Hearing my voice, I remember thinking, I don’t want to be this kind of parent

It was one of those nights. Dinner was burning, someone was screaming, someone else was crying, and I was holding it all together by the thinnest thread. My three children were young and needing me in every direction at once. And there I was, standing in the middle of it all, completely undone.

My mum had died not long before. The grief sat heavy in my chest. But I didn’t have space to feel it. I was busy surviving. Every day felt like a mountain. I was yelling more than I wanted to, getting angry with them and trying to control everything just to feel some sense of order. But the more I tried to control, the more out of control I felt.

I told myself: if the kids just did what I said, it would be OK. If they listened and didn’t make things harder, I would be calmer, steadier, less reactive, and then everything would settle. I was chasing some invisible version of the “perfect parent”, believing that if I controlled their behaviour, I could hold it all together.

I reached for the phone book and sat on the floor flipping through the pages. I wasn’t even sure what I was looking for. A hotel. A retreat. Somewhere I could escape. Not forever, just long enough to breathe. I didn’t want to leave my life. I didn’t want to leave my children. I just wanted the noise to stop.

I felt ashamed of how intense I’d become. Frightened by the cutting edge in my voice and the threats I’d made. And I remember thinking, “I don’t want to be this kind of mum.”

That thought unsettled me more than anything else. I loved my children fiercely, but something in me was fraying. In the days that followed, I couldn’t shake the discomfort of that moment. It would have been easier to focus on their behaviour, the arguing, the noise, the defiance. Easier to say they were the problem. Easier to double down on discipline and structure and control.

But somewhere inside me, I knew that wasn’t the whole story. The chaos I was trying to manage wasn’t just coming from my children. It was coming from me. From grief I hadn’t allowed myself to sit with. From exhaustion that had built quietly over months. From the pressure I put on myself to be the kind of mother who never lost her temper. From the fear that if I wasn’t in control, everything would fall apart.

I had been trying so hard to be a good mother that I hadn’t noticed how tightly I was gripping everyone, including myself. My children weren’t trying to break me. They were responding to a version of me who was overwhelmed and brittle.

That was confronting to admit. But it was also strangely freeing. Because if I was part of the patter