Anxiety After the Incident: When Mom Needs to Realize She’s Not Okay

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Even if you were fortunate enough to never experience true, debilitating anxiety before having children, I’m sure you’ve realized by now that motherhood comes with quite a bit of baggage in the stress department. It seems as if all we do as moms is worry about our kids… then worry some more. We lose sleep over the smallest issues, Googling health concerns we never, in a million years, thought we could have.

But it’s only when something really scary happens to our little ones that we realize the immense responsibility on our shoulders: our jobs have no breaks, no days off, no leniency. We must be alert, attentive, and in tune with our kids at all times to make sure they stay safe. We cannot fail our children, because that would mean failing ourselves, too.

Read the rest of my post featured on Westchester County Moms Blog here!

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Johanna Riehm teaches in the department of Communication and Media at Manhattanville College and in the department of English at Mercy College. She teaches courses in the history of communication, public speaking, and social media, as well as creative and technical writing workshops. Johanna’s work has been featured in Graffiti Literary Magazine, The Write Place at the Write Time, The Bangalore Review, Cactus Heart Press, and the LaMothe Review. She is working on her first longer work, a creative nonfiction novel called We Carved Our Names in Tamarind Trees.

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