Feeling Touched Out as a Mom? One Sunday Changed Everything

My Highlight Time is a HiMoment column where real readers share the small, often unspoken moments of self-care, connection, and discovery that shaped them. Names have been changed to protect privacy.

Feeling Touched Out as a Mom? One Sunday Changed Everything

By Keisha, 38 — Atlanta, GA

I had been feeling touched out as a mom for longer than I wanted to admit. Not in the dramatic, headline way — more like a slow dimming. Every shift at the hospital meant twelve hours of handing my body over to patient care: lifting, holding, steadying, comforting. Then I would come home and my daughter would need me in all the ways a six-year-old needs her mother, which is to say, every way at once. By the time she fell asleep, I did not want anyone or anything near my skin. I would sit on the couch with my arms crossed over my chest like I was trying to hold myself together, or maybe hold everyone else out.

That is the part nobody tells you about nursing and single motherhood at the same time. You give your body away in twelve-hour increments, and somewhere along the way you forget it is yours.

When Being Touched Feels Like Too Much

It built up so gradually I almost missed it. My daughter, Amara, is affectionate by nature. She is the kind of child who tucks her hand inside yours while you are standing in line at the grocery store, who presses her forehead against your arm while you are cooking, who wants to be carried even though she is old enough to walk. And for a long time, I loved all of it.

But there was a stretch — maybe four months, maybe longer — when her touch started landing on me like a demand. Not because she was doing anything wrong. Because I had nothing left. I would feel her small hand on my shoulder and my whole nervous system would tighten. I would move her gently off my lap and make an excuse about being too warm. I hated myself for it. What kind of mother flinches when her child reaches for her?

The kind who works fifty-hour weeks on her feet. The kind who has not been touched softly, without needing to give something back, in longer than she can remember. The kind who has maybe forty-five minutes between her daughter’s bedtime and her own, and spends most of it staring at the ceiling wondering where she went.

I was not depressed, exactly. I was depleted. There is a difference, though from the inside they can look the same.

The Forty-Five Minutes That Were Mine

A friend — another nurse, another single mom — told me something that stuck. She said, “You have to touch yourself before you can stand being touched by anyone else.” She did not mean it in a crude way. She meant that I had forgotten what it felt like to receive sensation on my own terms, without it being a task or a transaction.

She was the one who told me about HiMoment. Not in a sales pitch kind of way. More like how you tell someone about the magnesium supplement that actually works, or the specific brand of earplugs that blocks out hospital noise. Practical. Matter-of-fact.

So I ordered something. And the first night I used it, after Amara was asleep and the apartment was quiet, I felt strange. Not because of the physical sensation — though that was its own kind of relearning — but because I was doing something that was entirely for me. Not for a patient. Not for my daughter. Not for anyone’s comfort but my own. Those fifteen minutes before I fell asleep became mine. That was enough for right then.

I did not cry that night. But I did sleep differently. Like my body remembered it could soften.

What I Learned About Touch and Motherhood

Over the next few weeks, something shifted. Not overnight, and not in any way I could have predicted. The nightly ritual — even when it was just ten minutes, even when I was exhausted — started working on me the way physical therapy works on a stiff joint. Slowly. Through repetition. Through gentleness.

I started noticing my body during the day. Not just as a tool that carried trays and lifted patients and buckled car seats, but as something that could feel pleasant things. I noticed warm water on my hands when I washed them. I noticed the weight of my own hair against my neck after a shower. Small, dumb, beautiful things I had been sleepwalking past for months.

And then came the Sunday.

Amara had been watching hair tutorials on my phone — she is obsessed with braids right now, the kind with beads at the ends that click together when you move. She asked if she could practice on me. I said sure, mostly because I was tired and sitting still sounded fine.

She stood behind me on the couch. She parted my hair with her small fingers, carefully, the way she had seen me do hers a hundred times. She was not good at it. The sections were uneven and she kept losing her grip. But her hands were so gentle. So deliberate. She was concentrating so hard I could hear her breathing.

And I started crying.

Not sobbing. Not dramatically. Just tears sliding down my face while my six-year-old braided my hair on a Sunday morning with cartoons playing in the background. She did not even notice at first. When she did, she leaned over my shoulder and said, “Mama, does it hurt?”

It did not hurt. That was the whole point. It did not hurt at all.

Why Moms Cry When Their Kids Are Gentle

I have thought about that morning a lot since it happened. I think I cried because it was the first time in months — maybe longer — that someone touched me and I did not have to perform anything in return. I did not have to be strong or capable or comforting. I just had to sit there and receive it.

That sounds simple. It is not simple when you are a mother and a nurse and a single parent and you have trained your entire nervous system to interpret touch as the beginning of a task. Someone touches your arm, you lift. Someone touches your hand, you hold. Someone touches your back, you turn around and fix something.

Amara was not asking me for anything. She was giving. And my body, after weeks of slowly remembering how to feel things on its own terms, was finally open enough to take it in.

I do not think I would have felt it three months earlier. I think I would have sat there stiff and counting the minutes until I could get up and start the laundry. Not because I am a bad mother, but because I was so far gone from my own body that I could not receive even the smallest gift of touch without bracing for what came next.

How Reclaiming My Body Changed Our Relationship

Things are different now. Not fixed — I do not think “fixed” is the right word for something that was never broken, just buried. But different.

I still work long shifts. I still come home tired. Some nights I still need twenty minutes of silence before I can handle being climbed on. But I tell Amara that now instead of just enduring it. I say, “Give Mama ten minutes to land, and then I am all yours.” And she gets it. She waits. And when I open my arms, I mean it.

The bedtime ritual stayed. Some nights it is longer, some nights it is barely anything. But it is the one appointment I keep with myself, the way I used to keep appointments with everyone else. It reminds me that I am still a person with preferences and nerve endings and the capacity to feel good, not just a body that serves.

Last week Amara braided my hair again. She is getting better at it. The parts were straighter, the braids tighter. She put two purple beads at the end of one and said, “Now you click when you walk, like me.”

I did not cry this time. I laughed. Which might be even better.

I walked around the apartment with those lopsided braids for the rest of the day. I clicked when I walked. Amara clicked beside me. We were two people making noise together, and I could feel every bit of it.

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