Anxiety & Motherhood: Amplified, Unfiltered

For as long as I can remember, I’ve lived with anxiety. Not the kind that crippled me or derailed my day-to-day life, and not something that ever stopped me from functioning or moving forward, but a quieter, persistent presence that always sat somewhere in the background, simmering just beneath the surface.

It was manageable. Easy enough to rationalize, and easy enough to live alongside.

Motherhood is what turned the volume up. That’s when it became impossible to ignore and crept loudly into my day-to-day life.

Long before I became a parent, anxiety had already made itself known. I can trace it back to being a kid, lying awake at night, worrying about things that felt far too big for someone that age to carry. I remember moments of waiting, imagining worst-case scenarios, quietly rehearsing loss before I had any real understanding of what it meant. At the time, I didn’t have language for it. I just assumed this was how everyone’s mind worked. I was that kid that didn’t enjoy sleeping away from home when my parents traveled because I guess in hindsight, I had a “slight” attachment to them.

As I grew older, that low-level anxiety simply folded itself into my personality. I was driven, prepared, responsible, always thinking ahead. On the outside, it looked like ambition and independence. On the inside, it was vigilance, control, and a constant scanning for what could go wrong so I could prevent it before it ever happened.

And then I became a mother.

Motherhood didn’t create my anxiety, but it amplified it in ways I wasn’t prepared for. Suddenly, the stakes felt unbearable. I wasn’t just responsible for myself anymore, I was responsible for another human being. One I loved more fiercely than I knew was possible, and the world no longer felt abstract or theoretical. It felt sharp, unpredictable, and full of things that could hurt him.

My anxiety shifted from being in the background, just humming, to something incredibly loud, persistent, and harder to reason with. Long drives on the highway in bad weather (we live in Northern Alberta, so winter persists and the roads can be gnarly), illness, accidents, and bullying to name a few. The scenarios didn’t feel dramatic; they felt realistic. My brain wasn’t inventing fears out of thin air, it was responding to the reality that bad things do happen, and now I had far more to lose. I was a mom now, and I SHOULD be this worried for my child’s wellbeing.

What made it tricky is that none of this looked obvious from the outside. I was still functioning, still working, still parenting, and still showing up in my life. But internally, the mental load was exhausting. Anxiety has a way of sneaking into sleep, into quiet moments, into the pockets of my day, even when everything appears “fine.”

For a long time, I tried to manage my anxiety the way many of us do: therapy, exercise, supplements, meditation — all the things you’re “supposed” to try first. And they helped to an extent. What this pivot made clear was that managing my symptoms wasn’t the same as addressing the root. I had slowed down enough to recognize that anxiety had gone from a background noise to a loud-in-your-face alarm, and, one I was tired of living around.

Through therapy, I started connecting the dots. Anxiety wasn’t something that suddenly appeared when I became a mother. It had been there all along, quietly shaping how I moved through the world. Motherhood didn’t cause it, but instead, it magnified it. Even the early postpartum period — those hazy, emotional baby-blues days I brushed off at the time — now feel like part of a much longer thread. Pretending otherwise wasn’t serving me anymore.

One of the hardest realizations was accepting that I might need support beyond coping strategies. I put that off for a long time, mostly because I didn’t want to resort to medication right away. Which is ironic, considering I’ll take Advil without hesitation for a headache, but the idea of SSRIs felt uncertain, embarrassing, and strangely like a personal failure. There’s a subtle pressure, especially for women, to prove we can handle things on our own; to muscle through, normalize discomfort, and keep going instead of asking whether this level of strain is actually necessary.

When my therapist reframed medication not as a fix, but as a way to turn the volume down, something finally clicked. The anxiety doesn’t disappear, and life doesn’t become risk-free, but the noise quiets enough that it no longer runs the show. Enough space opens up to be present, to breathe, and to actually enjoy what’s in front of you instead of constantly bracing for what might happen next.

Talking about this feels important. Anxiety, especially in motherhood, is still something we tiptoe around, because we normalize exhaustion and that feeling of overwhelm, but we rarely talk honestly about how deeply fear can embed itself into daily life, or how quietly it can shrink joy if left unchecked.

I don’t want to look back on my years as a mother and realize they were overshadowed by anxiety and constant worry. I don’t want fear about what could happen to rob me of what is happening — the ordinary, meaningful moments that make up these years. I want to be gentler with myself, with my son, and with my husband, and to actually enjoy the life we’re building together instead of bracing for disaster.

And I don’t want my son absorbing or sensing my anxiety as if it’s normal, or growing up thinking constant worry is just part of love. Or worse, that his mother is quietly unhinged. (Humour aside, that one matters to me more than I can explain.)

This pivot has been about more than career or identity. It’s been about paying attention to what my body and mind have been asking for, sometimes loudly, sometimes subtly, for years. It’s been about choosing support over stoicism, honesty over performance, and health over the illusion of control.

I don’t share this because I have it all figured out. I share it because normalizing these conversations matters, much like i have openly talked about my experience with miscarriages. Anxiety doesn’t make you weak, seeking support doesn’t mean you’ve failed, and motherhood doesn’t require silent suffering as a prerequisite.

If anything, this season has taught me that strength often looks like listening sooner, asking for help earlier, and allowing yourself to live with a little more peace instead of constantly preparing for loss.

And that, for me, has been one of the most important shifts of this entire pivot.