You Disappeared Somewhere Between All the Doing and All the Giving
There is a moment many women describe in therapy. They are standing in the kitchen, or lying awake at 2am, or sitting in their car before walking into the house, and they feel it. Not sadness exactly. Not anger. Something closer to exhaustion so deep it has no name. A weight that never fully lifts, even on the good days.
If you know that feeling, this is for you.
What Is the Mental Load
The mental load is the invisible, unrelenting work of managing a household, a family, and everyone in it. It is not the doing. It is the knowing, the tracking, the anticipating, the remembering. It is knowing that the pediatrician appointment needs to be scheduled, that the permission slip is due Friday, that you are almost out of milk, that your mother has not called back and you should check on her, that your partner's work event is next week and you need to find a babysitter.
It lives in your head constantly. It does not clock out.
And for most women, it is entirely invisible to everyone around them.
Why It Falls on Women
This is not about blame. It is about patterns so deeply ingrained we rarely stop to question them. From a young age most women are socialized to notice, to anticipate, to care. We become the default managers of domestic and emotional life not because we chose it consciously but because it was handed to us so gradually we did not see it happening.
By the time most women arrive in therapy they have been carrying this weight for years. They are exhausted in a way that sleep does not fix. They love their families deeply and also feel quietly resentful in ways that confuse and shame them. They wonder what is wrong with them.
Nothing is wrong with them. They are simply carrying too much alone.
What It Does to You
The mental load does not just make you tired. Over time it erodes something deeper. Your sense of self. Your ability to be present. Your capacity for joy. Your connection to your own needs and desires.
When you are always in manager mode it becomes very hard to just be. To be a partner rather than a logistics coordinator. To be a person rather than a role. To remember who you are outside of everything you are responsible for.
Many women describe feeling invisible inside their own lives. Like they disappeared somewhere between all the doing and all the giving and they are not quite sure how to find their way back.
The Fair Play Framework
Eve Rodsky's book Fair Play offers one of the most practical and validating frameworks for understanding and rebalancing the mental load in a partnership. Rather than focusing on tasks alone she looks at the full cycle of conceiving, planning, and executing every responsibility in a household and asks a simple but radical question. Who is holding this and is that fair.
The book offers a concrete system for having conversations with your partner that many couples have never been able to have before. Not fights. Conversations. About what is invisible. About what is assumed. About what needs to change.
It is worth reading. It is also worth noting that reading it alone, without a space to process what comes up, can sometimes bring things to the surface that feel overwhelming. That is where therapy can help.
When the Mental Load Becomes Too Heavy
Sometimes the answer is not just redistribution. Sometimes the weight of everything you have been carrying has taken a deeper toll. On your sense of self. On your relationships. On your mental health.
If you find yourself chronically exhausted, resentful, disconnected, or quietly wondering who you are outside of all your roles, that is worth paying attention to. Not as a sign that something is wrong with you. As a sign that you have been giving everything to everyone else for too long and it is time to give something back to yourself.
Therapy is one of the only spaces where someone is focused entirely on you. Not what you need to do next. Not what everyone else needs from you. Just you. How you are actually doing. What you actually need. Who you actually are beneath all the roles you carry.
You deserve that space.
A Note
If any of this resonated with you I would love to connect. You do not have to have it figured out before you reach out. You just have to be ready to stop carrying it alone.
March 25, 2026
Lyza Chin, LICSW
Therapist for Women in Massachusetts
Matrescence. You May Not Know the Word But You Know the Feeling.
There is a word that does not yet appear in most dictionaries. A word that thousands of women are only just discovering, often years after becoming mothers, and feeling an overwhelming sense of relief when they do.
That word is matrescence.
And if you have ever felt like becoming a mother changed you in ways you cannot fully explain, like you lost yourself somewhere in the process and have not quite found your way back, this word is for you.
What Is Matrescence
Matrescence describes the developmental transition a woman goes through when she becomes a mother. It was first coined by anthropologist Dana Raphael in 1973 and has been expanded upon by psychologist Aurelie Athan, who defines it as a passage that encompasses biological, emotional, social, and psychological transformation comparable in depth and significance to adolescence.
Just as adolescence marks the transition from child to adult, matrescence marks the transition from woman to mother. And just like adolescence it is profound, disorienting, and wildly underacknowledged.
