“How do you do it with three kids?! I only have one and I’m drowning…,” she wrote. She could’ve been anyone. She is so many people. She was me – two kids ago.

Drowning is exactly the right word. I reassured this particular ‘she’ that I too felt that I was drowning. That she’s not alone. That I felt the same way when I had ‘only’ one child as if the enormity of being wholly responsible for a life is somehow less intense or life-changing depending on the number of children a person has. Hint: it’s not.

The role of mother, father, parent, guardian is the part that makes you drown. Not the children. Not the number. Not the circumstance.

As we all know, and have read article after online article about, parenthood in this day and age is a struggle. The expectations and standards that we are all being held to, and are holding each other to, are outrageous and unreasonable, at best. At worst, they are crippling and utterly unattainable. It is impossible to do it all, or do any single thing ‘right’ as a parent. All of the unsolicited advice and the warnings and the dos and the don’ts are enough to make one feel as though they are drowning.  The household, the workplace, the classroom, the community, the mom group, the every group… each is a full-time job. So please go out there and give 600% of your self away.  All of the tasks and the roles and the do this and do that’s are enough to make one feel as though they are drowning. I’m a mom and I’m drowning. I think we all are.

But why are we drowning in all of it. Why are the expectations so important to us that they drown out our gut instincts and affect every move and day to day decision. Why do we take on more than we can handle… time after time after time?

Is it the competitive nature of our society that motivates us to constantly compare our actions to those around us?— yes, probably. Is it our individual need to feel superior to other parents? — could be. But in every parenting decision and every job we undertake, the big and the small, there is a child at the heart of it.

The reason I’m drowning is because of a love so strong and fierce that I would do anything to feel like I deserve it. I’m drowning because I couldn’t ever bear to think I gave my littles anything but my very best efforts. I’m drowning because I have been blessed with a responsibility so wildly fulfilling that I’m willing to question my instincts and absorb whatever the world wants to throw at me on the off chance that I’ve missed something.

My children come first. They are the be-all and the end-all. That is why I’m drowning.  And I’ll drown again, and everyday. For the love of my littles and in the love of my littles. I’m a mom and I’m drowning in the love.