The Thin Place
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I woke up knowing. Not in a dramatic way — just a quiet recognition that the day was going to cost more than I had. It was a cold Tuesday last January, a school day, so there was no choice but to muscle through. It started with the usual bargaining — eat your breakfast, brush your teeth, say bye to dad — and then, six mittens, three stocking hats, three coats, and six snow boots later, we made it to the bus stop.
After Esme was off, I stood in the kitchen with Aura, 3, and Ivy, 2, and told myself we needed to get out of the house. The air outside was too bitter for a real outdoor adventure, so the library it was. I had recently started intermittent fasting — which, on a normal day, is fine. On this day, it turned me into a ticking clock. Hungry, irritable, a low hum of something just beneath the surface. The alternative was cabin fever with toddlers, so onward we went.
Story time was sweet. Twenty toddlers and their parents packed into a cramped meeting room, all that small-body warmth and noise. When it was over, they scattered into the children's section, and mine scattered with them — except mine kept going. Past the picture books, past the easy readers, into the adult shelves, where they played hide-and-seek between the stacks and laughed in the loud way that echoes. Both of them had stripped off their boots and socks somewhere in the chaos of story time dancing. My face was getting hot. I was light-headed from the fasting. I was trying to shush them without making a scene, scanning between the shelves for two barefoot toddlers. Then I heard her voice. She had found them. I knew that particular librarian. This wasn't the first time she'd called my kids out for being kids in the library. I turned around.
"It's a little cold to be running around with no shoes," she said.
She was talking to my two-year-old. I knew she was talking to me.
I smiled — a half-hearted thing. Then I swooped them up while they were distracted, bribing them with promises of sweets as I wrangled them back into their layers. Coats, hats, mittens, boots. Mine too. Three tote bags of twenty children's books I had checked out — I do not know why I do that to myself — and the backpack, of course, filled to the max: extra clothes, water bottles, snacks, everything. I looked like a pack mule, carrying both of them just to make sure we'd actually reach the door.
We crossed the threshold. Little Ivy's boot popped off.
I dropped everything. Tote bags, backpack, all of it. Set both girls down. Got on my knees in the entryway and tried to get the boot back on as fast as I could. That's when I heard her — a mother from story time, sweet voice, already moving toward me.
"Can I help?"
"No. I got it."
She moved on. I got the boot on. I was sweating in all my winter clothes. I walked to the car with my head down.
The girls were feeding off my energy by then, frantic because I was frantic, unsteady because I was unsteady. They didn't want to get in the car. They wanted to open the doors themselves, climb in themselves, do it all themselves in the slow and deliberate way that toddlers do. I ignored their protests and put them in the car. I nudged them, firmly, into their seats, told them to buckle up, loaded the bags into the trunk, and got in the driver's seat.
And then I just sat there.
Head down. Quiet. We stayed in that parking lot for five more minutes while I waited for something in me to settle. I didn't say a word. Neither did they.
What I kept coming back to was the woman. The one who only wanted to help. She had been exactly where I was before — I could see it in the way she moved toward me, careful, cautious — and I snapped at her. Not because she did anything wrong. Because I had nothing left, and the kindness arrived at the worst possible second, and the performance cracked.
When the Wave Pulls Back
I call it the thin place.
My life moves in waves, and it has been like that for as long as I can remember — there are days when I ride them easily, days when I am genuinely crushing it. The girls play independently, I move back and forth between working and mothering without missing a beat, the house is manageable, maybe even clean, laundry done and folded, meals coming together easily. Those days exist. They're real.
The other end of the wave is the thin place. It isn't about the logistics of the day. It's a different kind of wave entirely — the feeling of my tolerance for other people, for noise, for being perceived, wearing down to almost nothing. A librarian's comment isn't just a comment. A stranger's kindness isn't just kindness. Everything lands too hard, too directly, because there's no layer left to absorb it.
On the thin place days, even the small things cost something. There's a man named David who works in the nature park where I walk — I don't know much about him beyond his name, his job, and the fact that he has a genuine smile and something about his voice that feels like talking to a dad. On a normal day, I stop, we chat, it's easy, it grounds me a little. On thin place days, it takes everything I have just to say hi and keep moving, and underneath that is the quiet dread that he might want to talk. The other dog owners on the path, the parents at school drop-off, the wave and smile across the parking lot — all of it becomes something I have to gear up for rather than something that just happens. I don't want to be rude. I just want to be invisible for a little while. Before kids, I could be. I'd cancel, reroute, and go quiet until the wave passed. Now the wave passes through a full day of people who need things from me, and I move through it performing.
That's the part that exhausts me most — not the demands themselves, but the act. The performance of the on version of myself, layered over the reality of where I actually am. I smile at drop-off. I nod at the library counter. I hold the thing together in public, and the holding is what costs the most.
