I remember the exact moment.
It was a Tuesday. Nothing dramatic happened. There was no crisis, no phone call from a doctor, no meltdown at the grocery store. It was just… Tuesday.
I was standing at the kitchen sink doing dishes. The kids were finally in bed. The house was quiet in that heavy way it gets when the day is finally, finally over. And I started crying. Not the kind of crying that has a reason. The kind that just comes up from somewhere deep and says, you are so tired.
And the thing that scared me most wasn’t the crying.
It was the thought that followed it:
I don’t even know who I am anymore outside of this.
If you’re a mom raising a child with special needs, I think you know that moment. Maybe you’ve had your own version of it. Maybe you’re in the middle of one right now.
You’ve poured everything into your child — the appointments, the advocacy, the researching, the fighting for services, the explaining to teachers, to family, to strangers who don’t get it and probably never will. You’ve learned a whole new language of diagnoses and therapies and IEP goals. You’ve become fiercely competent at caring for someone else’s every need.
And somewhere in all of that — slowly, quietly, without even noticing — you disappeared a little.
Not all at once. Just piece by piece.
The hobbies you used to love. The friendships that drifted because your schedule is unpredictable and your world is hard to explain. The version of yourself that existed before your whole identity got wrapped up in caregiving.
Here’s what I want to say to you, and I mean this with everything in me:
That loss is real. And it deserves to be grieved.
Not pushed down. Not fixed with a bubble bath and a candle. Not explained away because “at least my child is still here” or “I should be grateful.”
You can be grateful and exhausted. You can love your child fiercely and mourn the life you expected. Both things are true at the same time, and neither one cancels the other out.
I say this as someone who lived in the tension of those two things for a long time before I understood that.
My son was diagnosed with a brain tumor when he was two. Two years old. I won’t pretend I handled that with grace — I held it together because I had to, and I fell apart in private because that felt like the only option.
For a long time, I operated in survival mode. Head down, next task, keep going. And when people asked how I was doing, I said fine because the real answer felt too big, too much, too exhausting to get into.
The problem with fine is that it keeps you stuck.
When you pretend you’re okay, you can’t actually get okay.
And the longer you white-knuckle your way through, the further away you get from yourself. From your joy. From your sense of who you are beyond your child’s diagnosis.
What I’ve learned — in my own life and in years of walking alongside moms just like you — is that the answer isn’t to want less, or need less, or feel less.
The answer is support.
Real, consistent, you-don’t-have-to-explain-anything-here support.
Not the kind where someone tries to fix you or cheer you up or remind you how strong you are. The kind where someone sits with you in it. Where you can be fully honest about how hard it is, and be met with presence instead of solutions. Where you can say I am not okay today and no one flinches.
That kind of support changes something in you.
Not overnight. But over time, something shifts. You start to breathe a little differently. You start to remember what it feels like to feel like yourself — not just the caregiver, but the woman with her own dreams and thoughts and desires that go beyond the next therapy appointment.
You start to believe that you matter too.
If you’ve been waiting for permission to take up space in your own life — this is it.
You don’t have to keep doing this alone. You don’t have to keep running on empty. You don’t have to keep putting yourself last and calling it strength.
Asking for support isn’t weakness. It’s the bravest, most necessary thing you can do — not just for yourself, but for the whole family who needs you to be okay.
There’s a community of women out here who get it. Who have lived versions of your story. Who will not look at you with pity or confusion when you describe what your day actually looks like. Who will just… nod. And stay. And show up.
Because you deserve that. Not as a reward for surviving this. Just because you’re human and you’re in it, and every single one of us needs a place to land.
If you’re curious about what it looks like to have that kind of support in your corner, I’d love for you to learn more about Pathway to Peace. It’s a coaching community built specifically for moms like you — not to add one more thing to your plate, but to give you somewhere that feels like home.
You’ve been holding it together for a long time.
You don’t have to keep doing it alone.
Xo, Kara