The difference is that we expect adolescence to be hard. We give teenagers room to be confused and emotional and not quite themselves. We do not extend that same grace to new mothers. We expect them to be grateful, capable, and essentially unchanged except now with a baby.
That expectation is not just unrealistic. It is harmful.
What Matrescence Actually Feels Like
Women going through matrescence often describe a feeling that is hard to name. They love their child deeply. They also grieve something. Their former freedom. Their former identity. The version of themselves that existed before.
They feel like they are supposed to have it together and they do not. They feel guilty for missing their old life. They feel disconnected from their partner, their friends, themselves. They wonder if this is postpartum depression or just motherhood or something else entirely.
Often it is none of those things in isolation. Often it is matrescence. The profound and messy and completely normal process of becoming someone new while grieving who you were.
Some of the most common experiences include feeling like you do not recognize yourself anymore. Struggling to reconcile your identity before motherhood with who you are now. Feeling pressure to bounce back to your old self rather than integrate into your new one. Grieving your former autonomy, spontaneity, and sense of self even while loving your child. Feeling disconnected from your partner as you both navigate this transition differently. Wondering if you made the right choice even though you love your baby fiercely.
All of this is normal. None of it means something is wrong with you.
Why Having a Word for It Matters
When women discover the word matrescence something shifts. Not because the word fixes anything but because being named changes everything. It means this experience is real enough to have a word. It means other women have felt it too. It means you are not broken or ungrateful or a bad mother.
You are in a developmental transition. One that deserves acknowledgment, support, and time.
What Helps
Matrescence is not a disorder to be treated. It is a transition to be supported. And there are real things that help.
Community with other women who are going through it or have been through it. Permission to grieve what you have lost while embracing what you have gained. A partner who understands that you are both going through a transition and that it will look different for each of you. Time and space to figure out who you are now, not who you used to be and not just who your baby needs you to be, but who you actually are in this new chapter.
And sometimes therapy. Not because something is wrong with you but because having a space to untangle the grief from the love, to understand the identity shift, and to find your way back to yourself inside this new life is one of the most valuable things you can do for yourself and for your family.
A Note
If you are in the middle of matrescence and it feels overwhelming, isolating, or like you have completely lost yourself, I would love to connect. This is exactly the kind of work I do and I find it some of the most meaningful work there is.
You do not have to have it figured out. You just have to be ready to start finding your way back to yourself.
March 18, 2026
Lyza Chin, LICSW
Therapist for Women in Massachusetts
What Nobody Tells You About Becoming a Mother
You prepared for the baby. You read the books, attended the classes, washed the tiny clothes, and set up the nursery. You prepared for birth, for feeding, for the sleepless nights everyone warned you about.
What you may not have prepared for is everything else.
The parts that do not make it into the baby shower cards or the Instagram posts. The parts that are true and real and shared by so many new mothers and yet somehow never quite get said out loud.
This is me saying them out loud.
It Is One of the Biggest Adjustments of Your Life
Nothing fully prepares you for how much everything changes when you become a mother. Not just your schedule or your sleep or your body. Everything. Your sense of self. Your priorities. Your relationships. The way you move through the world.
It is not just a new role added onto your existing life. It is a reorganization of your entire life around this new person. And that reorganization, however wanted and however loved, is enormous. Giving yourself permission to acknowledge that is not ingratitude. It is honesty.
Your Relationship Will Change
One of the things women most often say they were not prepared for is how much having a baby changes their relationship with their partner. Suddenly you are not just two people navigating life together. You are two exhausted people trying to figure out how to keep a tiny human alive while also somehow staying connected to each other.
The division of labor shifts, often in ways that feel unequal and unspoken. Resentment can build quietly. Intimacy, emotional and physical, can feel distant. You may find yourself feeling more like roommates and co-parents than partners.
This does not mean your relationship is broken. It means you are both going through an enormous transition at the same time and neither of you has a roadmap. Talking about it, honestly and without blame, is one of the most important things you can do in this season. And sometimes having support to have those conversations makes all the difference.
Everyone Sees the Baby
This one is quiet but it matters. When you become a mother the attention shifts almost entirely to your baby. People ask how the baby is sleeping, how the baby is eating, how the baby is growing. They bring gifts for the baby. They want to hold the baby.
And you, the person who just went through one of the most physically and emotionally demanding experiences of your life, can feel almost invisible.
