Written by Jenna Schofield, Accredited CBT Therapist and edited by Laura Greenwood, Founder, Clinical Lead, and fierce advocate for sharing the untold hero stories, of motherhood
During maternal mental health week, I have been reflecting on what us Mother’s carry. And I’m not just talking about the visible load – the school runs, the night wakings, the sheer responsibility of it all.
But the invisible one.
For some of us, me included, motherhood doesn’t just begin with a baby. It begins with memory.
When you grow up with instability
My family broke down when I was a baby.
I grew up living between two houses – two different environments, two sets of expectations, and two parents who deeply disliked one another.
I often felt like I was in the middle. And when you’re a child in that position, you learn quickly to adapt.
To keep people happy, to not say the ‘wrong thing’, to manage emotions that were never yours to manage in the first place.
No one tells you explicitly to carry that responsibility, but you carry it anyway, and it shapes you in quiet ways.
That early experience shaped me more than I realised at the time. It taught me to be hyper-aware of tension, to smooth things over, and to prioritise peace over my own feelings.
These were things I never truly recognised – until I became a parent myself.
When you grow up around chaos
In addition to early instability, I also didn’t grow up in a calm, emotionally secure home. I witnessed domestic violence, I grew up with a mother who struggled with alcoholism and mental health problems, and I learned early on how to read a room, how to stay small, how to anticipate danger.
When you grow up like that, you don’t just lose safety, you lose a template.
You aren’t shown what healthy conflict looks like. You aren’t shown consistent emotional regulation. You aren’t shown secure attachment.
Instead, you learn survival. And unfortunately, survival can look very capable from the outside.
Before I became a mother, I fell into patterns that felt familiar – even when they weren’t healthy.
As a teenager, I found myself estranged from my parents and in a domestically violent relationship.
Looking back, I can see how much of that made sense in the context of what I had grown up around.
Chaos felt normal, intensity felt like connection, and walking on eggshells felt familiar.
When violence or instability is part of your early environment, your nervous system can mistake it for home.
This isn’t weakness, it’s conditioning.
At that time, I didn’t have the language or the knowledge for trauma patterns or attachment dynamics; I simply knew what I had learned.
Breaking those patterns came long before I had children – but becoming a mother gave that process urgency.
Becoming a young Mum
When I became a Mum for the first time, I was just 21 years old. I was still figuring out who I was, whilst suddenly being responsible for someone else’s entire world. A couple of years later, I became a single Mum.
There was financial pressure, fear, and guilt. Guilt that my child wouldn’t have the ‘intact’ family I hadn’t had either. Guilt that I had somehow repeated history. And guilt that I wasn’t enough on my own.
Co-parenting then brought about its own challenges.
Learning to communicate when emotions were high.
Learning to separate adult conflict from my child’s experience.
Learning not to place them in the middle, the way I had once felt.
I was determined that even if the relationship hadn’t worked, my child would not carry the emotional burden of it.
And that determination shaped how I parented. There’s a particular type of strength that develops when you have no choice but to keep going.
But strength built in survival mode can come at a cost.
When motherhood became my whole identity
Motherhood quickly became more than a role I played. It became my whole identity.
Part of that was love, but part of it was fear.
I was determined my child would never feel unimportant, never feel overlooked, never have to question whether they mattered.
So, I overcompensated. Overfunctioned.
Avoided conflict. Worked hard. Took on too much responsibility. Rarely rested.
I struggled to ask for help, and I put my needs at the bottom of the list – consistently.
Because when you didn’t feel safe as a child, you often become hyper-focused on creating safety for yourself.
But somewhere underneath the Mother that on the outside ‘had it all figured out’, was a younger version of me thinking “If I give them everything I never had, they will never feel how I felt”…and while that intention came from deep care, it was also rooted in unresolved pain.
At 29, I had another baby. I got married. For a while, it felt like stability. Like I had rebuilt something different. And then that marriage broke down due to a lack of trust.
There is a particular type of pain in feeling like you are starting over again – especially when you’ve done it once before, and you finally believed you had built something secure.
I remember the feeling of failure resurfacing. That cruel inner voice was echoing to me that I had somehow let my children down… again.
Becoming a single mum for the second time felt even heavier. Not because I wasn’t capable, I knew that I was. But just because I was strong didn’t mean that I wanted to be in situations where I was forced to be.
It touched old wounds.
Fear of instability. The shame of perceived failure. The exhaustion of rebuilding. The responsibility of making sure everyone but me was ok.