The Recovery Window That No Longer Exists
The thin place has always been part of me. Since I was a child. The easy parts don't last forever, and neither do the hard ones. I emerge. I always emerge. I didn't always know that though. There was a time I thought I was simply falling into depression. It was only through years of writing in my journals, watching my own thoughts, that I started to see the pattern. Now I don't fight it or hold on to it either. I just ride it.
What's different now is the recovery. Before kids I could close the door on the world and do something with no meaningful output — paint something nobody would see, read without it being productive, walk without a destination. The doing was the point. That's what filled me back up. Motherhood didn't exactly take that away. It just made everything count for something. There is no purposelessness that belongs only to me anymore. Even the 4:45 am quiet has an agenda.
I've learned to bake it into the days with my girls. Hikes with no set time to come home, afternoons in the backyard that stretch until someone's stomach decides it's time to go in. It's there. It just looks different.
For a while, I thought the problem was outside of me. My kids need more independence. More discipline. I need to stop doing things for them that they could do themselves. And maybe some of that is true. But when I really sit with it, I know that's looking outside to fix something inside. My children don't cause the thin place. It's just that they make it impossible to hide from it.
The Performance Is What Costs You
On the thin place days, I have a system. I don't love it. But it works, barely.
I break the day into pieces. Between the pieces, I give myself something small — a scroll, something sweet to eat, a few minutes of nothing useful. Before the dishes, I'll lean against the counter, phone in hand, watching videos that don't matter. And then it comes: "MOM." And I yell back in that long, drawn-out, singsong way — "WHHHAAT" — as if their beckoning is interrupting something important. It isn't. We both know it isn't.
I know that sound. It's the voice of someone who loves her children and has nothing left to give.
Eventually, the scrolling tips into disgust, and I use that disgust as fuel to get up and do the next thing. Make dinner. Fold the laundry. Keep moving until the next collapse.
The system works until it doesn't. And when it doesn't, the thin place takes the wheel. I think the creators of Bluey know something about the thin place — because they wrote the perfect episode for exactly this moment.
How a Cartoon Dog Taught My Kids to Give Me Space
There is an episode of Bluey — the Australian cartoon about a Blue Heeler puppy that has, at this point, parented my children nearly as much as I have — where Chili, the mom, tells Bandit, the dad, that she needs twenty minutes where no one talks to her. Just twenty minutes. Bandit spends the entire episode doing whatever it takes to protect that window, holding the kids off, redirecting, absorbing the chaos so Chili doesn't have to.
My girls have seen that episode. Which means they understand the twenty minutes in a way I never had to explain — they saw it first in their favorite cartoon, which means it was already real before I ever needed it.
On the hard days, when I feel the thin place closing in and the performance starting to crack, I tell them: "Mommy needs to go to her room for twenty minutes. When I come out, I'll be nice mommy." I go in. I close the door. I change my clothes.
That last part matters more than it sounds. The costume change is part of it. When I come back out in something different, something shifts — not just for them but for me. It's an intermission. A chance to step out of the performance, however briefly, and step back in with a little more of myself intact. The thin place doesn't disappear in twenty minutes. But sometimes the costume change is enough to keep going.
What a Six-Year-Old Knows
Esme is six. She is my oldest, and she is at times my biggest trigger — the one most likely to ask me for something she knows how to get herself, the one who has learned that if she says "Mom, I need more water," I will get it. She has leaned into that, maybe a little too comfortably.
She is also the one who feels me most acutely. When the mom rage comes — and sometimes it comes — her eyes fill. She absorbs it in a way the little ones don't yet. She is tuned to me.
Yesterday was rough. I couldn't seem to gather enough energy to perform.
She looked at me and said, "Mommy. You need to go to your room for twenty minutes and come back as nice mommy." Then she turned to her sisters and said, "Mom is going to go to her room for a bit, let's give her a little space." I could hear her deflecting her sisters when they came toward the door, solving their problems as best she could to keep guarding my twenty minutes.
She had been watching. She learned the language, the practice, the mercy of a closed door — and she used it because she felt it coming before I said a word.
I went. I closed the door. I changed my clothes. Closed my eyes and took some deep breaths.
In the quiet, I thought about the woman in the library parking lot — the one who offered her hand and got the sharp end of me instead. I hope she knows. I think she does.
The thin place passes. For me, it always does. And while it's here, sometimes a six-year-old holds it at bay — twenty minutes, a closed door, her small body standing in the hall — and that turns out to be enough.
If you've ever lived through a thin place day, you know that what you need isn't more advice. You need somewhere to put it down.
The Ease Journal was made for exactly this — the hard days, the low tide, the moments when you need to move something from inside you onto a page so you can breathe again. It's gentle. It's quiet. It meets you where you are.