After her divorce, she cut off Halloween joy

parenting regret – During a stressful divorce, a mother says she became overwhelmed and “couldn’t always access” the calm parenting she wanted—turning everyday moments into power struggles and snapping at her daughters. Now she says she’s trying to show up differently, starting

The night began like any other: she and her daughters were out canvassing for trick-or-treating, their costumes turning the neighborhood into something bright and playful. Her 8-year-old dressed as a devil. Her 5-year-old sister wore a superhero outfit.

But as the candy buckets filled, a different kind of tension rose. Her youngest refused to say “thank you” as neighbors dropped handfuls into her bucket, and the mother’s frustration kept building until she snapped. “Say ‘thank you,’ or Halloween is cancelled,” she told her.

Her daughter stared at her stubbornly. Her sister’s face dropped. In that instant. the mother says she realized what she was doing—she had entered a power struggle with a kindergartner. which she described as the opposite of what she learned in college after taking multiple early childhood education classes.

Even now, she regrets that version of herself. “I deeply regret the mom I was during my stressful divorce,” she wrote, adding: “I’ll spend the rest of my life making it up to my daughters.”

Before the divorce, she had a plan—at least on paper. She worked her way through school as a nanny and preschool teacher. trying to counteract her own “tumultuous childhood” by learning age-appropriate positive parenting skills. She wanted to give her future children the childhood she felt she didn’t get.

Then life changed. Her marriage imploded after five years. Custody became a question instead of a given, and she says the years that followed were marked by fear—terrified she would lose her children. That fear, she describes, fed anxiety, depression, and dysregulation.

In her account, she wasn’t just stressed in the abstract; she says she was physically present while her mind raced through the next crisis. “At the time, I was physically present but mentally calculating bills, rehearsing court testimony, or wondering how I would pay next month’s rent.”

On the playground, even while reading books curled together, part of her remained elsewhere.

Her regret also includes moments when the stress spilled out as anger. She says she yelled too much during those years. Once. during a rare-for-us vacation. she snapped at one of her daughters while the child was “just being silly.” She says she believes the stress she was holding onto “ruined our vacation when my kids were 8 and 10.”.

She still remembers happy pieces—sledding in winter, and picnic dinners by the lake on long summer days. But she says certain images sting. She can still see the night she fell asleep before exchanging the tooth under her oldest daughter’s pillow with a note from the Tooth Fairy. She can also recall ranting about something so insignificant that she doesn’t remember it now—only that her daughter responded quietly with: “Mom. you don’t have to get so mad.”.

That line stayed with her. She says that night, lying in bed, she couldn’t sleep. Her daughter’s words ran through her mind “on a loop.”

She writes that she knew what good parenting looked like, even then. What she couldn’t always do, she says, was access it. “My girls deserved a mom who wasn’t constantly afraid, and I deserved a life that didn’t require me to be,” she wrote.

Now, she says, she’s trying to live differently. The regret remains, because she believes her daughters absorbed too much of her fear and stress during those years. But she also points to a belief that she repeats to herself: it’s never too late to become the mother she wanted to be—calm. present. supportive. and someone whose emotions her daughters don’t feel responsible for.

She grieves what the family “could’ve had,” even as she watches her girls grow into smart, capable, and kind young women she says she is “couldn’t be more proud of.”

She can’t change who she was then. But she insists she can choose who she is now. In practical terms, she says she’s looking for ways to make it up to them, treating each visit, phone call, and conversation as another chance to show up differently.

In one example she shared, her oldest daughter called recently. The mother says she told her she wasn’t busy even though she only had five minutes before she needed to rinse the color out of her hair. Her daughter then launched into a long, heartfelt story. The mother says she let her speak, even as her timer started going off.

It was the kind of moment her younger self didn’t know how to create—attention, patience, and listening instead of pressure. “Would I do it again? In a heartbeat,” she wrote.

At the end of the piece, she invites other parents to share their own regret, directing readers to email Jennifer Beck Goldblatt at jgoldblatt@insider.com to share their experiences with Business Insider.

divorce parenting regret custody stress early childhood education anxiety family life emotional responsibility daughters Halloween