It’s 5 p.m. Dinner isn’t started, someone is melting down over the wrong color cup, and a small voice asks for a third snack. And you snap.
For Dr. Cassidy Freitas, a therapist, mother of three, and author of Mom Needs a Moment, that scene isn’t a confession. It’s a diagnosis of the day. “By 5 p.m., I imagine your nervous system has probably been through it,” she says. “The snack request isn’t a threat, but it’s the last straw landing on a mom with zero margin left.”
Her work begins with a reframe so many mothers need to hear: the reactivity we carry so much shame about is not a window into who we really are. It’s a measure of how depleted we’ve become. And the fix isn’t another item on the to-do list. It’s margin.
What Happens Right Before We Lose It
Dr. Cassidy explains that every one of us has a nervous system whose job is to detect threats and keep us, and the people we love, safe. The trouble is that modern motherhood rarely gives that system a chance to rest.
“We’re living in an intensive parenting era (one that social media absolutely contributes to) where we feel the pressure to optimize everything for our families,” she says. “That alone leaves very little margin for our internal systems to recalibrate, resource, and regulate.”
So when the snack request lands, the fight, flight, or freeze response takes over and decides, simply, “Enough.” In her words, what’s happening right before we lose it is “a burnt-out nervous system that has no margin for accessing the most value-aligned way to respond,” so it takes the most efficient path instead: whatever will make the noise stop.
And here’s the uncomfortable part: it works, briefly. “Snapping can be effective at making the people around us stop in their tracks for a second,” she says. “But it’s not aligned with how we hope to show up.” What follows is often a guilt and shame spiral that can keep a mom from reaching out for support, and the cycle starts again.
So why does she want mothers to hear that losing it isn’t a character flaw?
“This is not a character flaw. This is a nervous system doing its job, and it can bring really important information about what’s happening around you and inside of you,” she says. “When a mom loses it, it is by no means revealing who she really is. It’s actually just showing us how depleted she is.”
Shame, she adds, is sneaky. It convinces us something is wrong with us. Understanding our reactivity, and getting support for it, shifts the question from What’s wrong with me? to What’s happening inside of me? “Curiosity, compassion, and connection around reactivity can open so many doors that shame slams shut.”
Fine on the Outside, Overworking on the Inside
One of the most validating ideas in Dr. Cassidy’s work is that “fine” can be deceiving. “A mom can look completely fine on the outside while her body is working overtime on the inside,” she says.
Most of us know fight, flight, and freeze. She adds two more that many mothers will recognize instantly: fawn and flock.
What do those stress responses actually look like in a mom’s day?
“Fight might look like a mom who is irritable or on edge. Flight might look like rushing. Freeze may look like she’s fine, but she’s really feeling stuck on how to move forward,” she explains. “Fawn can look like people pleasing, or putting everyone else’s needs above her own.” She speaks from experience: “I have a history of fawning until I can’t handle it anymore, and then my fight response turns on!”
Flock, she says, is running toward a group for safety, which today often means reaching for social media for connection and leaving it feeling worse. Naming these responses is the first step. From there, a mom can ask what triggered them, and what she actually needs underneath.
The Yellow Lights We Miss
If there’s a skill at the heart of Mom Needs a Moment, it’s catching yourself before the red zone. Dr. Cassidy says the early signs are often quieter than we expect.
What are the early warning signs most moms miss until it’s too late?
“Holding our breath, clenching our jaw, moving more quickly and rushing, feeling hot and bothered, or suddenly needing everything around us to stop,” she says. Ordinary household sounds start to feel unbearable. Every request grates. “The goal is to learn your own yellow-light signals. Once we’re in the red zone, it’s more obvious.”
And when the tension is rising, the kids are loud, and there’s no time to journal or breathe on a mat, what do we actually do?
Start with one physical cue, she says: shoulders up by your ears, a tight chest, a pit in your stomach. Then build a tiny pause. “Soften your shoulders, extend your exhale a bit, and name what’s happening: ‘I am getting overwhelmed.’” If you can, reduce the demand in the room: “Everyone, let’s pause for a second. I need a moment.”
Her own kids know the signal. “When I have a hand on my chest (that’s where I often feel it) and I take a longer exhale, they know I’ve caught myself,” she says. “The goal isn’t to be perfectly calm. It’s to create enough space between the trigger and your response to decide on your next move.”
Is it okay to walk away mid-meltdown?
“Yes!” If her child is physically safe, she says so out loud: “Hey bud, I’m feeling overwhelmed, and I’m going to take a moment so I can come back and help.” And then she comes back. “This doesn’t show a child that emotions are too much,” she says. “It shows them that when big, dysregulating emotions jump into the driver’s seat, we can notice, pause, ask for space, regulate, and come back to the relationship.”
Margins, Not Spa Days
The organizing idea of her book is the margin, and Dr. Cassidy defines it plainly. “At its core, a margin is space.”
