A Moment for Moms in Texas

I know I speak for all mothers when I say we are holding heartbreak and joy in the same tired hands this week.

Every time I've sat down to edit my post for this week, all I can muster are blank stares at my Google Doc. I cannot stop thinking about—and crying about—the devastating flooding in Texas over the weekend. I cannot stop thinking about those girls and their mothers, and those camp counselors who, no doubt, tried everything possible to save their campers.

My heart is so heavy for these families and their communities. I'm heartbroken thinking about what they're enduring. Words feel so inadequate, but here we are.

This week, I've felt like I'm living a double life: part normal, business-as-usual mom, part silently grieving adult trying to keep it together, heartbroken for people I've never met. I've danced in the kitchen and cried in the shower. I've read bedtime stories and avoided headlines. I've made grilled cheese sandwiches and whispered prayers for strangers.

This is what it means to mother. We quietly carry the world on our shoulders, shielding our children from it as best we can, while searching for and holding onto their joy at the same time.

I know I speak for all mothers when I say we are holding heartbreak and joy in the same tired hands this week. And that doesn't make us disconnected—it makes us human. We keep loving, feeding, hugging, and laughing because that's how we survive, and how we teach our children to care for a world we cannot fully protect them from.

So if you're feeling like you're doing it all wrong because you're smiling one moment and breaking inside the next—please know, you're not. You're simply holding two things at once.

And maybe the most powerful thing we can do at a time like this is love our children harder, seek more ways to laugh, sing that extra bedtime song for the tenth time, and spend extra moments memorizing our children's faces—all in honor of the mothers who can't.

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