When Motherhood Strips Away Control

There are moments in motherhood when the world outside your window makes everything inside your home feel both precious and painfully fragile.

Living in Abu Dhabi right now, as I watch the news and feel the weight of what's happening across the region, I've been sitting with a feeling that I think many of you know well. That desperate, human urge to wrap your arms around your children and somehow keep everything bad at bay.

The truth that motherhood keeps teaching us, over and over again, is this: we were never really in control.

The Illusion of Control

Before I became a mother, I was someone who liked a plan. I liked knowing what came next. I managed my world with routines, structure and a healthy dose of organisation, and it worked. Control felt like competence.

Then motherhood arrived and dismantled all of it.

Not just in the early sleepless days when a baby's needs made any kind of schedule laughable. But in the deeper, more unsettling way that parenthood confronts you with the absolute limits of what you can protect someone you love from.

Research confirms what many of us feel instinctively: Type A personalities tend to be stress-prone, worrying about all the details, and find it particularly hard to accept when things don't go as planned, and motherhood, with its endless unpredictability, can bring this tendency into sharp, uncomfortable focus. The need to control isn't a flaw. It's often a coping mechanism, a way of managing anxiety when the stakes feel impossibly high.

Studies on maternal anxiety consistently show that the transition to motherhood is one of the most significant triggers for control-related stress precisely because so much of it is genuinely uncontrollable.

No amount of planning prepares you for a newborn who doesn't read your schedule, a toddler who dismantles your systems, or a world that refuses to cooperate.

The need to control isn't a flaw. It's often a coping mechanism, a way of managing anxiety when the stakes feel impossibly high.

And right now, for many of us, the stakes feel very high indeed.

When the World Feels Unsafe

There is a particular kind of helplessness that comes when the thing threatening your sense of safety isn't something you can fix, schedule, plan around or solve. When it's geopolitical. When it's global. When it's simply the reality of the world your children are growing up in.

When your coping mechanism is control, any deviation from the plan can feel intolerable. But motherhood is unpredictable, and the wider world even more so.

And here's the thing nobody tells you about that feeling: it doesn't mean you're anxious by nature or that something is wrong with you. It means you love someone more than you have ever loved anything, and the world keeps reminding you that love alone cannot shield them from everything. That is not a weakness. That is the most human thing there is.

In these moments, the instinct is to do more. Research more. Prepare more. Control the controllables harder (oh, don't I know this well). But there is a point at which that urge, however well-intentioned, starts to cost us. It costs us presence. It costs us peace. And sometimes, it costs our children the one thing they most need from us, a mother who is grounded, not just vigilant.

What You Can Actually Control

Here is what I keep coming back to, both personally and in my work with mothers:

You cannot control the world. But you can control the atmosphere inside your home. You cannot protect your children from everything. But you can be a steady, loving, present presence that they can return to. I know this, of course I do, but in difficult times I really need to remind myself.

This is not passive. It is one of the most active, intentional choices a mother can make.

The research is clear on this too. Studies consistently show that what children need most isn't perfect external conditions, it's emotional attunement. Parental responsiveness and felt safety matter far more to child development and resilience than rigid routines or controlled environments. What they need is to feel seen, heard and safe in you even when you can't make the world safe.

So when everything outside feels uncertain, the most powerful thing you can do is come back to yourself first. Not as a luxury. As a necessity.

The Tools That Actually Help

These are the things that genuinely move the needle:

1. Name what you're feeling.

Not "I'm fine" or "I'm stressed." Get specific. Are you frightened? Helpless? Grieving a sense of safety you once had? Furious that the world won't cooperate with your need to keep your children safe?

Naming emotions accurately reduces their intensity, it's called affect labelling and it's one of the most evidence-backed tools in emotional regulation. Neuroscience research shows that simply finding the right word for what you're feeling activates the prefrontal cortex and dials down the amygdala, your brain's threat response centre. In plain terms: naming it calms it.

So don't rush past the feeling to get to the fixing. Sit with it for a moment. Write it down if that helps. Say it out loud. "I am scared because I cannot protect them from this." That is not weakness. That is honesty. And honesty is always the beginning of something better.

2. Separate what is real from what is anticipated. 

Our nervous systems don't distinguish between a threat that is happening and one we are imagining. The body responds to both as if they are equally present, the racing heart, the tight chest, the inability to concentrate. It doesn't know the difference between now and what if.

This is worth understanding because so much of the anxiety that accompanies uncertain times isn't about what is actually happening in our lives right now, it's about the story we're telling ourselves about what might happen next. And our minds, particularly those of us wired for control, are extraordinarily good at constructing very detailed, very convincing worst-case scenarios.

When you notice yourself disappearing into that spiral, gently bring yourself back with a few simple questions. What is actually true right now, in this moment? What is in front of me today that I can respond with? What would I tell a friend who was thinking this way?

You are not being naive by choosing to stay present. You are being wise.

3. Come back to your body.

Anxiety lives in the mind. Grounding lives in the body. And coming back to your body doesn't always mean meditation or breathwork, sometimes it means doing something that makes you feel unapologetically normal.

For me this week it was lifting weights with music turned up too loud. Just that. Twenty minutes of feeling strong and completely in my own world. And afterwards, I felt more like myself than I had in days.

For you it might be getting lost in a book, a Zoom call with a friend who makes you laugh, a family film night with too much popcorn. The activity matters less than the feeling it gives you, that quiet but powerful sense of I'm still me.

Even eight minutes of something that is purely yours can shift your nervous system from threat response back to presence. Don't underestimate it. Don't save it for when things calm down. Do it now, precisely because things haven't.

4. Let love be enough. 

This one is the hardest for those of us who express care through doing, fixing, planning and organising (That’s me!). When there is nothing to do, nothing to fix and no plan that will make it better, just loving them can feel desperately insufficient.

It isn't.

There is a body of research on what psychologists call the "safe haven" and "secure base", the idea that a child's resilience, their ability to cope with difficulty and uncertainty, is built primarily through their relationship with a consistently loving, present and emotionally available parent. Not a perfect parent. Not a parent who has all the answers or can control all the outcomes. Just one who shows up, stays present and keeps choosing connection.

On the days when you cannot fix anything, love is not the consolation prize. It is the whole thing and I have definitely learnt that this week as we’ve weaved through a series of emotions together.

Showing up. Holding them. Being present. Choosing connection over control. Reading together at bedtime when the world feels heavy. Cooking something comforting. Sitting side by side watching something funny. These are not small things dressed up as big ones. They are the big things. They are what your children will carry with them.

A final thought

The mothers I connect with the most are not the ones who have it all under control. They are the ones who have learned, slowly, imperfectly, repeatedly, to stay present when the world feels most uncertain but who are also not afraid to admit when they don’t have it under control at all. To choose love over vigilance. Connection over control.

That is not something that comes naturally to those of us who find safety in certainty. It is a practice. One worth returning to, again and again, especially now.

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