She asks mothers to imagine a magical calendar that shows everything in a day: not just appointments, but the scrolling, the sibling refereeing, the invisible mental load, the emails. “Where would there be any empty space where your body and brain get to just be?”
That space, she says, is what our nervous systems need to process and recalibrate, so she urges moms to protect it as fiercely as a pediatrician appointment, “because you getting that space absolutely is just as important.” A margin can be fifteen protected minutes alone. It can be the muscle of pausing between a trigger and a response.
It’s also why she’s skeptical of self-care as we usually hear about it, which tends to demand time, childcare, and money. “I love a good spa day when I can make it happen,” she says, “but what a mom really needs is continual, protected pockets of peace where her brain can just be.”
What does a margin look like in real life?
She breaks it into four kinds.
Mental: She writes everything down rather than carrying it in her head (“You should see my notes app!”), checks her pinned notes at the start and end of each day, and schedules time for tasks so she can quiet the swirl: “Yes, that’s important, and I’ve scheduled time to get it done.”
Emotional: She names the feeling. “Hey there, Anxiety. It actually makes sense you’re showing up here.” That’s it. “When the tender parts of us feel seen, or get a blanket of compassion, they have a way of loosening their grip.”
Physical: She protects time with no new input at all, no social media, no email pings, not even podcasts. “It’s not a coincidence that our best, most creative ideas sometimes come to us in the shower.”
Relational: One-on-one time with each of her kids, which she calls “the most potent tool in my parenting belt,” and protected time with her partner too.
Why is a moment, not a spa day or a solo trip, what actually changes how we show up?
“Life happens in the ordinary, everyday moments with our families, when nobody is handing us a robe or a cucumber water,” she says. A moment is something you can reach for between your child’s whining and your response. Practiced often enough, she explains, those pauses build new patterns. “This isn’t magic. It’s building new circuitry in our brains.”
When It’s All Too Much
Dr. Cassidy is candid that the instinct to do more runs deep, even for a therapist. When life tips into overwhelm, she tries to stop asking how to do everything better.
So what does she ask instead?
“What can actually be reduced? What can wait? What can be cancelled? Who can help? What expectations can I release? Where can I slow things down?” she says. “Sometimes we confuse regulation with adding another strategy to our plate. Sometimes we need a moment to acknowledge that the load we’re carrying isn’t sustainable. We were never meant to manage every need alone. We are human!”
What Ends With Us
Some of the heaviest moments of parenting, she says, aren’t really about the bedtime negotiation in front of us. “Becoming a parent has a way of bringing forward a lot of our old ‘stuff.’”
How do the patterns we inherited show up in those moments?
As children, she explains, our job is to keep our caretakers close, and we learn unspoken rules about what keeps people near and what pushes them away. Those rules can harden into beliefs about what makes us worthy or lovable, and what big feelings mean. Then our kids arrive without any of those rules, and that can be understandably triggering.
She’s careful not to make this about blame. “They were little once too, and probably didn’t have therapy, books, or other support to work through their own experiences,” she says of our parents’ generation. Legacy work, the thread that runs through her book, is about looking closely and deciding “what we’ll pass on and what stops with us.”
And for the mom who has been her own harshest critic her whole life?
“I believe self-compassion is responding to ourselves in a way that makes growth possible,” she says. Instead of I’m a terrible mom, she offers another script: “Whoa, that was hard. I got overwhelmed and reactive. If I’m a good person who got overwhelmed and reactive, how did I get there?”
“That’s how I’d want my own kids to talk to themselves one day,” she says. “So why wouldn’t I deserve that same tenderness? Turns out, I do. And so do you.”
A New Definition of a Good Mom
Three kids and one book later, Dr. Cassidy’s idea of a “good mom” looks very different than it once did. “I used to think being a good mom meant getting it right all the time: being patient, present, prepared, and always available,” she says. “Now I think being a good mom means being willing to stay in relationship, both with my family and with myself.”
That means naming her limits, repairing when she gets it wrong, and letting her kids know her as a real person with needs and boundaries. “My goal isn’t perfection anymore. That was never possible, and I understand now that I sought it for safety.”
Is there one piece of motherhood advice she’d love to retire?
“‘Enjoy every moment!’” she says. “It’s an impossible standard.” Motherhood can be joyful, and it can also be boring, lonely, infuriating, and exhausting, and none of that cancels out gratitude. What she’d tell moms instead: “This feels hard because it is. They don’t need you to be perfect. What a gift to them that you aren’t, because they aren’t either.”
The gift, ultimately, is the example. When mothers protect their margins, she says, their children learn to protect their own, so that one day, “if they’re the ones wiping our butts,” they’ll know Mom would want them to care for themselves too, “because they saw her do it.”
Her last word is for the mom who still feels guilty for needing a breath. “Needing a moment doesn’t mean you don’t love your life or your kids,” she says. “It means you are a real, living person inside of motherhood. You are not just a role, a resource, or the one who has to guide everything alone.”
