Your Highest Highs and Your Lowest Lows: The Truth Nobody Posts

Your Highest Highs and Your Lowest Lows: The Truth Nobody Puts on the Baby Shower Card

Why motherhood is the most beautiful, terrifying, hilarious, heartbreaking ride you will ever take

The Day My Sister Told Me the Truth

After locking myself out of my sister's house — with my one-month-old baby lying on the couch inside — I stood on the front step in a state of panic that I can only describe as "new mother meets home invasion, except you are both the victim and the burglar."

My sister, once we had resolved the situation (and stopped laughing, because what else can you do?), looked at me with the kind of calm that only a woman who has already survived the newborn stage can possess, and said: "Children will bring you your highest highs and your lowest lows."

At the time, I thought she was being dramatic. My baby was one month old. My highest high at that point was that he had slept for three consecutive hours. My lowest low was that I had just locked him inside a house while I stood outside in my pajamas at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday. Surely, I thought, it could not get much more extreme than this.

Reader, it got much more extreme than this.

That single sentence has become one of the truest things anyone has ever said to me. It is the kind of wisdom that sounds like a greeting card but lives like a battle scar. Because motherhood does not deal in moderate emotions. It deals in the kind of love that makes you weep at a school concert and the kind of frustration that makes you seriously consider whether it is possible to run away to a small island where no one knows your name or asks you what is for dinner.

The Highs: The Moments That Ruin You in the Best Way

Let me tell you about the highs, because they deserve to go first.

The first time your baby looks at you — really looks at you, with recognition and something that might be love — and you realise that you would walk through fire for this tiny, unreasonable creature who has not slept through the night once and has ruined every piece of clothing you own.

The sound of your toddler's uncontrollable laughter. Not the polite giggle of an adult but the full-body, tear-streaming, snot-producing laughter that happens when you make a silly face or pretend to fall down. That laughter is the purest sound in the universe, and it can rescue you from the worst day of your life.

The moment your child does something kind without being prompted. Shares a toy. Comforts a friend. Stands up for someone smaller. And you think: "I did not ruin them. They are going to be okay."

The pride that swells in your chest when they accomplish something hard — whether it is riding a bike, reading their first sentence, scoring a goal, or simply getting through a difficult day. You feel it in your whole body, this fierce, almost painful pride, and you understand for the first time what your own parents felt watching you.

The late-night conversations with teenagers that happen in the car, in the dark, when they suddenly decide to talk after weeks of monosyllabic responses. Those conversations are worth every slammed door, every eye roll, every "you just don't understand."

These moments are not rare. They happen all the time, tucked between the chaos and the routine. But they hit differently when you are a parent. They hit like the sun breaking through clouds, and for a moment, everything makes sense.

The Lows: The Parts Nobody Warns You About

And then there are the lows.

The lows are not just hard. They are the kind of hard that lives in your body — in the pit of your stomach, in the tension between your shoulders, in the ache behind your eyes when you have been crying but need to hold it together because the children are watching.

The exhaustion of the early years, when sleep becomes a distant memory and you cannot remember who you were before you became someone's mother. The identity crisis that no one talks about, the one where you look in the mirror and wonder where you went.

The guilt. Always the guilt. Guilt that you yelled. Guilt that you were not patient enough. Guilt that you went back to work. Guilt that you did not go back to work. Guilt that you served frozen nuggets for dinner three nights in a row. Guilt that you checked your phone when your child was talking to you. Guilt that is so pervasive and so constant that it becomes the background noise of your life.

The fear. The bone-deep terror that something could happen to your child — in a world that seems increasingly dangerous and unpredictable. The anxiety that keeps you checking the monitor, that makes you hold their hand too tightly in parking lots, that wakes you at 3 a.m. when your teenager is not home yet.

The heartbreak of watching your child suffer and not being able to fix it. The friend who excluded them. The teacher who was unfair. The diagnosis that changed everything. The first heartbreak. The struggles that you would give anything to take from them and carry yourself.

The loneliness. Even surrounded by people — by children who need you, by a partner who loves you, by friends who check in — there is a particular kind of loneliness that comes with the relentless responsibility of motherhood. The feeling that no one truly sees the weight you are carrying.

These lows are real. They are valid. And they do not make you a bad mother. They make you a human one.

Holding Both at Once

Here is what my sister's wisdom really teaches us: the highs and the lows are not separate experiences. They are the same experience, viewed from different angles. The love that makes the highs so high is the same love that makes the lows so low. You cannot have one without the other.

Dr. Susan David, a psychologist at Harvard Medical School and author of Emotional Agility, writes about the importance of "emotional granularity" — the ability to experience and name a wide range of emotions without judging them as good or bad. Mothers, she argues, are constantly navigating emotional complexity: joy and exhaustion in the same moment, pride and worry in the same breath, love and frustration in the same sentence.

The problem is not that we feel these things. The problem is that our culture tells us we should only feel the good ones. Social media is full of highlight reels. Baby shower cards are full of gentle platitudes. And the message, subtle but persistent, is that good mothers are happy mothers — that if you are struggling, you must be doing it wrong.

You are not doing it wrong. You are doing something incredibly hard, incredibly important, and incredibly human. And the full range of what you feel — every high, every low, and every bewildering moment in between — is evidence of how much you love.

What Helps

So how do we survive the roller coaster? How do we ride the highs without clinging to them and weather the lows without drowning in them?

We talk about it. We tell the truth to other mothers and we listen when they tell the truth to us. Not the curated version. The real one. The one where you admit that you locked the baby inside the house, or that you cried in the minivan, or that you had a day so hard you were not sure you could do another one.

We lower the bar. Not the bar for how much we love our children — that bar stays high. But the bar for how perfectly we execute the role. Good enough is good enough. Research from Dr. Donald Winnicott, the paediatrician who coined the term "good enough mother" in the 1950s, tells us that children do not need perfect parents. They need parents who show up, who try, who repair when they mess up, and who love them through all of it.

We take care of ourselves. Not as an afterthought, not as a luxury, but as a necessity. Because the roller coaster does not stop, and you need fuel to ride it. Whatever fills your cup — sleep, movement, friendship, solitude, therapy, a really good book — protect it fiercely.

And we remember that the lows are temporary. Even the ones that feel permanent. Even the ones that take our breath away. The sun comes back. The child forgives. The morning comes. And with it, another chance at one of those highs that makes the whole messy, magnificent thing worthwhile.

Dig Deeper: The Research Behind the Real Talk

David, S. (2016). Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life. Avery. — Essential reading on navigating complex emotions.

Winnicott, D.W. (1973). The Child, the Family, and the Outside World. Penguin. — The original "good enough mother" research.

Brown, B. (2012). Daring Greatly. Avery. — On vulnerability, shame, and the courage to show up.

Canadian Mental Health Association (cmha.ca) — Resources for maternal mental health and emotional well-being.

Postpartum Support International (postpartum.net) — Support for mothers experiencing perinatal mood disorders.

Let's Chat

This one is all about your stories, and we want to hear them:

What has been your highest high as a parent? Your lowest low? What is the truest thing anyone ever told you about motherhood? What moment surprised you — the one you did not see coming? If you could tell a brand-new mother one honest thing, what would it be?

Share below. Because every time we tell the truth about motherhood — the whole truth, not just the pretty parts — we give another mother permission to exhale.

With love and an unlocked door,Elizabeth

Disclaimer: This blog is for general information and coaching purposes only. It is not therapy or medical advice. If you are experiencing persistent feelings of hopelessness, severe anxiety, or thoughts of self-harm, please reach out to a mental health professional or your healthcare provider.