Your Children Don't Need a Martyr. They Need a Model.
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that only mothers know.
It’s not just the tiredness of too little sleep, though there’s plenty of that. It’s the exhaustion of a woman who has slowly, quietly, and often willingly disappeared, meal by meal, appointment by appointment, dream by dream, into the lives of everyone around her. It’s the fatigue of a woman carrying maternal depletion she’s never named, pouring from a cup that no one has ever thought to refill. Including herself.
I know this exhaustion. I grew up watching it.
My mother was the strongest woman I have ever known. She was a survivor of domestic violence who raised four children largely on her own, with a ferocity and a love that I still carry with me every day. She worked hard. She showed up. She gave everything she had to make sure we were covered, cared for, provided for. She put us first in the way that her generation understood a good mother should.
And she put herself last. For years.
In 2022, my mother died unexpectedly. She was taken by a virus, one that a healthy body should have been able to fight. But her body couldn’t fight it. Because years of self-neglect, untreated comorbidities, and a healthcare system that had never truly seen her had left her without the reserves she needed when it mattered most.
She did not die because she was weak. She died because no one, including herself, had ever told her that her health was worth protecting.
I will spend the rest of my life making sure that story does not repeat itself.
The Lie We Were Handed
Somewhere along the way, women, and mothers in particular, were handed a story about what it means to be good. To be selfless. To be devoted.
The story goes like this: a good mother puts her children first. A good wife makes sure everyone else is taken care of before she thinks of herself. A good woman does not complain, does not slow down, does not ask for too much. She endures. She sacrifices. She keeps going even when her body is telling her to stop.
We didn’t just accept this story. We celebrated it. We called it love.
But here is what that story actually costs: it costs women their health. Their vitality. Their presence. And ultimately, in too many cases, their lives.
I have watched this pattern play out in living rooms, in doctor’s offices, in hospital waiting rooms, and in funeral homes. I watched it in my own home, in the body of my own mother. And in 2020, I nearly watched it happen to me.
The Day I Thought I Was Dying
In 2020, I thought I was having a heart attack.
I had been working in the birth space for years by then, as a labor doula, a postpartum doula, a childbirth educator, a placenta encapsulationist. I had spent years pouring into other women in some of the most sacred and vulnerable moments of their lives. And I had been quietly, systematically ignoring my own body.
When the symptoms hit, I went to the doctors I had always trusted. I went through the standard workup. And I was told, in the way that women are so often told, that nothing was seriously wrong. That I was fine. That I should perhaps manage my stress.
I was not fine.
What followed was a frustrating, frightening, and ultimately transformative search for real answers. A naturopathic doctor finally helped me find them. Not by masking my symptoms, but by looking at the root. By running labs that revealed what was actually happening inside my body. By creating a protocol tailored to me, my biochemistry, my history, my life.
Through that process, I began to heal. And something else happened: I became obsessed. I wanted to know everything. About natural medicine. About the body’s capacity to heal when it’s given what it actually needs. About the gap between what conventional medicine offers women and what women actually deserve.
That curiosity became a calling. That calling became Elevate Women’s Wellness.
What Your Children Are Actually Learning
Your kids are watching you. Not just what you say to them. What you do. How you treat your own body. Whether you rest or keep pushing. Whether you ask for help or quietly carry it all.
When you run on empty and call it love, they learn that love looks like self-destruction.
When you dismiss your own pain and keep going, they learn that their pain should be dismissed too.
When you never stop, never refill, never say “I need something too,” they learn that a woman’s needs don’t matter. That devotion means depletion. That the measure of a good woman is how little she leaves for herself.
That is not the legacy you want to leave. I know that’s not what you’re trying to teach. But it’s what they’re learning, unless something changes.
“When you run on empty and call it love, your children learn that love looks like self-destruction.”
There’s a Real Difference Between Sacrifice and Depletion
I want to say something clearly, because I don’t want this to be misread.
Sacrifice is not the problem.
A woman who gives freely from a place of genuine abundance, whose love pours out because she is full enough to pour, that is one of the most beautiful things there is.
But that is very different from a woman who has been depleting for so long she no longer knows what full feels like. Who gives because she doesn’t know how to stop. Who keeps going because stopping feels dangerous, like if she pauses, everything falls apart.
Both women are giving. But only one is sustainable. Only one is truly serving the people she loves.
You were not made to be consumed by your calling. You were made to be sustained by it.
“Depletion is not devotion. It’s a signal. And it has a root that can be found.”
The Maternal Survival Movement
What I’m building with Elevate Women’s Wellness is not just a naturopathic practice. It is a movement, the Maternal Survival Movement, rooted in a single, non-negotiable conviction:
Your children don’t need a martyr. They need a model.
A martyr sacrifices herself. A model shows her children, by the way she lives, the choices she makes, the care she gives herself, what it looks like to be a woman who is well.
A mother who is well doesn’t just survive motherhood. She inhabits it fully. She shows up with presence, with energy, with the capacity to truly be there for the people she loves, not the frayed, depleted, running-on-fumes version of herself that she has convinced herself is enough.
A model teaches her daughters that their bodies are worth protecting. She teaches her sons what a woman who values herself looks like. She breaks the cycle, not with a speech, but with her life.
This is the work. This is why I do what I do.
What Putting Yourself First Actually Means
I want to address something directly, because I know what some of you might be thinking.
Putting yourself first sounds selfish. It sounds like something women have been conditioned to resist. It sounds like it conflicts with the deep love you have for your children, your family, your community.
It doesn’t.
Putting your oxygen mask on first isn’t selfishness. It is strategy. It is the acknowledgment that you can’t give what you don’t have. That a depleted woman cannot pour into her children. That a sick mother cannot model health. That a woman who has abandoned herself can’t teach her daughters to value themselves.
The most radical act of motherhood is taking care of yourself as if your family’s wellbeing depends on it. Because it does.
As a Christian woman, I believe with my whole heart that the Lord has gifted me with the skills and the calling to help women walk this path. I believe that the body He gave you is worth stewarding. I believe that your health is not a luxury. It is a responsibility to yourself, to your family, and to the generations that come after you.
Your children are watching you. They are learning from you, not from what you tell them, but from how you live. The cycle you break today is the one your daughter will never have to break.
What Getting Well Actually Requires
Here’s something I want to name directly, because it’s the part most wellness content skips.
Wanting to be well isn’t enough. Knowing you should take care of yourself isn’t enough. Buying the supplements, doing the yoga, getting more sleep when you can. That’s not enough either. Not when what’s actually happening is a systemic depletion that has clinical roots.
Most of the women I work with are depleted at a level that doesn’t show up on standard blood work. Or their labs are flagged as “normal” when they are actually at the very bottom of a normal range, a range that was never built for an optimally functioning woman. They’re not imagining things. They’re not anxious or overdramatic or just getting older. Their bodies have been trying to tell them something for a long time.
You are not fine in the way they mean. And you deserve someone who will actually look.
Ready to Begin?
The Maternal Health Assessment is free. It takes about five minutes and asks the questions most healthcare providers skip entirely. It’s the first step toward understanding what your body is actually asking for.
Take the Maternal Health Assessment
Keep Reading
If this resonated, The Woman Who Disappeared Into Motherhood goes deeper into what the disappearing actually looks and feels like from the inside, and how the finding begins. It’s the companion post to everything you just read.
For the woman who is postpartum and wondering if what she’s feeling is depletion, Why You Still Don’t Feel Like Yourself answers that question with the specifics your doctor never gave you.
