Hearing my voice, I remember thinking, I don’t want to be this kind of parent

It was one of those nights. Dinner was burning, someone was screaming, someone else was crying, and I was holding it all together by the thinnest thread. My three children were young and needing me in every direction at once. And there I was, standing in the middle of it all, completely undone.

My mum had died not long before. The grief sat heavy in my chest. But I didn’t have space to feel it. I was busy surviving. Every day felt like a mountain. I was yelling more than I wanted to, getting angry with them and trying to control everything just to feel some sense of order. But the more I tried to control, the more out of control I felt.

I told myself: if the kids just did what I said, it would be OK. If they listened and didn’t make things harder, I would be calmer, steadier, less reactive, and then everything would settle. I was chasing some invisible version of the “perfect parent”, believing that if I controlled their behaviour, I could hold it all together.

That night, something cracked.

I reached for the phone book and sat on the floor flipping through the pages. I wasn’t even sure what I was looking for. A hotel. A retreat. Somewhere I could escape. Not forever, just long enough to breathe. I didn’t want to leave my life. I didn’t want to leave my children. I just wanted the noise to stop.

I felt ashamed of how intense I’d become. Frightened by the cutting edge in my voice and the threats I’d made. And I remember thinking, “I don’t want to be this kind of mum.”

The chaos I was trying to manage wasn’t just coming from my children. It was coming from me. From grief I hadn’t allowed myself to sit with.

That thought unsettled me more than anything else. I loved my children fiercely, but something in me was fraying. In the days that followed, I couldn’t shake the discomfort of that moment. It would have been easier to focus on their behaviour, the arguing, the noise, the defiance. Easier to say they were the problem. Easier to double down on discipline and structure and control.

But somewhere inside me, I knew that wasn’t the whole story. The chaos I was trying to manage wasn’t just coming from my children. It was coming from me. From grief I hadn’t allowed myself to sit with. From exhaustion that had built quietly over months. From the pressure I put on myself to be the kind of mother who never lost her temper. From the fear that if I wasn’t in control, everything would fall apart.

I had been trying so hard to be a good mother that I hadn’t noticed how tightly I was gripping everyone, including myself. My children weren’t trying to break me. They were responding to a version of me who was overwhelmed and brittle.

That was confronting to admit. But it was also strangely freeing. Because if I was part of the pattern, I could be part of changing it.

When I finally sought help, sitting with someone who gently held up a mirror to me was uncomfortable at first. It meant acknowledging that my reactions weren’t just about the present moment. They were shaped by old fears, old expectations and old ways of coping that had once kept me safe but were now keeping me stuck.

Nothing changed overnight. I still lost my patience. I still raised my voice. But something subtle shifted. I began to pause, even if only for a second, before reacting. I started asking myself what was really being stirred in me. I apologised more quickly. I allowed my children to see that I was learning, too.

I remember kneeling in front of my son after snapping and saying, “That wasn’t about you. I’m sorry.” It felt awkward and vulnerable. His face softened. “That’s OK, Mummy,” he said.

And in that small moment, something shifted between us. Not forgiveness, but permission. Permission for both of us to be imperfect.

Slowly, the temperature in our home began to change. Not because my children became easier. They were still loud, emotional and wonderfully themselves. But because I became steadier. I stopped trying to manage every behaviour just to feel like I was doing it “right”. I started noticing what I was doing to them before they’d even done anything to me.

Through that process, I started to see the emotional imprints I was carrying from my own childhood, the ways I had learned to cope, to control, to earn love by being good enough. And once I could see them, I stopped fighting my parenting quite so hard. I began meeting myself with more honesty and more compassion.

Over time, that inner work reshaped not only my family life but my career. I trained as a family therapist, not because I had it all figured out, but because I had experienced firsthand what becomes possible when we turn inward with honesty instead of outward with blame.

Looking back now, I can see that my children were never the problem. They were reacting to a mother who was grieving, exhausted, and trying to be perfect in a season that didn’t allow for perfection. Parenting didn’t suddenly become easy. It just became more honest.

That night on the floor with the phone book, two decades ago, didn’t make me a perfect mother. It simply reminded me that my children didn’t need perfection. They needed me. Not the version of me who had it all together. Just me: flawed, learning, willing to be seen.

The Perfect Parent Trap: A Therapist’s Guide to Flipping the Script on Traditional Parenting (Amba Press) by Lisa Taylor is out now.