By Amanda McCoy
I’m at a point in my motherhood journey where I can sense what’s coming. I feel the weight of it banging in my chest at night.
My girls are still young enough that we haven’t faced much real drama yet. My oldest is eight, my youngest two. There have been small things: minor fights with friends, missed events, the quiet sting of little disappointments.
Nothing too heavy. Nothing that lingers.
But I see it coming: the bigger, harder things.
Broken friendships. Exclusion. Rejection. Failure.
I see it laid out on the path ahead of us, and sometimes it feels like I’m holding my breath as we walk toward it.
I’m not new to panic or fear on this motherhood journey. Pregnancy, birth, and those fragile postpartum days tell their own stories. The newborn and toddler years brought what I think of now as simple pain—skinned knees, earaches, sickness, and the small squabbles of little people learning to share space in the world.
Even when my heart felt heavy for them, the solutions were simple and clean. A bandage over a scraped knee. Rocking a baby in the quiet hours of the night. Medicine for a fever. Tears wiped away. A cuddle on the couch.
Once I navigated a crowded emergency room with a toddler struggling to breathe. The panic rose quickly in my chest, thick and suffocating. The fear that something terrible might happen to this small creature we had created felt unbearable. But I also remember the relief—the way my body softened when she was treated and we walked back out into the night, safe and together. The fear then was bright and loud, but it faded just as quickly as it arrived.
This feels different.
Now, with two of my daughters in elementary school and middle school not far ahead, the fear is quieter. It slips under my skin so softly I sometimes wonder if I’m imagining it.
That ER visit was terrifying, but when it was over, it was over.
This feels like something I’ll live with for a long time.
I think what I’m circling around is this: the pain my daughters are about to encounter will be new to them.
They will learn that life is messy and unpredictable, that we can’t control other people. They will discover that sometimes what we want isn’t what we receive. Sometimes our effort won’t be enough. Sometimes the people we adore stop loving us.
They won’t be invited to parties. Kids will whisper about them. Someone will make fun of them. Not everyone will like them.
Their hearts will break.
They will be excluded. Passed over. Left out. They won’t make a team they hoped to join or be welcomed into a group they longed to belong to. They will fail at something they care deeply about. Their feelings will not always be reciprocated.
Eventually they will grow familiar with this kind of pain, the way we all do. But until then, I see wave after wave of new hurt waiting for them. And I hold it inside my body in the rare quiet moments I have to myself.
Other mothers standing where I stand can see it too, just beyond the horizon.
And right now I feel a little helpless—like I’m watching the sky darken as a storm gathers in the distance.
I’m the kind of mother who lets her children fall. I believe they need to stumble and fail and try again in order to grow. I try to give them space to experiment, whether they’re climbing a playground ladder or navigating the delicate world of friendships. I let them work through a situation before I rush in to fix it.
I imagine I’ll take the same approach here. But I also know there will be nights when I lie awake thinking of their struggles, their fresh pain.
Because the truth is this: mothers carry their children in their bodies long after birth. Our bodies remember their weight. And we feel their pain, too.
I’m empathetic to a fault; I struggle not to absorb everything they experience. If I’m going to guide them through this part of life, I suspect I’ll need to grow thicker skin—something that feels both necessary and nearly impossible.
Still, I’m not sure anything can truly prepare a mother for what’s coming.
As an athlete, I understand practice. I know the power of repetition, the beauty of muscle memory—how a body can perform something difficult after hours and hours of training, even years later.
But how do you practice for this?
How do you prepare to guide a child through the complicated pain of growing up?
Will instinct take over? Will my body remember the shape of this pain from my own childhood and know what to do?
This will be new for me, too.
I’ve lived through heartbreak and disappointment before, but never through the body of a child I love. Experiencing it beside them will be different than anything I endured in my own childhood.
Like anything new, it may be hardest at the beginning. Maybe, with time, it will become something I learn to carry.
Amanda McCoy is a writer and mother who lives in Ohio with her four daughters, husband, and dog. When she’s not navigating the chaos her party of six demands, she’s writing about motherhood and the quiet, complicated emotions that accompany raising children and letting them grow. You can read more of her writing on Facebook, Instagram and Substack under the name The Write McCoy.
Photo: Nicole Follen Photography
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