You know those stories you hear on the news where a woman disappears and is later found to have been alive, living another life the whole time?

Your Reason: You just wanted to escape the weight of motherhood.

Selfish, you say. Cowardly. How could a mom ever leave her children?

But you get it. And the reason you know is that yesterday you fantasized about moving away. Of course, you would never do it because at the end of the day you love my kids and my life with every ounce of my being. That’s what a fantasy is — a daydream.

So yes, there are times that you imagine what it would be like to escape the constraints of being a mom. Not forever, just a couple of days, a handful of hours even.

Parenting is the hardest job on earth, so why do we have to pretend that it’s full of unicorns and rainbows all of the time? There are days you just don’t like your kids and you just want to throw in the towel, and the only thing that’s keeping you in a semi-sane state is the fact that regardless of the torture they put you through, you love them so you do it anyway.

When you are in the middle of chaos during a day that feels like it will never end, you crave acknowledgment from someone who gets it. A commiserating text to a fellow mom in the trenches goes a long way to feeling like you’re not alone in the parenting crusade.

If you were the praying type, you would probably ask for more patience and fortitude. So until the day when my life feels like your own again, you will enjoy the good days and barrel through the not-so-good ones, doing your best not to end up on the nightly news