You matter too. Your recovery matters. Your emotional wellbeing matters. Your needs matter. And it is okay to say so, even when the world around you seems to have forgotten to ask.
The Exhaustion Is Real
Sleep deprivation is its own category of hard. It affects your mood, your thinking, your ability to cope, your sense of perspective, your patience, your sense of humor, your capacity for joy. It makes everything harder and everything feel more permanent than it is.
If you are in the thick of it right now, please know that the way things feel at 3am is not the way things actually are. You are not failing. You are exhausted. Those are very different things.
You May Grieve Things You Did Not Expect to Grieve
Nobody warns you about the grief. The grief for your old body. Your old relationship. Your old freedom. The version of yourself that could leave the house without a 45 minute production. The spontaneity. The sleep. The quiet.
You can grieve all of that and still love your baby fiercely. Those two things are not in conflict. They are both true at the same time and holding both of them is one of the most quietly exhausting things about early motherhood.
Loneliness Is More Common Than Anyone Admits
Motherhood can be profoundly lonely, especially if you do not have a strong community around you. Especially if it is just you and your partner trying to figure it all out together. Especially if your friends have not yet had children and cannot quite understand what your days look like now.
You need more than just someone to help with the baby. You need someone to help with you. A chance to sleep. A chance to eat a meal without interruption. A chance to remember you are a person, not just a mother.
Building that support is not a luxury. It is a necessity. And asking for it is not weakness. It is one of the wisest things you can do.
The Return to Work Question Is Harder Than Anyone Prepares You For
At some point, usually sooner than feels right, comes the question of returning to work. And it is rarely as simple as logistics.
Do I want to go back? Can we afford for me not to? What will it feel like to leave? What will it feel like to stay? Who am I if I am not working? Who am I if I am? What kind of mother do I want to be and what kind of person do I need to be to feel like myself?
These are not small questions. They are identity questions. And they deserve more than a practical spreadsheet. They deserve real space to be explored honestly, without judgment, and without anyone else's answer imposed on you.
You Are Allowed to Find This Hard
Perhaps the most important thing nobody tells you is this. You are allowed to find it hard. You are allowed to miss your old life. You are allowed to feel overwhelmed and lonely and not quite like yourself. You are allowed to love your baby completely and also wish someone would take the baby for a few hours so you could just breathe.
Finding it hard does not mean you are doing it wrong. It means you are human. It means you are going through something enormous. And it means you deserve support, not just for your baby but for yourself.
A Note
If any of this resonated with you I would love to connect. Whether you are in the thick of early motherhood or still carrying things from that season that never quite got addressed, this is a space where you do not have to have it together. You just have to show up.
March 10, 2026
Lyza Chin, LICSW
Therapist for Women in Massachusetts
You Cannot Fix This. But You Can Stay.
There is a particular kind of fear that only parents know.
Not the fear of something happening to you. The fear of something happening to your child. The fear of watching them suffer and not being able to make it stop. The fear of not knowing how this ends. The fear of holding it together for them while quietly coming apart inside.
If your child is going through something hard right now, a mental health crisis, a serious illness, a season that has shaken your entire family, this is for you.
What Nobody Sees
From the outside you may look like you are managing. You show up. You make the appointments. You ask the right questions. You hold your child's hand and tell them it is going to be okay even on the days you are not sure you believe it yourself.
What nobody sees is what happens after. The lying awake at 3am running through every possible outcome. The googling you do when everyone is asleep trying to find something that will make sense of what is happening. The grief you do not have time to feel because someone always needs something. The exhaustion so deep it has settled into your bones.
You are carrying so much. And most of it invisibly.
The Helplessness Is the Hardest Part
Parents are supposed to protect their children. That is the deepest instinct there is. And when something happens that you cannot protect them from, when the illness or the crisis or the struggle is beyond your power to fix, that helplessness is its own kind of devastation.
You would take it from them if you could. You would carry it yourself without hesitation. But you cannot. And learning to live inside that truth, to keep showing up and loving them and staying present when you feel so helpless, is one of the hardest things a parent can be asked to do.
The Loneliness Nobody Talks About
Parenting a child through a mental health struggle carries a particular loneliness that is hard to explain to anyone who has not been there.
You may not feel free to talk about it openly. You want to protect your child's privacy. You are not sure who is safe to tell. You worry about judgment, about stigma, about what people will think about your child or about you as a parent.
