Feeling alone when you are a part of a large family might seem a strange thing. Reality is you are never really alone at home. From toilet breaks to showering, a set of eyes follows your every move.

When you are left to fend off the little army you created day and night it can become isolating. Catching up on the latest schoolyard gossip, re-learning the six times tables, listening to reading books and supervising mathletics. Cooking dinner, bathing children, putting them to bed 27 times before they go to sleep. Once this is done you sit down in a quiet house and get ready to start preparing for the next day, sometimes it feels like Groundhog Day.

So yes while being apart of a family with children means that you are never physically alone, sometimes you never feel so alone.

While you are pushing repeat on your household tasks, life is happening. People around you that you love are getting sick, bills are coming in thick and fast that you start walking around the house seeing what you can sell. Adult decisions need to be made.

Some days feel like a box is closing in around you and it’s suffocating, the days that your brain feels like it has ten thousand conversations going on in your head and yet you don’t actually feel like you are apart of any of it.

Some days the burdens start piling in, the emotional toll takes its place inside you and your body aches, because up seems down and down seems sideways.

The insides of you are tearing you every which way, but on the outside you are still Mary Poppins. The kids still need you; quitting parenting is not an option.

Some days the simplest tasks feel like such a heavy burden.

Some days we just survive. We hit survival mode.

Some days we just feel alone.

But we aren’t alone. We are never alone.

We aren’t alone, because everyone has someone who loves them. In those moments of need there is someone who is willing to listen, to help, to understand.

Life happens, and it is so hard to do the parenting thing when there are so many other struggles we are dealing with as well.

To ask for help or to share your load is not a sign of weakness. No in fact it makes you stronger.

Surviving this crazy journey of parenting is sharing it with people who are cheering for you. Who will walk along side you encouraging you forward, and on the days that you hit survival mode they will carry you.

Parenting can feel so lonely, but you are never alone.