Maybe I uttered the words for the first time in my 15th week of pregnancy, when I was admitted to the hospital for an IV drip of anti-nausea medication because I had vomited six times in the past 24 hours and couldn’t keep down water.
Or maybe I said them on the second or third day of my failed induction, as I labored all day and all night toward the C-section I’d hoped to avoid, with no progress beyond 5cm of cervical dilation.
It’s possible I first spoke them to my husband after another endless night of triple-feeding our baby – nursing him, laying him across my lap and feeding him a bottle of donor milk as I hooked myself up to a breast pump, and then feeding him that pitiful supply in a different bottle.
I know I said them as recently as last week, when a fever kept my now toddler home from daycare and thus me from the work I was already desperately behind on.
“I can’t do this any more.”
Then, of course, with neither the care of my child nor the earning of my paycheck up for debate, I did what I have always done: I kept right on doing it.
•••
Parenting in the US can feel like an endless endurance test; like running a relay race but realizing, as you approach each mile at which there should be a baton handoff, that there is no one waiting there to take the baton. So on you run, cramping and exhausted, in shoes and a body that were only meant to go the distance of your portion of the race. In lieu of a gold medal or a bouquet of flowers, you will be awarded (fingers crossed!) the survival, safety and relative wellbeing of your children.
In a country with no paid leave, no federal diaper-assistance programs, no universal childcare or healthcare and a maternal mortality rate that may lead you to believe that our government is hunting parents for sport, raising healthy and thriving children becomes possible for fewer and fewer of us as the wage gap grows.
•••
The Covid-19 pandemic brought about the first “I can’t do this any more” moment for many parents I know. Homeschooling children while working full time, while dodging or recovering from an airborne virus: even in a culture that supports families and parents (which ours is not), and even for families with plentiful resources and a robust network of non-judgmental support (which the vast majority of us lack) this would be rolling a boulder up a hill.
Now, imagine: the boulder also refuses to sleep.
“In 2021, my family got Covid,” says Margo Steines, the author of the 2023 memoir Brutalities. “And due to attempts to quarantine, I ended up caring for my then baby alone for about 10 days as we both got progressively sicker. I have chronic health issues and became extremely ill. I was also working – my partner has a small business that only makes money when he works, and he had been quarantined for a week already, so I didn’t feel like I could take any time off of remote professoring.”
“It was a lot,” Steines remembers. “Looking back, I don’t fully understand how I did it. My kid was screaming nonstop except when she was nursing, and I was too weak to hold her. I had students emailing me about, like, being late on an assignment, and I was spending a lot of the days in the bathroom with my laptop on one knee and my baby kind of crammed between my other knee and the computer. It felt almost funny, it was so absurd, and I was in so much pain and needed rest so badly, and I couldn’t ask anyone for help, because we were contagious.
“The reality that I had to keep going – that I had to make food to feed my kid, that I had to eat and drink water so that I could keep making milk for her, that I wouldn’t take medication because I didn’t want it passing through my milk, that I still had to change diapers and haul the trash out to the curb – felt crushing. I was so, so sick and I wanted so badly to be taken care of, and the reality that no one was coming, that I was the adult and I just had to show up for all of it, felt claustrophobic.”
For my friend Shai – though she had long borne perpetual witness to her country’s justice system ignoring the murders of young Black boys like the ones she was raising – the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s killer was her “I can’t do this any more” moment. “I thought: Can I really raise kids in this country?” she remembers. “But it’s not like I can just up and move. What am I supposed to do?”
Now, many years and many murders and many acquitted white gunmen later, she has pushed through this feeling many times over. Her sons kept growing up, while Trayvon and so many others did not, and she kept working and parenting and telling them to be careful – to smile and be overly polite, to be aware of their surroundings, to keep her on speed dial and never drive even five miles above the speed limit and be careful, be careful, be careful.
“I look at my boys, I love on them, I tell myself: ‘You are doing it,’” she says.
“I think this happens in small moments all the time,” writes Amanda Montei, whose 2023 book Touched Out examines the physicality and lack of autonomy implicit in motherhood. “I know now that my body and mind reach limit points when I’m dealing with troubling or frightening breaking news, when I’m working too much, or when I’m otherwise disconnected from my body or from rest. Obviously there are also times when my kids test my limits, but I’m better at recognizing the difference between their needs and my needs, and when those are in conflict, I can at least see that as the problem.”
While normalization of these moments of rock-bottom hopelessness – the reassurance from your social circles and from the media that what you feel is common and to be expected – can help, what we actually need is to go deeper than that “me, too”. What we need is an offering of access points into social movements that would use this despair as tinder, as fuel, as activation to care for one another through structural change.
“When I shared the hardest parts of motherhood in the early years of parenting, usually among other mothers, I was mostly met with humor or a kind of ‘yeah, we all feel that way’ or ‘welcome to the club’ mentality,” Montei tells me. “I can remember not long after I had my second child, another mother laughed when I shared some struggle I was having and told me I was a ‘real parent’ now, because it’s so much harder to have two children. It felt so alienating. I got the message that I was just an amateur who needed to figure things out on my own. Now, it’s clear to me that this idea feeds into a more general normalization of maternal suffering, but also this idea that mothers are tough athletes who overcome the impossible.”
•••
What if, rather than telling one another we’re heroes, rather than responding to the bid for human connection of ‘I can’t do this any more’ with ‘Yes, you can!’ (or worse: ‘Just wait, you think this is hard?’), we reminded each other that our lives are not just naturally unbearable or impossible, but they are made so by the powers that be?
“Being connected to a community, especially a community that was focused more on witnessing each other as people, rather than exclusively and intensively focusing on our children, would have given me a greater sense of solidarity,” says Montei. “Over time, I’ve learned that allowing myself to be myself, complete with feelings and limits and boundaries, also makes my children feel happier and more loved. It also gives them permission to be more complex and nuanced humans themselves.”
Our children, faced with a climate crisis, a gun violence epidemic, a widening chasm between the uber-wealthy’s quality of life and everyone else’s, and a bleak dearth of social support systems, will surely come up against their own “I can’t do this any more” moments.
Hopefully, beyond the dark jokes they’ll make to one another and the work they’ll do to exorcize it from their bodies, the “I can’t do this any more” moments will radicalize them. They’ll remember ours, if we can be honest and clear with them, and they’ll be curious about the world we can build together, in which this is not a mantra we carry alone through our days.