And so you carry it quietly. You smile at school pickup and say things are fine. You deflect questions about how your child is doing. You hold the weight of something enormous with very few people who actually know what you are going through.
The friends you thought would show up may not know what to say. The family members who find out may offer advice instead of support or struggle with their own discomfort around mental health in ways that leave you feeling more alone than before you told them.
This isolation is real and it is one of the heaviest parts of this season. You are navigating something frightening and you are doing it largely alone because the nature of what you are navigating makes it hard to ask for the support you need.
You deserve a space where you do not have to protect anyone. Where you can say the full truth of what you are going through without worrying about how it lands. Where someone receives it without discomfort or judgment or unsolicited advice.
That is what therapy can be for you.
You Are Allowed to Be Scared
Something that many parents in this season do not give themselves permission to feel is their own fear. You are so focused on being strong for your child that your own terror gets pushed aside. There is no time for it. No space for it. Your child needs you steady so steady is what you are.
But the fear is there. Underneath everything. And it needs somewhere to go.
You are allowed to be scared. You are allowed to grieve. You are allowed to say out loud that this is terrifying and you do not know how it ends and some days you are not sure how you are going to get through it.
That is not weakness. That is love. And it deserves to be witnessed.
Your Child Needs You Present More Than They Need You Perfect
One of the most important things I want you to hear is this. You do not have to have the right words. You do not have to know what to do in every moment. You do not have to be unafraid or unshaken or certain that everything will be okay.
What your child needs most is not a parent who has all the answers. It is a parent who stays. Who shows up. Who sits with them in the hard moments without flinching. Who loves them through this season without conditions or timelines or pressure to be better faster.
You cannot fix this. But you can stay. And staying, showing up again and again in the face of something this frightening, is an act of profound love.
Will They Be Okay
This is the question underneath everything. The one you are afraid to ask out loud because saying it makes it more real.
I cannot promise you a specific outcome. Nobody can. But what I can tell you, from years of sitting with families in hard seasons, is that children who are loved and accompanied through their struggles, who have a parent willing to stay present and get support and keep showing up, have something powerful on their side.
Your presence matters more than you know. Your love matters more than you know. And your willingness to get support for yourself so you can continue to show up for them matters more than you know.
You Need Support Too
This is the part that often gets forgotten. Everyone is focused on your child. The therapists, the doctors, the teachers, the family members who call to ask how they are doing. And you, the person holding everything together, are rarely the one anyone thinks to ask about.
You need support too. Not as an afterthought. Not once your child is better. Now. While you are in the middle of it. While you are scared and exhausted and running on empty and trying to be everything your child needs.
Having a space that is entirely yours, where someone is focused on you and how you are doing and what you are carrying, is not a luxury. It is what makes it possible to keep going. To keep showing up. To keep staying.
A Note
If you are a parent going through a hard season with your child and you need somewhere to put what you are carrying I would love to connect. You do not have to have it together before you reach out. You just have to be willing to let someone stand next to you the way you are standing next to your child.
February 3, 2026
Lyza Chin, LICSW
Therapist for Women in Massachusetts
High Functioning Anxiety. You Look Fine. But Inside You Cannot Stop.
There is a version of anxiety that nobody sees.
It does not look like panic attacks in parking lots or an inability to leave the house. It looks like getting everything done. It looks like being reliable, prepared, and on top of it. It looks like the person everyone else leans on because you always come through.
It looks, from the outside, completely fine.
But inside it is anything but.
What High Functioning Anxiety Actually Looks Like
High functioning anxiety is the anxiety that hides behind competence. It is the overthinking that starts before your feet hit the floor in the morning. The mental rehearsal of every possible outcome before you make a decision. The inability to fully rest because your brain is always working on something, solving something, anticipating something.
It is the rumination that follows you into the shower, into the car, into the quiet moments that are supposed to be restful but never quite are. It is the list that never feels finished. The standard that is never quite met. The nagging sense that you should be doing more, doing better, doing it differently.
Women with high functioning anxiety are often described by others as driven, responsible, and capable. What others do not see is the cost of maintaining all of that. The exhaustion underneath the competence. The worry that never fully quiets. The toll of holding everything together while never quite feeling like it is enough.
