Kate Langbroek: "The day I wished I was never a mother."

There are days when being a mother seems like too tough a burden to bear.

Kate Langbroek has shared a heart-wrenching Mothers’ Day story about the days when being a mother is almost too hard to handle.

In today’s Sunday Style, the television and radio personality tells of the moment her son Lewis, who had been diagnosed with leukaemia, was wheeled into surgery for a biopsy to investigate why he had gone blind in one eye.

The 49-year-old recounts the terror that overcame her at the thought that Lewis might lose his battle with cancer, and her despair at feeling that this was a thing she could not bear – that being a mother, in that instant, was simply too hard, too painful, too much.

“It was the day I wished I was never a mother. Because I could not bear it,” she writes of the 2010 incident. “It was a dreadful day. Truly dreadful. Full of dread.”

Langbroek also tells of the realisation, as she placated her frightened son in his hospital bed, that she must bear it.

“I was his mother. And because he was frightened, I could not be,” the Kiis FM drive show co-host writes.

“I thought I could not bear it, but I did. Because I could not panic and I could not run. Because I was his mother. And because he was frightened, I could not be.”

She says she realised what so many other mothers have realised before her: that sometimes, when it comes to your children, there is no choice but the unbearable. That being strong for your child when you have no strength left for yourself is just what being a mother is.

This year, after two years in remission, Kate’s 11-year-old son will go on a class trip to Italy. He will break his mother’s heart all over again, in a different way. And he will continue to do so throughout his life.

But, as Kate so wisely says: “I am a boy’s mother, and doing that job well means knowing how to let go.

“I did not know that when I took on the role. I had not thought it through. But now it is upon me, I am performing to the best of my limited, but infinite, abilities.”

Read more: 

Motherhood is a continual process of letting go.

I struggle with motherhood every single day.

‘Today, we remember the mothers whose children are not here.’

‘I miss you, Mum.’

14 hard truths about motherhood nobody tells you while you’re pregnant.

What’s the hardest day you’ve ever had as a mother?