made me stronger than I imagined and softer than I expected.

It has also made me appreciate my own mother in ways I never could when I was young. As a teenager, I put her through plenty. I can smile at that now because I am living the other side of it.

There is a humbling that happens when your children grow, and life hands you the same mirror. You begin to understand what your parents carried silently…The worry and the waiting. The sleeplessness and the care. The invisible emotional labor, and that constant, unwavering hope that your child finds their way.

Motherhood has taught me so many lessons I had no idea I was signing up to learn. How to hold a healthy boundary without closing my heart. How to communicate clearly from love rather than fear. When to be firm and when to yield. When to step in and when to step back, trusting the slow, sacred process of someone else’s becoming.

I have learned that my children, though they came through me, are their own sovereign souls. They have their own karmic lessons, their own path to walk, their own light to find and to be. My job is not to carry them through life but to walk beside them long enough so they can lead themselves.

But perhaps the most important lesson has been to mother myself as I mother my children.

That lesson has not come naturally to me. For many years, I gave and gave and gave until I was depleted. I overextended. I juggled too many plates. I carried too much. I often confused love with putting myself last, as if giving everything away was the proof of how much I cared. I know many women will recognize that terrain.

But over time, something in me shifted. Another muscle began to grow…The muscle of self-love and replenishment. The muscle of knowing what I need and honoring it. The muscle of filling myself first, so that what I give comes from overflow rather than exhaustion.

I began to understand that loving others and loving ourselves are not competing acts. They belong together. In fact, one cannot be sustained without the other.

“Every time I parent you…
I’m learning how to parent me too.”🎶

Motherhood has also given me the gift of reflection. I see myself in my children’s bright eyes and in their confusion, in their beauty and in their edges. My light and my shadow, mirrored back in a way I cannot ignore. And in tending to their tender hearts, I am slowly, more gently, learning to tend to my own.

There are no instructions; there is no personalized parenting manual to follow. We figure it out moment by moment, in a dance of remembering and forgetting, of giving and receiving, of searching and knowing, of experimenting and practicing, again and again and again.

That night, I got on the plane. I flew through the dark, met her the next morning, and brought her home. Because sometimes love looks like tenderness. And sometimes love looks like movement. And sometimes, to be a mother, is to know exactly when it is time for both.

Whether you are a mother or not, every one of us came through one. Some received the care, steadiness, and love they needed. Some did not. Most of us carry a mixture of both. But no matter what we were given, there comes a point in life when we are invited to become a loving presence for ourselves.

To notice what we need and offer ourselves the care we once longed for. To speak kindly inward, to create safety within our own body, to meet ourselves with tenderness rather than neglect. To finally drop the self-inflicted pressure we have carried for far too long.

Perhaps that time is now.

So wherever you are this Mother’s Day week, take a moment and ask yourself:

What do I need from myself to feel seen, supported, and cared for?

A Song for This Season

This reflection was the seed of a song I wrote called, To Be a Mother. It came through as I returned home from Miami, physically exhausted from the whirlwind of travel, words arriving like a remembrance of something I already knew.

It is for every woman who has stretched herself open in love. For every mother, of children, of dreams, of others’ becoming, who has given and given and is quietly learning how to also receive.

“To be a mother… is the greatest gift
A constant breaking, a sacred shift
A dance of becoming, again and again
To be a mother… is where I begin

The words arrived the way truth often does, quietly, after the doing was done.”🎶

You can listen to my new song, To Be a Mother, here.