In The Middle Of Being Needed

There are days when I can feel something building inside me.

It usually starts quietly. A thought while I’m making eggs. A sentence that forms while I’m tying little shoes. An idea that arrives while the boys are outside digging in the dirt. It’s an itch. Not anxious. Not frantic. Just steady. Creative. And lately, I’ve been feeling it constantly. I wake up wanting to write. Wanting to shape something. Wanting to build something that feels like mine. There are so many ideas moving through me right now, pieces I want to publish, things I want to curate, a direction I can almost see clearly if I just had a little uninterrupted space to sit with it.

But uninterrupted space is rare when you have a three-year-old and a one-and-a-half-year-old.

I don’t have these days often, but when I do, they sit heavy. I’ll be at the computer and the words will finally start lining up. I’ll feel that familiar click, the one that tells me something good is forming, and then I hear, “Mom.” Or someone needs milk. Or someone is crying. Or someone just wants to show me something very important and very small.bAnd of course I go. I always go. But something in me quietly closes each time.

It’s not resentment. It’s not regret. I love being their mother. I chose this. I would still rather be here, single, building something honest for us, than in a relationship that required me to shrink. But that doesn’t mean this part isn’t hard.

I am in this strange in-between. I am still home with them. I am also trying to figure out how to support us. I feel the responsibility of that every single day. The weight of it. The urgency of it. And I also feel the pull toward something creative, something expressive, something that feels bigger than the walls of this house. Sometimes I look around, the toys, the laundry, the half-clean kitchen, and I can see both versions of myself at once. The mother on the floor building towers. The woman who could build something else entirely. And I don’t think those two versions are in conflict. But they are competing for time.

What has surprised me most is how physical it feels when I can’t complete something. When an idea gets interrupted over and over, it doesn’t just disappear. It lingers. It sits in my body. My workouts feel flat. My food feels pointless. I can eat clean, lift heavy, do all the “right” things and still feel off. Because it isn’t about protein. It’s about expression. It’s about wanting to follow a thought all the way to the end and not being able to.

I know I am not the only one who feels this way. The mothers who see their own potential clearly. Who know they are capable of something meaningful outside of motherhood, even while loving motherhood deeply. The women who chose to leave instead of stay small, and now carry everything.

There is pride in that.

There is also exhaustion.

Sometimes I wonder if this season is shaping me more than I realize. If learning to build in fragments, in 20-minute increments, between snacks and snuggles and meltdowns, is actually teaching me something about patience. About depth. About why I want to create in the first place. Maybe the interruptions are not ruining the momentum. Maybe they are teaching me how badly I want it.

If you are here too, feeling stretched, feeling capable, feeling interrupted, I see you.

There is nothing wrong with you for wanting more.

There is nothing wrong with loving your children and still craving space.

You are not failing.

You are in the middle of being needed.

And that is both beautiful and incredibly hard.