Nope, this is just hell. Sorry. I wish I could say it would get better and there's a bright side, but this is just fucking hell. But it'll get better. And there will be bright sides again. Maybe not today, though.

I don't care if you have an army of sitters and family, four little kids suck. I don't care if you only have one, having a baby in the hospital is a nightmare. Doing both? At once? While staying vertical? Does Breaking Mom have a medal of honor, because I think you fucking qualify.

You can do it on your own though. You know this because you have been. Eight months is NOT enough time to start judging yourself. You barely know which end is up in eight months. Eight months is the flounder until you take a breath of air time. You. Are. Doing. This. Ever day. Every day you get up and you do it. Look at what you're doing. It's fucking INCREDIBLE.

I don't like to talk about our foster placements often, but I've had two that really speak to this. Both were okay-ish parents. Both could have gotten their kids back easily and with minimal effort. They just....didn't. Why? Fuck me, I have no clue. But they just decided to not do it. That's a decision you're NOT making every day. It's a decision you wouldn't even consider. It wouldn't cross your mind. So any time you feel like you're not doing a good enough job, like you're not meeting some unimaginable standard, remember that. If I took your kids and said you had to belly crawl through a half mile of raw sewage to get them back, you wouldn't think twice. You'd be stripping down before the flag dropped.

You love your kids. You're doing your best by them. Maybe your best is shadowed in sad and hard and I wish it was different right now. Maybe that's who you are. But your children weren't guaranteed pristine robots for parents. They got people. Stupid, human, broken, real people who go through hard times and show their work through them. You're not doing a disservice by being your real, human self around your kids. If anything, you're showing them through example how everything can be awful and you can still go on and move forward. They are always watching you, soaking it in. They might not be making sense of it yet, they might not have words for it yet, but they are watching. You are showing them how to do one of the hardest things anyone has to do, and you're doing it with grace. You should be so incredibly proud of yourself.

But it doesn't make it better. I know you just want to roll over and have it be different tomorrow morning. For that, I am so, so sorry. You're totally entitled to want, to grieve, to rage, to cry, to feel all the feelings. It's just hell. It just is.