Confessions of a Chaos Mom

Some parents make the hard look easy; I make the easy look hard. (Guest Post)

Photo by Daniele Levis Pelusi on Unsplash

A guest post by Anna Brian.

It was during one of many meltdowns outside our daycare, right in the heart of the college district of our city—my two-year-old slamming his tantruming body onto the filthy sidewalk, me screaming at my four-year-old as he streaked toward the cars whipping down the adjacent busy road—that the thought first popped into my head: I should be charging the university for birth control.

I wonder now for how many young people I’ve provided a cautionary tale against parenthood—a horror story they think of as they debate future plans with partners or reach for the condom box in the heat of a one-night-stand—all from our daily walking of the one or two blocks from the car to school in the morning, and back again in the late afternoon.

Certainly, there are the moms who make things look easy—even though I’d argue that it’s NOT easy, for anyone! But there are parents who seem to always know the right, patient, gentle thing to say to keep their toddler from projectiling himself into a pile of cigarette butts in front of a group of 18-year-olds entering a tattoo shop. We’re the family who makes a couple think, “hmmmm, maybe we don’t want to have a second kid.”

Sometimes, I feel designed in a lab to make other moms feel good about their parenting.

It always surprises people who knew me before. Maybe it’s the former “gifted kid” thing (guilty). The overachiever thing, the perfectionist thing. But the chaos was always there, bubbling just under the surface. It just took motherhood to truly bring it out.

And it’s not cute chaos: the artsy mom with her hair askew. The house cluttered because life is happening all around. A few episodes of Daniel Tiger here or there because “it’s OK in moderation!” A takeout meal or two a week. Oh, no. We’re talking amounts of screen time that would make experts weep. My oldest has never voluntarily eaten a vegetable; meals are the same rotation of nuggets, pizza, MAYBE mac n’ cheese if the big kid is feeling it that day. And forget baths every day; if we can get the children (generally kicking and screaming) into the tub twice a week, I ride that high through all the skipped baths the following one.

A mom friend—a nurse—once casually pointed out that the crackers some parents think are healthy (and that my kids were presently chowing into) don’t actually have any nutritional value and I thought, do you think I don’t know? Do you think I let them binge Blippi for their health? I know these are not great choices. Mistakes are being made.

I also know what you’re probably thinking and trust me—trust me!—the worst thing you can come up with, I’ve already thought it about myself; late at night, when the insecurities suppressed all day seep back in at the edges. Yes, my kids are a little bit wild, but so are a lot of peoples’ kids! I know the problem is (mostly, haha) not the kids’ actions but how I handle them. Why can’t I get through a doctor’s appointment, a grocery store trip, sometimes even a school drop-off without a lollipop or a Hot Wheels bribe? Why can’t I get it together to have family dinner more than once in a blue moon? Why does the inside of my car always look like a Cheerio box and a toy factory had a baby that exploded?

Neurodivergence is definitely a factor here, for both my husband and me. The fact that these conditions are highly hereditary does help explain my children, who never once met a demand they didn’t want to avoid. My oldest recently received no diagnosis after an evaluation, notwithstanding the fact that he only chose beige food even as a baby-led-weaning infant. However, the lack of diagnosis doesn’t change the reality on the ground. Add onto this relatively minor but impactful chronic health issues (me!), sometimes debilitating social anxiety (hubby!), life-threatening food allergies (kids! Both of them!), as well as four therapies for one child (speech, occupational, physical, and feeding), and it does often feel like we’re drowning in it.

All this to say that yes, I have challenges. But I also have a lot of privileges, and many people with these same challenges get through the days without their children mainlining YouTube Kids.

In a different essay, this is where I would share some kind of message that I’ve discovered about parenting this way; some secret I’ve figured out that the type-A mind could never comprehend. If this is what you’re looking for now, 1) Have you even been paying attention AND 2) If you were able to fever-dream some message out of the above, will you please let me know?!

Sometimes, I feel bad that I’m the mom my kids got. A mom who can’t figure out how to executive-function her way through a semi-home-cooked meal at the end of the day even with her children glued to the TV. A mom who gets so overstimulated by the screaming and the touching and the barking dog that she retreats to the kitchen because Mama needs a minute, just one minute, and then yells at the tearful child who follows her in there because even that minute away was just too much. A mom who lets Paw Patrol fruit snacks pass for vegetables.

So yeah, sometimes I regret, for them, that they got a chaos mom. But then I see how they cling to me so fiercely; how they know instinctively in their sensitive little bodies that for all my flaws, I understand them more fully than anyone else ever could. The way I’m so attuned to their triggers that I know how they’ll react before they do. How for all their reactivity—and all of MY reactivity—I’m their safe space in an uncertain world.

Whoops. I guess we got to a message after all.

Not that I’m justifying my approach; I don’t actually recommend YouTube Kids! But maybe as moms our tendency to self-flagellate, to focus on our mistakes (and/or what we view as our mistakes) to the exclusion of all else gets in the way of us seeing the mini parenting miracles we perform every day. Maybe we are all out here just trying to do our best with the various hands we’ve been dealt, frantically comparing ourselves to our neighbors, to our mothers-in-law, to that trad wife on Instagram and just hoping beyond hope, beyond REASON that we are doing a good enough job to not screw up our kids. Maybe some day I will take my own advice and cut myself a break.

And maybe—just maybe—you will, too.

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Anna Brian lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband, two children, and a cantankerous senior dog. Right at this moment she is either a) being used as a jungle gym b) wiping a butt, probably not her own c) having a conversation with her husband that’s been interrupted 500 times OR d) all of the above! She occasionally putters around Bluesky.

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