The Perfectionism Connection
For many women high functioning anxiety and perfectionism walk hand in hand. Not the kind of perfectionism that means you care about doing good work. The kind that means nothing ever feels quite good enough. The kind that sets an internal standard so high that meeting it brings only brief relief before the bar quietly moves again.
Perfectionism looks like high standards from the outside. Inside it often feels like fear. Fear of getting it wrong. Fear of letting someone down. Fear of what it would mean about you if you fell short.
And so you keep going. You keep managing and anticipating and preparing. You stay one step ahead of everything because the alternative, slowing down, letting something drop, not being on top of it, feels genuinely dangerous even when logically you know it is not.
The Overthinker Who Cannot Put It Down
One of the most exhausting features of high functioning anxiety is the inability to set down your worries even when you want to. You know the rumination is not helping. You know going over it again at midnight is not going to solve anything. And yet your brain will not stop.
It is not a choice. It is a pattern. And it is one that can be changed.
Learning to interrupt the rumination cycle, to recognize the thoughts that are driving your anxiety rather than being swept along by them, to relate to your worry differently rather than either fighting it or being consumed by it, these are skills. Real, learnable skills that can genuinely change how you experience your own mind.
What Gets Better With Support
Women who come to therapy for high functioning anxiety often say the same thing afterward. They did not realize how much mental energy they were spending just managing their own inner world. How much quieter things can be. How much more present they can feel.
Therapy for high functioning anxiety is not about lowering your standards or caring less. It is about understanding where the anxiety is coming from, what it is protecting you from, and learning to work with it rather than be driven by it. It is about building a different relationship with uncertainty, with imperfection, with the parts of life that cannot be controlled no matter how hard you try.
And it is about finally giving yourself permission to rest without your brain treating that rest like a threat.
A Note
If you recognized yourself anywhere in this post I would love to connect. High functioning anxiety responds really well to therapy and the relief of finally understanding what has been driving you, and learning to quiet it, is significant.
You do not have to keep running this hard. There is another way.
January 27, 2026
Lyza Chin, LICSW
Therapist for Women in Massachusetts
Who Are You Outside of All Your Roles?
At some point, often quietly and without a clear moment you can point to, you realize you are not sure.
You know who you are as a mother. As a partner. As an employee. As a daughter. You have been showing up in those roles reliably for years. But outside of them, underneath them, when the house is quiet and the to do list is done and there is actually a moment that belongs entirely to you?
You are not sure what to do with it. You are not even sure who that person is anymore.
How It Happens
Nobody wakes up one day and decides to lose themselves. It happens gradually, in the accumulation of responsibilities and roles and the relentless demands of a life built largely around other people's needs.
Motherhood in particular has a way of consuming identity. Not because children are a burden but because the mental load of raising them leaves so little space for anything else. There is always something that needs to be done, anticipated, managed, arranged. And in that constant state of giving and doing and managing, the question of what you actually want, what you enjoy, who you are when nobody needs anything from you, gets quietly set aside.
And then one day you look up and realize you cannot remember the last time you did something purely for yourself. Not for the family. Not for the house. Not because it needed to be done. Just because you wanted to.
The Hobby Gap
One of the things women notice, often with a mix of resentment and sadness, is that their partners seem to have maintained their identities in a way they have not. Their partners still have hobbies. Still have interests. Still carve out time for the things that are just theirs.
And somehow, without it ever being explicitly decided, the woman in the relationship became the one who gave those things up. Whose time became collective rather than personal. Whose identity became defined almost entirely by her roles.
This is not a small thing. Your interests, your passions, your sense of play and pleasure and curiosity are not luxuries. They are part of who you are. And when they disappear so does a piece of you.
What It Feels Like to Not Know Who You Are Anymore
Women describe this experience in different ways. Some say they feel empty in the quiet moments. Some say they feel guilty when they try to prioritize themselves because they have been the one prioritizing everyone else for so long that it feels wrong. Some say they genuinely do not know what they like anymore because it has been so long since they asked.
Some say they are waiting. Waiting for the kids to be older, for life to slow down, for some future season when they will finally have space to figure it out. But that season never quite arrives on its own.
Finding Your Way Back to Yourself
Reconnecting with yourself after years of losing yourself in your roles is not a dramatic transformation. It is quiet and gradual and sometimes uncomfortable. It starts with small questions. What did I used to love before all of this? What have I always been curious about? When do I feel most like myself?
