Why Am I Scared I Won’t Be a Good Mother? Practical Small Steps That Help Me Cope
Last Saturday, I was folding clean baby onesies at my older sister’s kitchen table, her three-month-old daughter Mae napping in a scratchy hand-me-down bassinet by the window. My coffee had gone lukewarm, there was a half-eaten everything bagel on a plate next to me, and Mae had spit up on the sleeve of my sweater an hour earlier. When my sister leaned against the counter and asked when my partner and I were thinking about starting our own family, I didn’t give the vague, polite answer I usually do. I said, “I’m scared I’ll be a bad mom.”
She didn’t say what everyone else says: that I’m great with kids, that I’ll be a natural, that I’m overthinking it. She just wiped dried formula off her sweatpants, pulled out her phone, and pressed play on a voice note she’d sent a friend at 2:17 a.m. two weeks prior. Her voice was cracking, thick with sleep and tears. She said she’d forgotten to burp Mae after a middle-of-the-night feed, Mae spit up all over the new crib sheet, and she just sat on the nursery floor crying because she already knew she’d messed her up. I clicked the voice note off, and we both sat quiet for a minute, the clock above the stove ticking.
I told her where my fear comes from. We grew up with our mom, who worked 60-hour weeks to pay the mortgage after our dad left, and she missed almost every one of my after-school events. I still remember waiting by the entrance of the town rec center after my fifth grade piano recital for 45 minutes, until my teacher offered to drive me home. Mom apologized, said she’d gotten stuck in an emergency work meeting, and she meant it. But I grew up assuming that kind of absence just runs in our family. That I’ll get busy, I’ll forget, I’ll leave my own kid waiting by the door too.
I spend a lot of time with kids already: I watch Mae one afternoon a week so my sister can work, and I babysit my friend’s four-year-old daughter Lila twice a month. Over the past year, I’ve picked up small, low-effort habits that have helped me work through this fear, instead of just letting it spin. The first thing I changed was how I respond to hard feelings. I used to think a good caregiver has to fix every problem immediately. A couple months ago, I watched Lila while her mom had a last-minute surgery consult. Halfway through the morning, Lila realized she’d left her favorite stuffed rabbit at daycare, and she started wailing so hard she could barely breathe. That day I had a migraine, and I couldn’t summon the energy to problem solve: no offering popsicles, no offering to drive to the closed daycare, no pulling out Bluey to distract her. I just sat down on the living room floor next to her, leaned my back against the couch, and said, “That’s really awful. Bunny’s your favorite, it makes total sense to be this sad.” I didn’t say anything else for 12 minutes, just let her cry into my shirt. After a while, she pulled back and asked if we could color pictures of bunnies together. That’s when I realized most of the time, kids don’t need you to fix the bad feeling. They just need you to sit with it. It’s a small thing, but it’s the kind of thing I would have messed up if I’d tried to be perfect.
The second habit I started is keeping a running note in my phone of 1-sentence small caretaking wins. It’s just for me, no one else sees it. Entries are things like “Remembered Lila can’t have strawberries, brought apple slices instead” “Paused my work meeting to get Mae’s paci when she was fussy” “Didn’t yell when Lila spilled juice all over my work laptop keyboard” “Sat through 10 minutes of Lila’s dinosaur story even though I had no idea what she was talking about”. When I start spiraling about all the ways I’ll mess up, I scroll through that note. I used to only count the big mistakes: the time I lost Lila’s favorite hat at the park, the time I was 10 minutes late picking her up from preschool. The note reminds me that most of parenting isn’t the big recitals or the perfect birthday parties. It’s all those tiny, unremarkable moments that add up.
The third thing I did was small and silly, but it made a big difference: I unfollowed 17 parenting accounts on Instagram that showed perfect, neutral-colored nurseries and kids eating homemade organic quinoa bowls without throwing food. I replaced them with three regular moms from a local mom’s group, who post about burning the birthday cupcakes, forgetting their kid’s library books and having to pay the $20 fine, their kid drawing on the wall with permanent marker when they turned around for two minutes. It stopped me from comparing my messy, ordinary practice to someone else’s curated highlight reel.
I still get scared. Some nights I lie awake and think about all the ways I could mess up a kid, all the hurt I could pass on even when I don’t mean to. I don’t have a big, neat answer that I’ll definitely be a good mom one day. No one can promise that. But right now, this is what works: I keep showing up for the small moments with the kids already in my life, I write down the good bits I almost forget, I don’t pretend I have to be anything but ordinary. There’s still a lot that’s uncertain, and that’s okay. For now, that’s enough.
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