Invisible Motherhood

I had the strangest dream the other night. Honestly, I felt somewhere between amused, embarrassed, and a little bit sad when I woke up. And I’ve definitely never had a dream like this before.

I had a dream that I was toilet paper. Inside a (clean) toilet.

I know. This is already weird. Bear with me.

The dream itself was very brief. There I was, being my toilet paper self in the bowl of clean water. All of a sudden, someone (I don’t know who) walked up to the toilet and started to pour this thick pink chemical onto me.

They were trying to make me dissolve. Disappear. Be gone forever.

I woke up before anything happened. That was the whole dream.

The humor and embarrassment parts are fairly transparent here, and I’m not afraid to be a little bit (or a lot?) foolish in sharing this.

But the sad part?

It actually kind of made sense. Just the night before, something happened where I wasn’t feeling “seen.” I told my husband and daughter that I was feeling invisible and had a need to be acknowledged.

Every human on the planet needs to know that they matter. I was having a “low” night.

And that’s how it showed up in my dream; literally experiencing someone not “seeing” me, to the point where they were intending to dissolve my very existence.

To be clear, I know I matter. I don’t share this to worry anyone. It was a circumstance-specific situation that has since passed, not to mention, I’m blessed to be able to think of more than a small handful of friends and family members who very much want me around. I’m truly okay.

And still…

We, particularly as mothers, do a lot of invisible work. And unless we say something, the mental load – the whole lot of it – stays hidden in the category of things people can take for granted.

Because we let them.

All this to say, the situation—and the weird dream—got me thinking. Am I showing up for myself? Am I communicating my needs? Where am I on healthy boundaries? Do I say yes too much to others, only to have “no’s” left over for myself because I’m too tapped out?

It’s no one else’ job to fix this. It’s ours, mamas (and/or anyone else who carries more than their share of the load).

There comes a time when we need to use our voice and say, “Hey, I could use a hand over here. This is too much for me to keep managing alone. I need to know that I matter.”

And then, relentlessly – compassionately, but relentlessly – we don’t give up expressing and pursuing support, visibility, and acknowledgment. Whatever it is we need, we keep seeking it, communicating our truth along the way to all who will listen. And if they won’t listen, we seek support and find someone who will.

My truth is this: I know I matter. And I know you do, too.

Invisible motherhood doesn’t need to be a thing. Empowered parenting is where we go, and it begins with this: “I have a need to be seen.”

And we stand up and say it out loud, using the voice of someone who truly knows her worth, and speaking on behalf of all the others who haven’t.