It involves giving yourself permission to have needs and preferences and interests that are entirely your own. To take up space in your own life not just in service of others but in service of yourself.
And sometimes it involves therapy. Not because you are broken but because having a space that is entirely focused on you, where someone is genuinely curious about who you are beneath all the roles you carry, can be one of the most disorienting and healing experiences there is.
To be asked who you are, and to have space to actually answer, is something many women have not experienced in years.
A Note
If you have lost track of yourself inside your roles and you are ready to start finding your way back I would love to connect. This is some of the most meaningful work I do and it begins with one simple question.
Who are you when nobody needs anything from you?
January 13, 2026
Lyza Chin, LICSW
Therapist for Women in Massachusetts
You Were Never Taught to Ask for What You Need
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from spending your whole life making sure everyone else is okay.
From reading the room before you speak. From softening your words so nobody feels uncomfortable. From saying yes when you mean no, and meaning it so automatically that you are not even sure anymore what you actually want.
If you grew up learning that keeping the peace was your job, that your needs came last, that being easy and agreeable was how you stayed safe or loved or accepted, then you did not learn something that most people assume everyone just knows.
You did not learn how to ask for what you need.
And that is not a character flaw. It is something you were taught. And it can be unlearned.
How It Gets Passed Down
Most women who struggle to use their voice did not one day decide to stop speaking up. They were raised in environments, families, cultures, relationships, where it was not safe or rewarded or even modeled to do so.
Maybe you grew up in a home where keeping the peace was survival. Where expressing a need or a disagreement created conflict and conflict felt dangerous. Where being good meant being quiet and agreeable and not making things difficult.
Maybe you were simply raised in a world that taught girls to be accommodating. To be nice. To not be too much. To make sure everyone around you is comfortable even at the expense of your own comfort.
And so you learned. You learned to shrink. To accommodate. To anticipate everyone else's needs and set aside your own. You became very good at it. And now you are in relationships, at work, in your family, where you do not know how to stop.
What It Looks Like Now
You say yes when you want to say no and then feel resentful about it. You avoid conflict even when conflict would actually help. You do not know how to ask for what you need in your relationship so you wait to be noticed and feel hurt when you are not. You apologize constantly, for taking up space, for having an opinion, for existing inconveniently.
You may not even know what you want because you have been so focused on what everyone else wants for so long that you have lost touch with yourself entirely. Your needs feel like an inconvenience. Your preferences feel negotiable. Your voice feels like it might cause damage if used too directly.
And underneath all of it is often a quiet belief that you are not quite worth the disruption.
What Assertiveness Actually Is
Assertiveness is not aggression. It is not being difficult or demanding or selfish. It is the ability to express your needs, your boundaries, and your perspective clearly and respectfully. It is the belief that your needs matter as much as anyone else's. Not more. Just as much.
Learning to be assertive is not about becoming a different person. It is about giving the person you already are permission to be heard.
It involves learning to recognize what you actually need in a given moment. Learning to communicate it directly without over explaining or apologizing. Learning to tolerate the discomfort of disappointing someone without interpreting that discomfort as proof that you did something wrong.
It involves building the kind of self trust that lets you know your needs are worth expressing even when the response is uncertain.
Setting Boundaries Without Guilt
Boundaries are one of the most misunderstood concepts in mental health. They are not walls. They are not punishments. They are not ways of controlling other people.
A boundary is simply a statement of what you will and will not accept. What you are available for and what you are not. What feels okay and what does not.
For women who were raised to prioritize everyone else's comfort, setting a boundary can feel like an act of aggression even when it is an act of self protection. The guilt that follows is familiar. So is the impulse to take it back, to soften it, to make sure the other person is not upset.
Learning to set limits and let them stand, without collapsing under the weight of someone else's reaction, is one of the most liberating things you can do for yourself. And it changes your relationships in ways that benefit everyone, not just you.
You Are Allowed to Take Up Space
Perhaps the most fundamental thing that changes in this work is the belief underneath everything else. The belief that you are allowed to have needs. That expressing them is not dangerous. That you are worth the disruption.
You do not have to earn the right to be heard. You do not have to make yourself smaller so others can be more comfortable. You do not have to keep giving everything away and hoping someone notices you have nothing left.
You are allowed to take up space. In your relationships. In your family. In your own life.
