When the Moment Feels Impossible, Make the Moment Smaller

You’ve been bouncing your baby for what feels like forever. You’ve fed her, changed her diaper, walked circles around the kitchen, tried the carrier and the pacifier. You’ve held her against your chest and rocked harder, then softer, then stood up because maybe she doesn’t want you to sit down. She is still crying.

At first, you were trying to figure out what she needed. But as the crying continues, something starts to shift. You begin to wonder why you can’t soothe your own baby. Maybe you’re missing something. Maybe something is wrong. You’re her mother. Shouldn’t you know what she needs? And if you can’t figure this out now, what is tonight going to look like? What about tomorrow?

The crying hasn’t changed, but the moment has gotten much bigger. It’s no longer just a baby who is crying and a mother who doesn’t yet know why. Now it’s about whether you’re a good mother, whether your baby is okay, whether you can trust yourself, and whether this is what your life is going to feel like from now on.

This is one of the things our minds do when we’re uncomfortable and uncertain. We take what’s happening right now and begin adding meaning to it. We add the past and the future, and we add everything we think the moment says about us. Suddenly we aren’t just holding a crying baby. We’re holding everything we fear the crying might mean.

And we do this far beyond the baby years. Your child has a tantrum in the dairy aisle at the grocery store, and within minutes the story becomes that your child is difficult, you don’t know how to hold a boundary, everyone around you thinks you’re a terrible mother, and you shouldn’t have attempted the grocery store in the first place. An email with critical feedback from your boss becomes evidence that you’re bad at your job, you’re never going to get the raise, and maybe you’re not nearly as capable as everyone thinks you are. Your husband walks through the house with heavy footsteps and barely says hello, and before you’ve even asked him what’s going on, you’re wondering if he’s angry with you, what you did wrong, and what his mood says about the state of your relationship.

There may be something in each of these moments that deserves your attention. Your child may need a boundary. Your boss may have feedback you need to consider. Your husband may actually be upset with you. Making the moment smaller isn’t about convincing yourself that everything is fine. It’s about separating what is actually happening from everything your mind has added to it.

The tantrum is happening. The email contains critical feedback. Your husband walked into the house heavily and didn’t say much. Those are the facts, and the facts give you somewhere much steadier to stand.

So when the moment begins to feel impossible, make the moment smaller.

Come back to what is actually happening right now. Maybe that means noticing this breath, the weight of your baby against your chest, your feet on the floor, or the sounds around you. Maybe the fact is simply, My baby is crying, and I don’t know why yet.

Notice how different that is from I should be able to fix this. Or Something is wrong. Or I can’t do this.

The first statement describes what is happening. The others are stories about what is happening. Those stories may feel completely true in the moment, but they’re still interpretations, predictions and conclusions. When we can begin to tell the difference, the moment often becomes more manageable.

Your nervous system doesn’t live ten years from now

One of the remarkable things about being human is that our bodies can respond to something we are imagining as though it is happening right now. We can be standing safely in our kitchen while our minds are ten years into the future. We can be holding a healthy baby while imagining everything that could possibly go wrong. We can be looking at a child having one difficult afternoon while wondering whether they are ever going to be okay.

This is one of the things our strategic intelligence does incredibly well. It anticipates, predicts, looks for patterns and tries to solve problems before they happen. These capacities help us build careers, manage households, make complicated decisions and take care of the people we love. They are particularly well developed in many of the highly capable women I work with.

But there are moments when this same intelligence makes it harder to see what is actually in front of us. Instead of experiencing one difficult moment, we experience this moment plus the ten possible moments that could follow it. We start solving a future that doesn’t exist yet while our body responds as though all of it is happening now.

Relational intelligence asks something different of us. It asks us to stay with reality long enough to notice what is actually happening before we decide what it means or what we need to do about it.

Sometimes there is a problem to solve. Sometimes action is absolutely necessary. But we are much more capable of seeing what a moment requires when we aren’t simultaneously trying to solve every possible future it could lead to.

Make it as small as you need to

Sometimes even today is too big.

If you’re exhausted and your baby has been crying for hours, thinking about getting through the rest of the day may feel impossible. So don’t get through the rest of the day yet. Get through the next five minutes. And if five minutes feels too big, come back to the next minute. If a minute feels too big, come back to this breath.

Feel your feet on the floor. Notice the weight of your baby in your arms. Look at your child’s face. Ask yourself what you actually know right now.

Making the moment smaller might mean noticing the difference between My child is having a hard time and My child is not okay. It might mean noticing the difference between I made a mistake at work and I’m failing at my career. It might mean noticing the difference between My partner is upset with me and Our relationship is falling apart.

You don’t have to force yourself to believe that everything will be okay. In fact, that can become another attempt to create certainty where certainty isn’t available. You can simply stop asking yourself to carry what hasn’t happened yet.

That isn’t denial. It isn’t pretending something isn’t difficult, refusing to plan for the future, or telling yourself that your fears are irrational. It’s allowing yourself to respond to what is actually here before responding to what might be.

You don’t have to solve motherhood all at once

Motherhood gives us very little certainty. Our children keep changing. What worked yesterday stops working. We make decisions without knowing exactly how they’ll turn out. We get things wrong, we repair, we learn, and then the landscape changes again.

For women who are accustomed to being able to think their way toward an answer, this can be profoundly uncomfortable. When uncertainty appears, the instinct is often to think harder, gather more information, predict further into the future and find the answer that will finally allow us to relax.

But motherhood rarely gives us that kind of certainty, and trying to manufacture it can make an already difficult moment feel enormous.

You are not raising your child for the next eighteen years today. You don’t need to know exactly who they will become. You don’t need to know how this difficult season ends while you’re still living inside it. And you don’t need to turn one hard moment into evidence about the kind of mother you are.

Sometimes your job is just to come back to what is here. This breath. This footstep. This eye contact. This fact. Then, from there, you can ask what this particular moment needs from you.

When the moment feels impossible, make the moment smaller.