How Motherhood Has Changed My Relationship With Anxiety
A reflection on self-trust, sensitivity, and finding strength in the struggle.
Anxiety has lived within me for as long as I can remember.
Whether conscious - what if what if what if, or subconscious - insomnia, IBS, skin picking, at the root of anxiety is a lack of trust. The belief that if I can’t control the world around me, something bad will happen and that I won’t be able to handle it. I’ve known intellectually that control is an illusion and that perfection is an unattainable goal, but I have always struggled to cultivate enough trust within myself to just let go.
So when it came to motherhood, I thought entering into that chapter would only make my anxiety worse.
How could that kind of chaos and uncertainty not, especially for a highly sensitive person like me?
To be honest, when I got pregnant for the first time, I was maybe 20% excited, 80% terrified. Parenting seemed like the ultimate loss of control: sleepless nights, constant overstimulation, a new identity I couldn’t plan or perfect my way through.
And I was absolutely right.
Motherhood began to expose every coping mechanism I’d built to feel safe - the perfectionism, the people-pleasing, the constant mental scanning for what might go wrong.
Suddenly, there was no space for managing appearances or anticipating outcomes. There was only the moment in front of me, and whether I could meet it.
What I didn’t realize was that every impossible moment I survived was quietly building that self-trust I’d always been searching for.
I think back now to the early days in my pregnancy with Reece - nausea, migraines, exhausted to the core, chasing around an energetic two-year-old, catching cold after cold he brought home from daycare.
If I’d seen it all ahead of time, I would’ve said, there’s no way I can handle that.
And yet, I did.
When preparing for Reece’s birth, I found myself in a tug of war between the part of me who yearned to experience a vaginal delivery (Briggs was born via c-section) and the part of me who has always been terrified of labor and birth.
Because I’m highly sensitive, I have carried the belief that I’m fragile - not strong enough to endure that level of intensity.
The choice of another c-section was always on the table, but a deeper, steadier knowing kept rising above the fear that said you can do this.
When my contractions began in the wee hours of April 21st, an unexpected stillness came over me.
I felt the familiar current of anxiety dissolve into a grounded calm. I was no longer anticipating or analyzing, just allowing this primal transition to unfold.
As the day progressed and the contractions grew more powerful and all-consuming, a warrior part of myself emerged and took the lead - focused, determined, confident.
The pain I felt was unlike anything I could imagine or describe, but so was the strength.
Reece was born at 9:14 that night, and as I held his tiny pink body for the first time, I felt a pride I’ve never known before.
He’s here, I thought, and so am I.
In the weeks and months that followed, that strength felt shakier as the hormonal cascade, sleep deprivation, and overstimulation set in.
Reece was what people lovingly call a velcro baby. For the first four months of his life, he needed to be in our arms at all times - no car rides, no napping in the crib, and would only fall asleep while being vigorously bounced on a yoga ball in a dark room.
I was suffering with chronic back pain from pregnancy and birth, processing the guilt and grief that comes with learning how to meet the needs of more than one child, and trying to accept that my summer of maternity leave would be spent within the four walls of a nursery rather than by the beach as I had envisioned.
When Reece was 9 weeks old, Ben’s paternity leave came to an end.
I was already feeling very anxious about this transition, and then a series of events unfolded that even my anxiety couldn’t have anticipated.
On a Saturday, Briggs came down with a stomach bug, and I got into a car accident. On Monday, Ben started working again, and on Tuesday I came down with the bug too.
I remember one night in particular, bouncing Reece in the dark while nausea and a fever rolled through me and my back throbbed with pain. I could hear Ben trying to navigate a meltdown from Briggs in the room next door.
Tears rolled down my face, and I kept thinking I can’t do this.
But once again, it was through the pain, the exhaustion, the relentlessness of it all, that the warrior within me had the opportunity to rise. Not in spite of the struggle, but because of it.
Somewhere along the way, I realized that the thing I’d always feared most - losing control - is actually where my strength lives.
The more I meet the unpredictable and survive it, the more I have started to trust myself to do it again.
And the truth is, the anticipation of the hard things is almost always worse than the hard thing itself.
Motherhood has rewritten so many of the beliefs I held about myself.
The ones that said I was too fragile, too anxious, too sensitive to handle life’s intensity.
What I see now is that sensitivity and strength were never opposites; they’ve always coexisted within me. My sensitivity is what allows me to stay attuned, to notice the subtleties, to care deeply enough to keep showing up, even when I’m depleted.
And that, I think, is what makes mothers extraordinary.
Not the ease or perfection of how we move through the world, but the way we keep rising to meet it. The way we keep loving, even when it hurts. The way we keep finding our footing in the chaos.
My story isn’t unique. This quiet, relentless strength lives in so many women - especially the ones who feel everything deeply.
We question ourselves, doubt our capacity, brace for what might come… and then we live through it, over and over again.
And maybe that’s the point.
The goal was never to eliminate the fear or the sensitivity, but to learn that they can exist alongside strength.
To trust that we can bend without breaking.
To know, deep down, that we can do hard things.
Not because we’re unshakable, but because we keep showing up anyway.