Everyday life as a mother is already a full-body endurance sport.

It’s cooking breakfast while checking the clock.
Packing snacks. Packing lunches.
Teacher conferences. Calendars. Color-coded schedules.
Extracurriculars, pickups, drop-offs, practices, performances.
Mounds of laundry that never actually disappear.
Meal planning. Grocery lists. Cooking again.

And that’s just the visible labor.

Then there’s the invisible list we carry as women:
Self-care. Workouts. Weight loss. Skincare. Facials.
Trying to look rested. Trying to look young.
Trying to meet society’s impossible expectations of who we are supposed to be.

Now add work.

Not just a job—but a career.
One you love. One you worked hard for.
One that required education, sacrifice, grit, and time.

On a good day, it’s a miracle we sleep at all.

And then—
add trauma.

That’s when everyday life starts to feel overwhelming in ways no planner or productivity hack can fix.

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Trauma Changes the Math

Trauma doesn’t remove responsibilities.
It adds weight to all of them.

Healing is one of the hardest parts of motherhood because it isn’t tangible.
You can’t check it off a list.
You can’t outsource it.
You can’t measure progress week to week.

It’s not like finances.
It’s not like navigating institutions or systems.

Healing happens deep inside your own soul—quietly, painfully, and often invisibly.

One of my Momsday Preps is healing.
And healing is complicated.

“For you, God, tested us; you refined us like silver.
You brought us into prison and laid burdens on our backs.
You let people ride over our heads; we went through fire and water,
but you brought us to a place of abundance.”
Psalm 66:10–12

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A Beautiful Disaster

For fifteen years, my life was a beautiful disaster.

I gained wisdom the hard way—through a marriage to someone with a disordered personality.
Someone with a food addiction in the form of anorexia.
Someone with significant mental health issues who refused medication.

All the while, I was keeping children alive.

Children who survived childhood cancer.
Children who survived vehicle accidents.
Children navigating their own mental health struggles.

I kept them stable.
Academically.
Emotionally.
Logistically.

I held together extracurriculars, schedules, and six wildly different personalities.

Hard doesn’t begin to cover it.

It was walking through fire most days.

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Where the Damage Lived

The narcissistic abuse was hidden behind smoke and mirrors—quiet, confusing, disorienting.

But the worst part of those fifteen ungodly years wasn’t just the abuse.

The worst part was this:

I was not healed.

I had big, open wounds that kept getting reopened—
with every coercive act,
with attrition warfare,
with medical trauma,
with stealthing,
with sexual coercion.

Eventually, my body began to give up.
It began to shut down.

And then I understood the truth:

I was carrying deep, open, bleeding wounds—old ones.
Wounds that had never been allowed to close.
Wounds that were quietly running my life.

Those wounds didn’t need to heal perfectly.

They just needed to heal enough.

Enough to give me the courage.
Enough to give me the strength.
Enough to make the changes that—one day, I’m sure I’ll fully understand—saved my life and the lives of my children.

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Healing in Practice

Now I am in a new season.

A season of applying the healing.

The EMDR.
The CBT therapy.
The Polyvagal work.
The somatic body work.
The spiritual growth.
The deepening of my faith—not just in words, but in practice.

Healing is no longer theoretical.
It is embodied.
It is lived.
It is chosen daily.

“He has made everything beautiful in its time.
He has also set eternity in the human heart.”
Ecclesiastes 3:11

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Healing Is Not Weakness

If you are mothering, working, loving, surviving, and healing all at once—

Hear this:

You are not failing.
You are not lazy.
You are not broken.

You are doing one of the hardest things a human being can do:

Healing while still functioning—and that work is essential