How to Mom When You Have Anxiety: 101

Being a mom who lives with anxiety, or any mental illness, is tough. It’s like stacking an elephant on top of a rickety ladder that could give way at any moment, only the elephant is the worry and stress that comes with the territory of caring for a child, and you’re the rickety ladder struggling to stay upright when everything is telling you to collapse.

Now that I’ve told you, my probably fellow ladder, what you know all too well, let’s have a laugh with How to Mom When You Have Anxiety.

The 10 Plagues of Bedtime

It’s bedtime, and you’re about T-30 minutes away from doing a victory touchdown dance outside your child’s door. Except, nine times out of ten, your kid isn’t willing to go down without a fight.

I like to refer to this as the 10 Plagues of Bedtime.

Because when children are involved, bedtime is a shitfest of biblical proportions.

5 Parents Who Are Even Worse Than You (Probably)

As a parent, you have one job. To have your child on a strict but fun daily schedule that nurtures their interests, has them waking up and going to bed at the appropriate hour some stranger on the internet decided was appropriate for their age, make nutritious, organic, sugar-free meals made with locally grown ingredients, brush their teeth, do age-appropriate chores, entertain them or fill their day with activities and extracurriculars like sports or robotics so they can learn teamwork and practical job skills for the future, monitor their screen time, encourage growth and independence, protect them without hovering, be a strong, sound role model who is a pillar of good behavior, kindness, and respect at all times, teach them to be polite but never a pushover, stay on top of their homework, never yell or lose your cool, discipline them in a well thought out way as approved by a panel of child psychologists so as not to traumatize them for life, and put down your phone so you can be present and available for them whenever they ask you to watch them sprint from one room to the next for the eleventeenth time. Super easy, right?

If parental guilt and society’s endless list of expectations of you as a parent has you pouring a bit o’ whiskey in with your morning coffee, this one’s for you, homie. 

Here are five of the worst parents in history to make you feel a little better about yourself. Here’s the twist: I give you a lowdown of their dirty deeds, but you won’t know who the culprit is until the end. Oooh, intrigue.