Eventually, I realised something important yet deeply healing
I had fortunately completed my CBT training the year before, and over that time, I had slowly begun to realise something difficult: That losing myself wasn’t the same as protecting my children.
When the past shows up in motherhood.
Motherhood has a way of activating everything.
If you grew up around volatility, your child’s big emotions can feel overwhelming.
If love is felt as inconsistent, you may fear you’re not doing enough.
If boundaries weren’t respected, setting them can feel deeply uncomfortable.
Learning to prioritise myself again was not easy.
When you’ve grown up managing other people’s emotions, boundaries feel uncomfortable.
When relationships have broken down more than once, you start to question your own judgment.
But I slowly started to learn that my children don’t need a perfect Mum, they need a regulated one.
I had to learn slowly, and show them that:
- Saying no doesn’t make you selfish.
- Boundaries don’t equal rejection.
- Conflict doesn’t automatically mean abandonment.
- You don’t have to overgive to be worthy.
- You can experience betrayal and still choose stability.
- That a relationship’s ending isn’t failure.
These weren’t lessons I was taught. They were lessons I had to unlearn and rebuild, to reclaim the person and mother I was meant to be. Lessons I could then pass on to my children for the future generations to come.
Reclaiming parts of myself felt deeply uncomfortable. It meant:
- Allowing my children to see me as a whole and vulnerable person, and not just their ‘mum’.
- Taking time for my own needs without guilt.
- Accepting that meeting my own needs doesn’t mean that I am neglecting theirs.
- Tolerating the discomfort of not being everything to everyone, all the time.
When your childhood teaches you that your needs didn’t matter, prioritising yourself can feel selfish – dangerous even.
But children don’t benefit from a mother who shrinks herself and disappears.
They benefit from a mother who models:
- Self-worth.
- Emotional regulation.
Learning to hold both truths – “my children matter deeply, and I matter too” – has been one of the hardest and most important shifts in my motherhood journey so far.
But this shift didn’t occur overnight; I have been a parent now for almost 15 years. It happened gradually, with reflection, with mistakes and with discomfort.
Grieving what you didn’t have
One part of my healing that I didn’t anticipate was grief.
I learned that growth and reflection also unfairly come at a cost. There is grief in becoming the kind of mother you needed as a child.
Grief for:
- The stability that you never got to experience.
- The protection you didn’t receive.
- The emotional safety that you deserved but didn’t get.
I found myself on one hand being so unbelievably proud of myself for becoming the mother I was, whilst on the other hand thinking “why couldn’t someone have done this for me”, with those old voices coming back to haunt me, saying “because you weren’t important enough”.
Breaking generational patterns hasn’t meant being perfect or getting it right all the time. It has meant noticing and acknowledging patterns – even the ones I once repeated myself.
If this is your story too…
If you grew up in between conflict…
If you were exposed to addiction or violence…
If you repeated patterns before you recognised them…
If you became a young mum…
If motherhood became your whole identity because you were determined that your children would never feel unseen…
If you’ve parented through separation…
You are not failing, you are building something new without a blueprint, and that takes courage and time.
Breaking generational patterns doesn’t mean you were never affected by them.
It means you become aware of them – and choose differently.
You are allowed to parent in a way that feels safe to you, you are allowed to set boundaries, and you are allowed to exist outside of motherhood.
Breaking generational patterns isn’t loud; sometimes it’s simply this:
A mother who has rebuilt more than once.
A mother who chooses awareness and change over repetition.
A mother who refuses to let her children live in the middle of adult pain.
Take home
Today, I write this as both a mother and a therapist.
I don’t speak about it as someone who has it all figured out, I speak about it as someone who has lived it – who has rebuilt more than once, doubted herself, made mistakes, and someone who has had to sit and face uncomfortable truths and choose differently anyway.
Healing hasn’t been linear for me; it has been layered, humbling, and at times painful. And I can say, genuinely, that I am in a better place than I have ever been. Not because my life is perfect, or because things aren’t hard anymore – but because I understand myself. I understand my patterns, I set boundaries I once avoided, and I no longer live in survival. There is more stability internally, even when my life externally shifts.
If you’re parenting while carrying your own unresolved experiences, I see you. I know how heavy that can feel. You can love your children deeply and still need support. You can be resilient and still feel overwhelmed. You can be capable and still have wounds that deserve attention.
Sometimes the bravest thing a mother can do is admit that her healing matters just as much as her children’s well-being. Because when she heals, the impact reaches far beyond her.
Jenna x
