Everyone's doing well around us. We make sure of it. It’s our job.

Our kids? They're well. They’re happily playing with their toys.

Our partner? Great too. Currently at work and preparing for a meeting.

And us? We're "fine,… just fine." At least that's what we tell everyone, and we're able to mask our bad feelings with the daily distractions of mom life.

We always have so much to do, and the list grows all day in our heads. And it harasses us, making us weepy, and overwhelmed.

But we're okay…

…really.

We promise.

This is normal mom life—no big deal.

So, we continue to lie to ourselves because all moms feel like this, right?

And if we have that aha moment that maybe we're not okay, we don't have the time or energy to figure out why we're feeling so awful. So we internalize those bad feelings.

We put one foot in front of the other, day after day, week after week, and we march on like the warriors we’ve become.

Because even though what we need most as moms is our mental health, many of us have lost it along the way.

We were left alone six weeks after we gave birth to our babies and have been so hyper-focused on our children we've been ignoring our needs for the most part ever since.

We're mentally and physically exhausted, and because of that, anxiety and depression have crept their way into our lives.

But we brush it off,

it's just the blues…

It's normal to be stressed…

We're just doing our job as mothers…

We'll fix it when we have more time…

So, this is a call to action to pay more attention to the moms in our lives who feel like they don't have the time, energy, ANY OF IT, to get help. The ones who mistakenly believe it's selfish to reach out when they have small children who need them all the time.

As a culture, we need to figure out how to take better care of our moms--because we’re not warriors, we’re human beings, and we deserve to be more than "just fine."

This post originally appeared on the author's Facebook. Her book "Living FULL: Winning My Battle with Eating Disorder" is available on Amazon: https://amzn.to/2O4mJId