Someone on TikTok recently commented,
“Be a better parent.”
Just three words. Simple. Sharp. Careless.
And I wish it were that simple.
I won’t sit here and deny my mistakes.
I won’t pretend I didn’t fall apart.
When my mental health collapsed, I made choices I wish I could undo. I caused pain—real pain—and I carry the weight of that every day.
That guilt doesn’t fade.
It lives in my chest like a bruise I press on, over and over again, to remind myself of what I lost… and what I’m still fighting to restore.
But what people like that commenter don’t see, what the system so often refuses to see, is the fight that came after the fall.
The hours spent in therapy.
The nights crying and writing and rebuilding piece by piece.
The effort to make amends, to show up, to heal.
The never-ending, exhausting journey of trying again.
Because being a parent doesn’t mean you don’t break.
It just means you break quietly.
It means the focus isn’t on your healing, it’s on your children.
It means every stumble, every flaw, every crack becomes a risk assessment.
The truth is: anyone can have a breakdown.
Anyone can fall apart when life and trauma catch up to them.
But if you’re a parent when that happens, the judgment is immediate, the scrutiny unforgiving, and the road back? So much harder.
There’s this unspoken rule that parents must be perfect.
That the second you have children, you must never be vulnerable, never be human, never fall.
But life doesn’t stop just because you have a child.
Your past doesn’t vanish.
Your pain doesn’t pause.
Sometimes, a childhood you’ve tried to bury comes back swinging.
And sometimes, you’re still figuring out how to be okay when the world expects you to raise someone else.
And here’s the cruelest part:
By the time a parent begins to truly heal, sometimes the opportunity to be a parent is already gone.
The system has moved on.
The records are written.
The judgments made.
No space for growth. No credit for change.
You become a file.
Not a person.
Not a mother or father doing the work to be better.
Just a risk, frozen in time.
And then begins a second battle, this time, not to survive, but to reunite.
To prove you’ve changed to a system that rarely believes in change.
So no… it’s not as simple as “be a better parent.”
Sometimes being a better parent starts with being a broken person doing the hard work to become whole again.
And that work deserves compassion, not condemnation.
~ The Girl Speaks ~
thegirlspeaks.uk 