We Are Not Built for This and Yet We Mother Anyway

Motherhood today is a kind of exhaustion that sleep can’t touch. One that self-care can’t fix. It’s the exhaustion of waking up every morning to a headline more horrifying and soul-crushing than the day before, and still sorting backpacks, finding missing shoes, and chugging along.

You open social media hoping to see cute pictures of your friends’ kids, only to be ambushed by literal footage of a mother being shot at point-blank range by masked agents. Minutes later, you pick up your young children, smile, and ask, “How was your day, kiddos?” as if your nervous system weren’t screaming.

It’s hearing about another school shooting. Innocent babies whose parents won’t get to snuggle them to sleep tonight. And then somehow summoning the courage to drop your own off at school the next morning, as if you’re not envisioning worst-case scenarios. To act like this isn’t an impossible ask of parents.

It’s living in a country where being right has become more important than being kind. Where listening with compassion and curiosity has been replaced with shouting, mocking, and dehumanizing. And then going home to teach your children critical thinking: how to discern right from wrong, to ask questions, to consider perspectives beyond their own.

It’s watching leaders hurl hateful insults at those who disagree with them and then kneeling to eye level with your kids to explain that we don’t name-call. That respectful disagreement matters, and words have the power to cut or to heal.

It’s seeing people cheer on the suffering of others who risked everything to flee violence, poverty, or hopelessness, something so many of us wouldn’t hesitate to do to protect our children’s futures. Families who’ve lived here for generations, are loved by their communities, who contribute, who belong, being torn apart and sent to countries they don’t know or remember or even speak the language of. Then somehow teaching your children that we are all God’s children, that where someone comes from, the color of their skin, or who they love does not determine their worth. That compassion is not optional. That “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” That people’s stories are complex, and we shouldn’t judge or pretend to know all the facts.

Our generation of parents cannot be well. At least, I hope we are not. I hope I’m not the only one walking around with this tightness in my chest, this pit in my stomach, grieving for people I’ve never met and aching for a world my children will inherit. I hope I’m not alone in missing the days when we could disagree politically and still agree that democracy matters and basic humanity was not up for debate.

I am exhausted, afraid, and heartbroken by this world daily.

We are not built emotionally, psychologically, or spiritually, to casually witness the graphic murder of a political activist and then go home and make dino nuggets for dinner. We are not built to hear about a lawmaker, her husband, and their dog being brutally shot because someone was radicalized and then read a bedtime story about an old lady who swallowed a shoe.

Something in us rebels against that whiplash. Something in us knows this is too much.

I said to a fellow Her View From Home writer that it feels like we’re living in the Upside Down, and we’ve lost our souls. She gently replied, “Not everyone, sweet friend. Not you. Not me. That’s the hope that keeps us going.”

And she’s right.

We are bombarded daily with horror. We doom-scroll. We read comments that shock us to our core. We wonder how anyone can be so cruel, so detached, so certain they are justified in someone else’s suffering, so indifferent to a life extinguished. But there are still many of us who feel the weight of it all. Who carry it in our bodies, threaded through us like breath and blood.

The fact that we still feel the hurt, the outrage, the heartbreak, is proof that our humanity is not gone. That is the hope. That is why we keep going.

We keep teaching our children kindness in a world that models cruelty, choosing empathy when it would be easier to harden. We keep believing that love is powerful, that compassion is not naïve, that caring deeply is a superpower, and that we don’t have to agree with someone to still show them respect.

I will carry that hope with everyone else who feels this ache. I will pray that our humanity returns in full force. I will keep doing the quiet, sacred work of raising children who know how to love, because maybe that is how we leave this world better than we found it.

For them.
For all of us.

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Kristyna Moore

Kristyna is a California girl navigating motherhood, work, and mid-life 2,300 miles from where she began. She’s been married to her husband for 10 years and is a working mom to two tiny humans who keep her very humble. Based in Huntsville, Alabama, Kristyna spends her days as a Development Manager for a commercial real estate firm and her off-hours as the Moore household’s resident Chef de Cuisine, professional boo-boo kisser, and full-time manager of an ever-growing laundry pile and toy population. Outside the demands of work and motherhood, she creates content aimed at normalizing hair loss and alternative hair wearing (yes, it’s a wig), and believes deeply in the healing power of fresh air and dirt under her fingernails, so you’ll likely find her elbow-deep in the garden or out on a hike with her little crew - proving that therapy doesn’t always have to come with a couch. As a writer, she gravitates toward the conversations women are rarely invited to have out loud - aging, identity shifts, grief, body changes, motherhood, marriage, and the quiet unraveling and rebuilding that often happens in midlife. Her hope is always the same: to make another woman feel seen, understood, and a little less alone.