A Note
If this resonated with you I would love to connect. Learning to use your voice, to ask for what you need, and to set limits that actually hold is some of the most transformative work there is. And you do not have to do it alone.
December 30, 2025
Lyza Chin, LICSW
Therapist for Women in Massachusetts
When Your Parent Starts to Need You
There is a moment, different for every family, when something shifts.
Maybe it is a phone call that frightens you. A fall, a diagnosis, a moment of confusion that did not used to happen. Maybe it is something slower and harder to name, a gradual dimming, a series of small changes that you have been quietly tracking for longer than you want to admit.
Whatever it looks like, something has changed. And you feel it in your body before you can fully articulate it in words.
Your parent needs you now in a way they did not before. And everything that comes with that is more than most people prepare you for.
The Role Reversal Nobody Prepares You For
There is something profoundly disorienting about becoming the person your parent leans on. For your whole life they were the steady one, the one you called when things were hard, the one who held things together. And now that dynamic is shifting and you are being asked to step into a role you never quite anticipated.
Even when it happens gradually it can feel sudden. One day you are a daughter. The next you are a care coordinator, a medical advocate, a decision maker, a person who has to research memory care facilities or have conversations about end of life wishes that feel impossible to start.
And you are doing all of this while also being everything else you already were. A mother. A partner. An employee. A person with your own life that does not pause while you navigate this one.
The Weight That Falls on Daughters
It is worth naming directly. The emotional and logistical weight of caring for aging parents falls disproportionately on daughters. Research consistently shows this and most women living it do not need research to confirm what they already know in their bodies.
Sons are involved. But daughters tend to be the ones who manage. The ones who track the appointments and make the calls and notice the changes and carry the worry. The ones who reorganize their lives and their calendars and their emotional reserves around what their parent needs.
It is an enormous amount to carry. And it is rarely acknowledged as such.
When Siblings See It Differently
One of the most painful and undertalked aspects of this season is the sibling dynamic. Families that have functioned reasonably well for decades can fracture under the pressure of decisions about a declining parent.
Who should be making decisions. What level of care is appropriate. Whether to keep a parent at home or consider a facility. How to interpret what the parent actually wants. Who is doing enough and who is not.
These disagreements are rarely just logistical. They are laden with decades of family history, old roles, old wounds, old dynamics that resurface with startling force when something this significant is at stake.
Being the one who sees most clearly, who is most involved, who is carrying the most, and not being heard or supported by your siblings is its own particular kind of grief. And it deserves to be named.
Anticipatory Grief
One of the most significant and least discussed emotional experiences of this season is anticipatory grief. The grief that begins before a loss has fully happened. The grief of watching someone change. Of mourning the relationship you had before. Of missing the version of your parent that used to be there even while they are still present.
Anticipatory grief is real grief. It deserves the same space and care as any other kind. And it is often complicated by the fact that you are supposed to be managing everything while also quietly falling apart inside.
The Sandwich Generation
Many of the women navigating aging parents are doing so while simultaneously raising their own children. Holding the needs of two generations at once with very little room left for themselves.
You are managing school pickups and pediatrician appointments and homework and sports while also managing your parent's care, their appointments, their decline, their fear. You are the person everyone needs and you are running on empty and there is no good time to fall apart because someone always needs something.
This is an extraordinary amount to carry. And the fact that you are carrying it mostly without complaint does not mean it is not taking a toll.
What You Are Allowed to Feel
You are allowed to feel grief. Anger. Exhaustion. Resentment. Fear. Sadness that your parent is not who they used to be. Guilt that you cannot do more. Relief on the days when things are easier and then guilt about the relief.
You are allowed to find this hard even though you love them. You are allowed to need support even though you are the one providing it. You are allowed to have your own feelings about this season even while you are busy managing everyone else's.
Getting Support
The women who navigate this season best are not the ones who need the least support. They are the ones who found it. Whether that is a therapist, a support group, a trusted friend who will actually listen, someone who gives you permission to put down the weight for an hour and just be a person who is struggling.
If you are in this season right now, whether you are just beginning to notice the changes or you are deep in the middle of it, you do not have to carry it alone.
A Note
I spent years working in elder care before becoming a therapist and this population, and the daughters who love them, holds a special place in my work. If you are navigating a parent's decline and need somewhere to put all of what you are carrying I would love to connect.
December 16, 2025
Lyza Chin, LICSW
Therapist for Women in Massachusetts