In partnership with
There are days when parenting feels like a steady climb — messy, yes, but manageable. And then there are days that knock the wind out of you before you even get your coffee down.
This last last Monday was the second kind.
The baby slept horribly. He woke up soaked, freezing, and furious. I didn’t even try to get him dressed; he was too angry to sit still. Just a diaper on a tiny person who already felt betrayed by the universe before 7 a.m.
I took my meds. Made my coffee. Started breakfast.
A routine that usually feels like hitting the “load basic functioning” button.
And then I smelled it.
He’d exploded.
Of course he had.
If you’ve ever parented a lightning-fast baby you know the drill: we do standing changes because lying down is not an option for someone who has places to be. I got halfway through one wipe when he took two determined steps forward, grabbed my full mug of coffee, and — while staring directly into my soul — tipped the entire contents onto my phone.
And something in me broke.
Not gently. Not gracefully.
Not in the ways we like to imagine “regulated parenting” looks.
I screamed.
I threw my phone into my sawdust-covered kitchen (renovation season is the ninth circle of parenting).
I threw the mug.
And then the tray that was now swimming in coffee too.
My whole body was vibrating — with overstimulation, sleep deprivation, hormones, ADHD, and the way motherhood sometimes asks you to hold far more than one nervous system can realistically carry.
And the kicker?
It had been twenty minutes since I’d taken my meds.
My regulation hadn’t even finished loading.
In that moment, I knew I couldn’t stay in the room. I couldn’t clean. I couldn’t parent. I couldn’t do anything except prevent myself from making the moment worse.
So I scooped up my still-naked, very confused baby and ran him upstairs to Alex in the shower. A handoff. A pause button. A mercy.
When I came back down, expecting another disaster, I found something entirely different.
My eldest.
Quietly working through the chaos I had created.
He had already found my coffee-soaked phone and placed it carefully on a towel.
He had laid paper towel on the floor to soak up the mess.
He was looking for the mug.
He was being gentle with the space in the way I hadn’t been able to.
He is six.
Six.
And he handled the moment with more steady presence than I could grasp at the time.
When I mentioned the ottoman cleaner, he sprinted to get it — eager to help, eager to fix, eager to soften the moment for me.
Eventually everything was cleaned.
My mug wasn’t broken.
My body settled.
My brain caught up.
And I apologized — sincerely and fully — because my reaction had been much bigger than the moment deserved, and because he deserved to hear that from me.
Later that day, when he got home from school, he brought it up again:
“Mom, it’s REALLY impressive the mug didn’t break.
Also… don’t worry. I didn’t tell anyone about your tantrum.”
And I could have cried right there.
Because here’s the truth I keep learning:
Kids don’t need perfect parents.
They need honest ones.
Repairing ones.
Human ones.
The kind who come back after the storm and say, “I’m sorry. That wasn’t about you.”
The kind who show them what it looks like when a nervous system crashes and what it looks like to rebuild connection afterward.
We talk so much about protecting our children from our messy moments, but sometimes those moments are where the deepest lessons live:
that adults feel overwhelmed too,
that emotions aren’t dangerous,
that rupture isn’t the end of a relationship,
that repair is powerful,
and that even when we fall apart, love remains the constant.
That morning didn’t make me a bad mom.
It made me a human mom navigating too little sleep, too much noise, too many stressors, and not nearly enough bandwidth.
And my son’s response didn’t make him “parentified.”
It made him a child who understands empathy, who instinctively knew I needed a soft landing, the same way I’ve given him hundreds of soft landings before.
That’s the quiet beauty of family:
we take turns holding each other up.
That day he held me.
Tomorrow I’ll hold him.
And the day after that?
We’ll probably be cleaning coffee off something again.
But we’ll be doing it together.
Talk soon,
Tara
CEO of Chaos & Co.
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