When the Parent Who Does Everything Suddenly Can't

A few days ago, I was the parent who got up when somebody cried.

I could pick up my children, get them where they needed to go, grab the thing someone forgot, change a diaper, make food, chase a toddler, get everyone into the car, and do the thousand tiny physical tasks involved in parenting young children without consciously thinking about what my body was doing.

Then I got hurt.

And after surgery to repair my ACL, both menisci, and a more complicated fracture than we initially anticipated, I came home unable to put any weight on one leg. My knee is locked straight in a brace. Getting from one place to another now requires equipment, planning, and often another human being.

I went from being one of the primary caregivers in my family to needing care myself.

I knew recovery would be physically difficult.

I wasn't prepared for what it would do to my identity.

When One Person Changes, the Family Changes

As a Marriage and Family Therapist, I spend a lot of time thinking about people relationally.

Family systems theory asks us to look beyond an individual person and consider the relationships, roles, patterns, and functions connecting everyone within a family. When something significant happens to one member, it doesn't simply happen to that person.

The system responds.

Research supports this relational understanding. A systematic review by Bertschi, Meier, and Bodenmann (2021) examined couples in which one partner was living with a chronic physical or sensory impairment. Across the research, couples described changes involving roles and responsibilities, communication, intimacy, and social participation.

I'm experiencing that concept very differently from this side of the therapy room.

Our family didn't have a meeting and decide to redistribute everyone's roles.

My body made the decision for us.

Things I normally do now have to be done by my husband or another family member.

Someone else may have to respond when one of my children needs something even when I'm sitting right there. And that can create a strange emotional contradiction.

I can be overwhelmingly grateful that I have people willing to care for me and my children. And I can absolutely hate needing them to do it. Both are true.

When "I Can't" Starts Feeling Like "I'm Not"

That's where this becomes more than a logistical problem.

When you're accustomed to measuring your role partly by what you do, losing the ability to do those things can very quickly start messing with how you think about who you are.

I can't pick up my child right now.

I can't get up and follow them into another room.

I can't automatically be the person who responds.

Those are statements about my current physical abilities.

But the brain is remarkably good at turning them into something much crueler:

• I'm not doing enough.

• Everyone else is having to do my job.

• I'm a burden.

• My children are missing something because of me.

• Maybe I'm not being the mother I should be.

Research suggests that our relationships matter during these transitions, too. Tough, Siegrist, and Fekete's (2017) systematic review found associations between social relationships—including social support, negative interactions, family functioning, and relationship quality—and mental health and well-being among people with physical disabilities.

In other words, adapting to changes in physical ability isn't solely an individual psychological task.

We adapt relationally.

There Is Grief in the "Maybe"

And then there is the part I wasn't expecting.

The brace is temporary.

This particular stage of recovery is temporary.

But recovery doesn't necessarily mean returning to exactly who I was before I got hurt.

My children are still little. When I imagined them growing up, I never specifically imagined my knees.

I didn't think about whether I would be physically capable of running beside them, jumping on a trampoline, chasing them through the yard, or doing all the ridiculous things children ask their parents to do.

I simply assumed I would. Now I don't know.

Maybe rehabilitation will give me back more than I currently imagine. Maybe some activities will need to look different. Maybe there will be things my body simply shouldn't do anymore.

There is an uncomfortable amount of grief inside that maybe.

Grief isn't reserved for death.

Sometimes we grieve an identity. A role. Independence. An imagined future. The version of our body we assumed would accompany us into that future.

And uncertainty makes that grief particularly strange because I'm grieving possibilities I don't even know I've lost.

Parenting Is Relational, Too

As I've tried to understand what I'm experiencing, one piece of research particularly stayed with me.

In a 2024 qualitative study, Shpigelman and Karlinski Argi interviewed 20 mothers with visible, lifelong physical disabilities about the intersection of disability and motherhood. Their experiences included navigating dependence on others, questions of parental competence, identity, stigma, and the complicated relationship between receiving physical assistance and maintaining their identities as mothers.

Their experiences are not mine.

These women were living with lifelong physical disabilities. I am writing from the very different experience of a significant injury, surgery, and a period of physical disability in which I don't yet know what will be temporary and what limitations, if any, will remain.

But parts of their stories resonated with me.

And resonance is not equivalence.

One distinction in particular has stayed with me: the difference between physically performing every caregiving task and being someone's mother.

Because somewhere along the way, many of us have absorbed an incredibly physical definition of good parenting.

• Good moms carry the babies.

• Good moms get on the floor.

• Good moms take everybody places.

• Good moms chase their children around.

• Good moms handle everything.

And when your body suddenly says, No, you cannot do that, it can feel as though your identity is being taken away along with the activity.

But my children don't experience me as a collection of completed tasks. They experience me through our relationship.

• I can still comfort them.

• I can still listen.

