This is the post I wish someone had directed me to when I was in the hardest season of my mothering. I wish I understood what was happening in my body and why the tools I was trying weren’t working. I wish I had the framework that made sense of what I was experiencing rather than just a growing pile of shame about it.
When we snap at our children over something small, something that did not deserve that response, the story most of us immediately tell ourselves is some version of what is “wrong with me?” The patience, the warmth, the connection…we treat those as the performance and the losing it as who we feel we are underneath.
This story is not only unkind to our self worth, it is also physiologically inaccurate. It matters that it is inaccurate because the story you believe about why you are responding this way determines what you try to do about it. If the story is I am a bad mother, the response is shame and trying harder. If the story is my nervous system is responding to sustained depletion, the response is tending the nervous system. Only one story produces a positive outcome.
When you lose it, something specific and measurable is occurring. The prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain responsible for patience, empathy, perspective, and the capacity to respond rather than react, has temporarily lost the resources it needs to function. Stress hormones are elevated, and the survival brain has taken over.
You are not choosing to lose it, or to be unkind. You are flooded. You are in a mental state that was designed for genuine physical threat, not the sustained relational demands of modern motherhood. The fact that you are in that state in response to ordinary mothering moments is not a sign of weakness, it is a sign that the system has been under too much pressure for too long without adequate restoration.
Every nervous system has what researchers call a window of tolerance. Inside this window you have full access to yourself as a parent, as a person. You can feel frustration without becoming it. You can hear your child’s distress without being swallowed by it. You can make concrete decisions rather than reactive ones.
Outside the window, in either direction, you lose that access. Pushed too high into hyperarousal you get the snapping, the rage, the heart racing, the disproportionate response. Pushed too low into hypoarousal you get the shutdown, the flatness, the sitting in the middle of the day unable to feel anything.
Motherhood, particularly the kind that involves medical complexity, chronic stress, limited support, and the relentless proximity of children who need your regulation, narrows this window over time. Not because you are getting worse, rather the window has been pushed past its limits repeatedly without adequate recovery.
Shame and guilt are the most common responses to these moments and the least useful ones. It’s not because accountability doesn’t matter, but because shame and guilt activates the same threat response that produced the losing it moment in the first place. You cannot regulate your way out of a dysregulated state by adding another activating experience on top of it.
What creates change is understanding, compassion, and the practical work of building back the nervous systems capacity, understanding what happened and why. Compassion for the mother who was running on empty and did not have what she needed in that moment. The consistent, patient practice of building back what depletion has taken.
Not with a better strategy, or with another framework for responding to tantrums. The strategies and frameworks are useful but they have a ceiling, and the ceiling is the state of your nervous system.
Begin with the most honest assessment you can make of what your nervous system is actually getting in terms of rest, nourishment, movement, genuine connection, and space to be a person as well as a mother. The answers are usually more honest than comfortable, and they point toward the real work more directly than any parenting book ever has.
The nervous system that is adequately cared for can access the parent you want to be. The one that is chronically depleted cannot, no matter how good the strategy is. Care for the nervous system first, everything else flows from there.
Mama, remember you are not a bad mother. You are a mother whose nervous system has been under more pressure than it has had resources to meet. That is a resources problem, and resources problems have solutions that shame or guilt have never provided.
The work is available. You are worth doing it, and everything downstream of a regulated you, your children, your home, your relationships, your capacity for joy, changes when you begin.
Intentionally Conscious Motherhood intake is open, mentoring you to come home to yourself, no matter where you’re at now. Motherhood Connection. Homesteading or Home Education, you choose the path.
Below is where it all began, where I knew my souls purpose was to help mothers and women heal from our pasts, return home to who we are, and create the community we’ve always needed.
redhavenhomestead.ca 