It’s 4am and I’m awake in the dark, my thoughts keeping time with his snoring from the far side of the king bed.
Breakfast, lunch, snack, dinner. What to feed my family today. In eight years I’ve thought about and prepared something like 8,760 meals. And that’s before the inventory of what’s actually in the fridge, the expiry date on the guacamole nobody touched and the fact that she liked eggs last week but doesn’t this week.
Someone will tell me to get more organized. Think ahead. And I would. Except you cannot meal-plan your way out of a moving target.
. . .
The same man snoring beside me now is the one who used to sit across from me at a small white table that folded down to fit the apartment. Somehow it became the center of everything. Where we ate, where we worked. We weren’t always talking. We were just there, in each other’s orbit, and that was the whole point of it.
Back then we had a queen size bed which gave just enough room that our backs and butts found each other every night whether we meant them to or not. It was absurd and completely comforting at once. On weekend mornings we stayed in bed till 9am, talking or watching a show we both loved on the laptop.
Nobody called it anything but our nervous systems knew exactly what they were doing. Each one borrowing calm from the other through nothing more than proximity. He was my person. Around him I was lighter, more myself, more human and less like a system.
There’s a word for it. Co-regulation. At the time it just felt like being married to him.
. . .Then she was born. The best thing that ever happened to me, and the same morning, she detonated everything I knew. No warning. No chance to catch my breath. The first months were survival — hers and mine. Keep her alive. Stay upright. That was the entire job. Everything else, the table, the queen bed, the time with him went into a box I didn’t have a free hand to open.
This wasn’t unique to my marriage. It’s what happens when two people become three. The moment your child arrives, your body becomes infrastructure. Literally. She regulates her temperature from your skin. She finds calm in your heartbeat, the same one she heard for nine months from the inside.
She smells you in the air, actual odor molecules, actual chemistry, and her nervous system reads it as safety and stands down. You are not a person to her yet. You are the environment itself.
. . .
This is biology. And it’s also the beginning of something neither you nor your partner saw coming. Your bandwidth just got redirected. All of it. To someone who needed it to survive.
But babies grow and change. They no longer need your heartbeat to slow theirs. They no longer need your skin to keep warm. The bandwidth, though? That never gets handed back. It simply expands. One day you realize it’s not just your body anymore. Your mind has joined it. You’re lying in bed trying to fall asleep but can’t.
Did I sign the field trip form?
She’s almost outgrown those shoes.
We’re out of milk.
Picture day is Tuesday.
I still need to book the dentist.
She said her knee hurt yesterday. Was she just tired? I should keep an eye on that.
Don’t forget the birthday gift.
She won’t eat eggs anymore.
What am I making for dinner tomorrow?
None of those thoughts finish. You don’t solve them at 10:47 p.m. You don’t solve them at 2:13 a.m. You certainly don’t solve them while folding towels or driving to school. They remain open, quietly looping in the background while life keeps demanding new ones.
Psychologists call this the Zeigarnik effect: unfinished tasks stay active in the mind until they’re resolved. Motherhood isn’t one unfinished task. It’s fifty. Sometimes a hundred. Some are tiny. Some are invisible. They don’t look heavy because none of them weigh very much on their own. It’s the simultaneity that crushes you. Not the dentist.
The dentist, the groceries, the permission slip, the birthday RSVP — and the gift, wrapped and ready — the laundry in the washer, the library book due Friday, the teacher email you haven’t answered, the way she came home quiet today and you’re not sure why but you’re keeping an eye on it.
The insurance renewal, the property tax deadline, the trip itinerary nobody asked you to build but would fall apart without, the flight nobody else checked in for, the sunscreen you’re almost out of, the chicken you forgot to thaw, and the fact that she suddenly hates pasta even though you bought two boxes because she loved it last week.
All of it. All at once. Every day.
. . .
Picture trying to hear someone whisper your name in a room where fifty radios are all playing different stations. The whisper is real. The person saying it loves you. Your ears still work. There’s just no room left to hear it.
Even in the night. For years she found her way to your bed in the dark. Small feet, warm body, climbing in between you. Your husband loved it, family, warmth, everyone together, utterly content. She’d settle immediately and sleep. He’d sleep. The whole king bed breathing slowly around you.
You loved her being there. And you spent the night being kicked, elbowed, and quietly reorganized around two people who had no idea. Even in sleep the output never fully stopped. It just got quieter.Then morning comes and with it, him.
A hug in the hallway. A joke that actually lands. An evening on the couch playing a game, talking, laughing. These moments regulate him. You can feel it. His whole system settles when you laugh at his joke, when you reach back in the hug, when you’re both present together. And yours does too. The warmth is real. The connection is real.
But somewhere in the middle of the game, between one turn and the next, a loop opens quietly. Did she pack her water bottle for tomorrow?
Not loud. Not urgent. Just — there. The way it always is. His mind is still. Yours never fully lands.
. . .
This is where we’ve misunderstood co-regulation. We’ve treated it as something emotional. But it’s also capacity dependent. It needs somewhere to put the incoming calm. A phone at 12% battery is still functioning, still doing everything asked of it, but slower, dimmer, everything costing more than it should.
It needs charging. The charger exists. But thirty seconds plugged in before another demand on the battery isn’t enough to restore a full battery.
Her calm is the emotional climate her child learns to live in, her partner reaches toward, her family breathes inside. That’s not a marriage problem. That’s not a her problem. That’s just what nobody told us co-regulation actually requires.
Kate Szatmari is a celebrity photographer and writer exploring motherhood, the nervous system, and the slow work of reparenting yourself while raising a kid. A Hungarian immigrant based in the US, she writes through lived experience with a sharp eye for cultural patterns most of us were never given language for. She publishes on Substack at kateszatmari1.substack.com.