• I can still make them laugh.

• I can still be the person they want to tell something to.

• I can still set boundaries, apologize, teach, cuddle in whatever way my body safely allows, and be emotionally present.

Someone else performing a physical task for my child doesn't make that person their mother.

And needing help doesn't make me less of one. I'm still working on believing that last part.

I Don't Have the Inspirational Ending Yet

I'm a therapist, which means part of my brain desperately wants to wrap this experience in a therapeutic bow.

Find the meaning.

Identify the growth.

Reframe the negative thought.

Write the inspirational ending.

But I'm not there.

I'm still in the brace.

I'm still dependent on other people.

I'm still frustrated.

I'm still grieving.

I'm still wondering what my body will eventually be able to do.

And perhaps there's value in talking about this part, too.

We don't have to wait until something difficult is over before we're allowed to talk about what it's teaching us.

Sometimes adaptation isn't a beautiful moment of acceptance.

Sometimes it's being grateful that someone brought you what you needed while simultaneously wanting to scream because you couldn't get it yourself.

Sometimes it's watching someone else do something for your child that you desperately wish you could do.

Sometimes it's discovering how much of your identity was tied to being needed while you're learning how to be the one who needs.

And sometimes it's recognizing that two things can be true at exactly the same time:

I can know that my worth as a mother has nothing to do with whether I can run. And I can still be heartbroken by the possibility that I might not run with my children.

I don't know yet exactly what my body will be able to do.

But perhaps part of this process is learning that becoming a different kind of parent does not mean becoming a lesser one.

And for right now, I'm trying to let that be enough.

A Note From a Therapist

If you're reading this because illness, injury, chronic pain, disability, pregnancy complications, surgery, or another major life change has altered what you're able to do within your family, I want to offer something I've been reminding myself:

You don't have to wait until you're "better" to acknowledge what this change has cost you.

Changes in physical ability can affect far more than our bodies. They can change roles within a marriage or partnership, shift parenting responsibilities, increase dependence on others, disrupt intimacy, change routines, and challenge parts of our identity that we may not have realized were connected to what we could physically do.

From a relational perspective, these changes don't happen to one person in isolation. Families adapt together.

Sometimes that adaptation is beautiful. Sometimes it's frustrating, messy, unfair, or exhausting. Usually, it's some combination of all of those things.

You may feel grateful for the people helping you and resentful that you need help.

You may know intellectually that your worth hasn't changed and still feel less useful.

You may know that your children love and need you, not your physical abilities, and still grieve the things you cannot currently—or perhaps eventually—do with them.

Those feelings don't cancel each other out.

Therapy during a major physical transition doesn't have to be about convincing yourself to "look on the bright side." It can be a place to grieve, adjust, talk honestly about resentment or guilt, renegotiate roles within relationships, communicate needs and boundaries, and begin figuring out who you are within a body or family system that may function differently than it did before.

Sometimes the therapeutic work isn't learning how to feel okay about what happened.

Sometimes it's learning how to make room for what happened while continuing to build a meaningful life and meaningful relationships around it.

And sometimes the whole family needs space to figure out what this new version of family life looks like together.

A Note About Disability and My Experience

I also want to be intentional about the language I use here.

Right now, I am experiencing significant physical disability as the result of an injury and surgery. I don't yet know exactly what will be temporary, what recovery will look like, or whether there will be lasting limitations.

That experience is real.

It also does not mean that I suddenly understand what it is like to live with a lifelong or chronic disability.

Some of the research that helped me make sense of my experience—including research involving mothers with lifelong physical disabilities—describes experiences of dependence, identity, parenting, and perceived parental competence that resonated deeply with me.

But resonance is not equivalence.

Disability is not one universal experience. It is shaped by someone's body, diagnosis or injury, environment, accessibility, relationships, culture, resources, discrimination, and countless other factors.

So I'm writing from where I actually am: a mother, therapist, and temporarily disabled person trying to understand what has happened to my body, my role within my family, and the future I had quietly assumed would look a certain way.

I don't know yet what comes next.

That's part of the story, too.

References & Further Reading

Bertschi, I. C., Meier, F., & Bodenmann, G. (2021). Disability as an interpersonal experience: A systematic review on dyadic challenges and dyadic coping when one partner has a chronic physical or sensory impairment. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 624609. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.624609

Rolland, J. S. (2018). Helping couples and families navigate illness and disability: An integrated approach. Guilford Press.

Shpigelman, C.-N., & Karlinski Argi, R. (2024). "Motherhood forced me to cope with my disability": Identity intersection among mothers with physical disabilities. Frontiers in Psychology, 15, 1398456.

Tough, H., Siegrist, J., & Fekete, C. (2017). Social relationships, mental health and wellbeing in physical disability: A systematic review. BMC Public Health, 17, 414. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-017-4308-6