Being the “mom friend” is a gift until nobody checks on you. Let people take care of you too.

Looking after everybody is a real talent and it quietly turns into a job description. Once you are the person who checks on others, people stop asking how you are, partly because you always seem fine and partly because you have never given them practice at it. The arrangement works until the week you need something, and then you discover the traffic only flows one way. That is not anybody’s cruelty, just a habit everyone fell into, including you.

Tell one person something true that you have not been handling well. Let them be clumsy about it. And when somebody does ask, resist the reflex to say you are fine.