I'm mothering through this madness, and I don't know how much more I can take

• I'm a mom, and parenting through a pandemic, a formula shortage, and school shootings is too much.
• I yearn for the days when we didn't have to deal with all of this while parenting.

"I'm checking in," my friend texted, as she routinely does. "How are you today?"

There's a small part of me that marvels at how well we've adapted to this pandemic-borne distance and isolation; how, as parents, we've found a way to toe the line — through the sleepless nights, the balancing of careers and kids, and responsibilities and relationships, all while we watch every pillar of safety and solace crumble at our feet.

The rest of me, though, isn't sanguine in the slightest.

"Honestly?" I reply. "I want to walk into the ocean, never to be seen again."

I'm not OK. If you're a mother, I'm betting you know exactly how I feel.

Every morning, I wake up and beg the universe to prove me wrong — to show me that, no, things can't get worse than this, that the worst is over, and that we can only go uphill from here. But like clockwork, my fears are realized in all manner of ways, and by sundown, I've seen what I already knew I would: Things can not only get worse but do, will, and already have.

I wish we could go back in time

So when that inevitable tomorrow comes, and I face that barrage of microtrauma upon macrotrauma — such as another classroom COVID-19 exposure, scraped knees, senseless killings, or juice-box-fueled tantrums — I find myself almost laughably yearning for the days of yore, for yesterday, even, when we didn't have to reckon with increasing financial debt, a deadly mutating virus, pervasive social injustice, a million COVID-19 deaths, and the government's unrelenting attempts to control the comings and goings inside our bodies.

Those were the days, I think. If only we could go back — to when there were 19 more children alive in Uvalde, Texas, than there are today.

But we can't. So suddenly, without warning, I find myself in the aftermath, deafeningly silent, reconciling this brutal atrocity with the overwhelming gratitude I feel knowing my own babies are safe at this moment, tucked under my wings and into their beds; knowing full well that it could've been my children — but that, at least this time, it wasn't.

I want to keep my children safe

I remember those early days of motherhood when I was granted some measure of control; when my babies were safe at home, strapped to my body, swaddled and milk-drunk as my beating heart thrummed the cadence that lulled them to sleep.

But I've learned in real time just how fleeting those moments are, and that long before I might ever be ready, I'm charged with sending them off into the world to discover moment by moment what the act of living entails.

I want desperately to protect my children until I no longer can. But there's no pause button, so I can access neither a reprieve from the madness nor a moment to collect my thoughts, to ask myself in earnest: What do I do? Do I send the kids to school today? Will they be safe?

And it's my privilege to exhale at the end of the day, when those babies of mine, ragged and dirty, track their muddy footprints across my floors. Imagine that. Imagine knowing that the almost insurmountable trauma, the unrelenting fatigue, and the desperation we as mothers feel is but a pipe dream to the dozens of parents in Uvalde who'd give everything they have for the monotony of such a thing.

I feel so lost as I lie in the wake. In truth, I don't know how much more I can take. And in those darkest hours, I wonder, have I made a mistake?