she’ll never have to recover from me.

you know what the craziest shit is about being a single mom?

there’s no crash. no breakdown. no dramatic spiral. no soft-launch of a mental health hiatus.

there’s just bottles to wash, court paperwork, tuition bills, emails, and someone very small who needs me to be fully present while my entire nervous system is actively glitching. there are tears—hers, mine—but they don’t even get the dignity of a full breakdown. they just get wiped. mid-sentence. mid-midterm.

people think this must be the hardest thing in the world. and yeah, it is. but not for the reasons they think.

it’s not the logistics. it’s not even the loneliness. it’s the fact that there’s no room to fall apart. not even in private. no one’s coming. no one’s holding the other end. it’s just me, and the job, and the baby, and the bills.

so i write.

not because i’m spiraling. not because i want to be witnessed. but because if i can’t unravel my life, i’ll bleed into language instead. if i can’t scream, i’ll structure it. line breaks. syntax. clean sentences holding feral emotion. something i can shape that won’t slice her open.

because she’s watching. and being her mom didn’t just change my schedule—it rewired me. it made me metabolize grief differently. not because i’m healed. because i had to function.

she didn’t ask to be born into my aftermath. so i made a quiet, permanent vow: she will never have to shrink to survive me. she won’t learn survival by watching me suffer. she won’t flinch at my rage or carry versions of it in her bloodstream.

i won’t be another storm she has to outgrow.

so no—i didn’t soften. i transformed.

motherhood stripped me bare. it handed me a mirror and said: fix it or pass it on. and i’m choosing not to pass it on.

she’s good. my dog’s barely avoided a felony. and i’m somehow getting a low-grade A in law school with a teething baby, three hours of sleep, and the emotional consistency of a haunted victorian white lady in a corset.

i’m not okay in the way people want to hear. but i’m here.

and i’m becoming someone she’ll never have to recover from.

which honestly might be the most healed i’ve ever been.