Every night before I go to sleep, I walk past both of my daughters’ rooms. And every time I get up to pee in the middle of the night, which, let’s be honest, is often, I do it again. I still check the monitor for my three-and-a-half-year-old. I hold my breath every time I hear one of them cough until I hear them breathe again. I stare into the monitor, making sure I can see her little chest rise and fall. I sometimes get up to go to my older daughter’s doorway to make sure I can see her breathing, too.
Nobody warned me about this part of motherhood.
Not the books. Not the friends who had kids before me. Not the pediatrician. Not a single person pulled me aside and said: by the way, once you become a mother, despite your entire world changing, your emotions and fears are going to fundamentally change too. The way you view everything will be different. Not just busier. Not just louder. Different. Like someone quietly recalibrated what matters, what hurts, and what keeps you staring at the ceiling at 2 am, convinced you heard something.
I used to be a night owl, staying up late and sleeping as late as I could the next day. I knew how to function on minimal sleep. I mean, I lived in China for five years, working and partying hard. I survived grad school and writing all five of my final papers in a week. But back then, I was the one keeping myself up — my own choices, my own chaos, my own fault. There is something categorically different about being woken by a tiny human who has an almost supernatural ability to sense the exact moment you finally surrender to unconsciousness.
But the lost sleep I expected. Sort of.
What I didn’t expect was how motherhood would change what terrifies me. In addition to tiny humans waking me up, new fears and anxieties would also plague and hijack my sleep.
I can’t write out my deepest fear. I’ve tried, actually. Every time I get close to the words, something in my chest seizes, and I have to stop. I know what the fear is. I just can’t say it directly. I suppose I won’t force myself to either.
Having recently witnessed another mom have to grapple with my deepest fear realized sends painful shockwaves to my heart. I feel sick with empathy for a heartbreak I cannot begin to fathom. A heartbreak I don’t want to ever have to fathom. Every time I think of that mom, I am barely able to breathe.
I’m a trained grief counselor. I have sat with people in their most devastating moments. I understand loss intimately — I lost my own father when I was twenty-four, the day after my birthday.
And I still don’t know if I could survive that.
I know I would have to. Just like she has to. But knowing that doesn’t touch the fear.
I grew up watching Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (SVU). I feel as if I grew up with Benson and Stabler. My dad could never watch it. He’d either leave the room or bury his head in a newspaper when he wanted to keep me company. I used to think he was being dramatic.
I was wrong.
From the moment I found out I was pregnant with my first daughter, I couldn’t watch that show anymore. SVU is a show about violence against women and children, and suddenly those weren’t characters. They were possibilities. Scenarios my brain had previously filed under fiction got quietly moved to a different folder entirely.
I became my father. And I finally completely understood why.
I’m scared of teenagers with guns. The number of shootings makes me want to throw up. I’m scared of antisemites. I’m scared of people so filled with hate that they could - and do - harm a child.
Every time I take my girls to a Jewish event, I find myself scanning the room. Counting exits. Clocking the security. Figuring out how I would protect my child in the case of an attack. Wondering how I can raise them with Jewish pride without also handing them a fear complex they’ll carry forever. (That one deserves its own essay. I’ll get there.)
I worry my girls will be left out. I worry I don’t read to them enough, and somehow it will be my fault if they struggle academically. I worry that my hard days — the anxious ones, the depleted ones, the ones where I’m running on fumes and snapping at everyone — are landing on them in ways I can’t see yet.
This is the motherhood nobody puts on the box.
Not the cute stuff. Not even the hard stuff everyone sort of prepares you for. The specific, particular terror of loving two small humans so completely that the entire world starts to feel like a different place. More beautiful, yes. But also more fragile. More dangerous. More real in a way that makes your chest tight just sitting here typing about it.
A few weeks ago, I dropped my daughter off at camp.
Objectively, nothing happened. A counselor showed her where to put her backpack. She stood alone for a moment, looking uncertain. Another kid wanted to go play with someone else. That’s it.
And I stood in that parking lot completely unable to leave. Peering through the window like a woman waiting for a verdict. (In many ways, I was.)
Because I wasn’t just watching my daughter navigate her first day.
I was also watching for every possible way she could get hurt.
I was watching the day camp version of me, terrified she wouldn’t be able to make a friend. I was watching the sleep-away camp version of me, so homesick she cried herself to sleep almost every night. I was watching the version of me who got on a plane to China, knowing no one and speaking no Mandarin, wondering how she would survive the year.
I was watching every version of myself who wasn’t sure she belonged. I somehow forgot to keep watching the versions of me that flourished — that made lifelong friendships, learned Mandarin, and came into her own. Standing in that parking lot, my brain could only remember the fear and the anxiety.
Motherhood does that. It finds every tender place you’ve ever carried and taps on its shoulder, sometimes slugging it in the face. It doesn’t create the wounds. It just finds them. And holds them up to the light.
I drove home and couldn’t quite bring myself to get anything productive done. Part of me was still standing in the parking lot peering through that window, unsure what to do with myself. I put on my werewolf romantasy audiobook and disappeared for a while — even though, as a coach, I have so many tools at my disposal. Sometimes you just need the werewolf romances.
I’ve been thinking a lot about what healing actually looks like inside all of this.
For a long time, I thought it meant getting rid of the old wounds. Getting over the old fears. Arriving at some version of motherhood that didn’t crack me open quite so regularly.
Now I think healing looks like recognizing them when they show up. Naming what got tapped. Asking: which younger version of me is asking to be seen right now? And then — and this is the part I’m still learning — offering her something other than criticism. Offering her something other than banishment to the deepest crevices of my heart.
I’m still in the middle of this. I don’t have a tidy ending for you.
What I have is this: a deeper understanding of my dad, a werewolf romantasy audiobook I’m not ashamed of, and two little girls whose first days of anything will probably undo me for the rest of my life. I also know that the fear will never go away and that I cannot let it consume me completely.
And maybe that’s enough. Maybe being undone by the people you love most isn’t something to fix. Maybe it’s just something to feel — and then get up and walk past their rooms one more time.
I’d Love to Hear From You
How has motherhood changed what scares you? Is there a fear you carry now that you never could have imagined before? Drop it in the comments or send me a DM on Substack. I promise you're not alone in it, and I genuinely want to know what yours is.
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A Gentle Resource
If this brought something up — a fear that doesn’t have a name yet, a wound that’s been quietly waiting — you’re not alone in that either. I wrote my guided journal, You’re Not Failing, You’re Feeling, as a place to put all of it. The things that are hard to say out loud. The feelings that live somewhere between your chest and the ceiling at 2 am. You can find it in the Your Non-Linear Journey Shop.
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