You don’t have to be fully healed to be a good mother. But nobody tells you that. So I’m telling you.

There is a version of me that wakes up in the middle of the night. Not because of a sound downstairs or a child calling out. Just… awake. Alert. Heart doing that thing it does where it forgets it’s safe now.

And then I hear it. A little voice. Or small feet padding down the hallway. And I have to do something I’ve had to learn to do deliberately, consciously, sometimes painfully:

Come back. Come back to right now. Come back to this child who needs a mom, not a ghost.

I want to talk about something that doesn’t get said enough in motherhood spaces, especially in spaces where trauma is part of the story. And that is this: some of us are raising children while we are still, quietly, in the middle of our own healing. We are showing up for bedtime routines and school pickups and dance recitals and homework wars while somewhere underneath it all, there is still a version of us that is wounded. Still working. Still trying to find its way through.

This post is for those of us doing both at the same time.

• The Ghost in the House

I call her the ghost. She’s not a bad person. She’s just the version of me that got frozen somewhere along the way. In a moment. In a year. In a chapter of my life that left marks I can’t always see but can absolutely feel.

Trauma doesn’t clock out when you become a parent. I wish someone had told me that early. There is no version of this where you walk through the hospital doors with a baby in your arms and the past just… graciously agrees to stay behind. It follows. Not to be cruel. It follows because it hasn’t been resolved yet. And it surfaces in the strangest places.

It surfaces when your child throws a tantrum and something in you reacts not just to the tantrum, but to something older, louder, more familiar than a two-year-old on the floor of a grocery store.

It surfaces when you flinch at a raised voice, even a playful one.

It surfaces when someone needs something from you when you have nothing left, and the guilt of that emptiness feels ancient.

For me, the ghost showed up in hypervigilance. In the need to control the environment around my kids because somewhere deep in my nervous system, chaos still meant danger. In moments where I’d dissociate mid-conversation and come back to find my child staring at me, waiting, and feel a grief I couldn’t entirely explain.

The ghost isn’t the enemy. But she can’t be in charge of the kids.

• What Healing Looks Like in the Middle of Motherhood

I am going to tell you something I have had to make peace with slowly:

You will not be fully healed before your children need you. That is simply not how the timeline works.

Healing and parenting are not sequential. They are concurrent. They happen in the same life, at the same kitchen table, with the same hands. And that is both one of the hardest things and, I’ve come to believe, one of the most meaningful things.

Because here is what I’ve found: doing the work while being a parent doesn’t just change you. It changes them. Not in a dramatic, everything-is-fixed way. But in the quiet way that children absorb everything. They watch you go to therapy. They hear you say, “I’m having a hard moment right now, but it’s not because of you.” They watch you come back after you’ve stepped away to breathe instead of yelling. They learn, slowly and without knowing they’re learning, that emotions are survivable. That adults can struggle and still show up. That broken doesn’t mean gone.

That is not nothing. That is everything.

• The Hardest Part Nobody Talks About

The hardest part isn’t the bad days. The hardest part is the good days.

It’s the moments when everything is soft and easy and your kid is laughing and the light is doing that thing it does in the late afternoon, and instead of just being in it, your brain whispers: you don’t deserve this. Or: something is about to go wrong. Or: you are too broken for this beautiful thing.

That is the ghost talking. And she is lying.

One of the cruelest symptoms of unprocessed trauma is the way it makes joy feel dangerous. Like happiness is a setup. Like good things are bait. If you grew up in chaos or survived something that rewired your nervous system, your body can genuinely struggle to settle into peace. It’s not ingratitude. It’s not weakness. It’s a wound. And it deserves to be treated like one.

I have had to practice, genuinely practice, allowing good moments to be real. Staying in them instead of bracing for the end of them. Telling myself: this is allowed. You are allowed to have this. Your children are allowed to have this version of you.

• What I Want My Kids to Know

I don’t think I’ll hide this chapter of my life from my children forever. Not the darkness of it, but the truth of it. The truth that their mother fought for something. Not just for herself, but for them. Before they were old enough to understand what it cost.

I want them to know that healing is brave. That getting help is not weakness. That you can love someone fiercely and still be in the middle of your own story. That the two things are not in opposition.

I want them to know that I chose to do the work because they deserved a mother who was present. Not perfect. Not unscathed. Just present.

And I want them to know, if they ever find themselves carrying something heavy, that they can put it down long enough to ask for help. That the asking doesn’t make them less. It makes them someone who knows the difference between surviving and living.

That’s what I’m trying to model. Every single imperfect day.

• A Note to the Mothers Still in the Middle

If you are parenting while healing, I see you. Not the curated version. The real one. The one who cried in the car before walking into the house. The one who dissociated during bath time and felt guilty about it for days. The one who snapped and then sat on the bathroom floor afterward wondering what is wrong with me.

Nothing is wrong with you. Something happened to you. Those are not the same thing.

You are not failing your children by being human. You are not failing your children by being in process. You are failing them only if you stop trying. And the fact that you’re reading something like this tells me you haven’t stopped.

Keep going. Not because it gets perfectly easy. But because your children are watching you choose to keep going. And that is one of the most powerful things they will ever witness.

You are raising warriors. And warrior mothers are made, not born. They are made in the in-between. In the healing. In the choosing again and again, to show up even when the ghost is loud.

You’re not just surviving this. You’re building something.

Leigh Nightshade

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