mom guilt

Watch Parents Rally Around A Mom Spiraling From A Brutal 5 AM Wake Up

“I’m the worst mom,” she said after feeling helpless to console her 1-year-old daughter.

A new parent’s emotional 5 a.m. video shows how draining mom guilt can be for having difficulty comf...
@hanzcakess / TikTok

In a story that every single mom can relate to, a TikTok is going viral in which an exhausted and sleep deprived mom confesses that she feels inadequate as a parent when she can’t seem to get her one-year-old baby to stop crying.

TikToker and parent Hannah Charles (@hanzcakess) got emotional as she spoke to the camera during a 5 a.m. confession where she discouragingly said she feels like “the worst mom.”

Charles explained that her 1-year-old daughter is going through a sleep regression. When Charles tried to breastfeed her daughter back to sleep, she realized that her breast milk had dried up and she didn’t know. So throughout the night, when she would go in for a night waking to feed, she didn’t realize that her daughter wasn’t getting any milk.

“I was just doing what I knew, and she was latching! Like, I thought she was eating,” Charles mentioned.

The pair were up for hours in the middle of the night, Charles exhausted and desperate to console her baby. “I gave her pain medicine. I let her play. I held her. I brought her into my bed. I tried everything,” she said.

At that point, Charles confessed she didn’t know what else to do to make her child stop fussing. So, she put her in her crib and let her cry it out.

“Finally, I just broke, and I got to a point where I just put her in her crib, and I just let her cry,” Charles shared.

Though Charles explained that she went back to check on her daughter multiple times, nothing seemed to calm down the upset baby.

After some time, she took her daughter out of her crib to let her play, out of options of what to try to make her feel better. Too exhausted to breastfeed again, she prepared a bottle for her baby.

Charles then explained that she truly thought her daughter would not take the bottle, especially since the bottle was cold. However, the baby was so thirsty she didn’t even care if the bottle was warm.

“She chugged it and went straight to sleep,” Charles said through tears before admitting, “I was getting frustrated with my daughter for being thirsty.”

While Charles was beating herself up over how the evening progressed into the early morning hours, followers flooded her comment section with words of comfort and support.

One follower reassured Charles that most moms have been in that same moment in one way or another. They wrote, “You are not a bad mom! I’ve had something along these lines happen to me as well. It seriously happens to all of us!”

Another wanted Charles to realize that by staying up all night with her daughter and wracking her brain for every possible solution to the problem is what makes her, in fact, a great mom.

“You are trying your best! And the fact that you tried a million things to console her, that is the best example of what being a really good mom means!” they assured.

Others commented on a new fear being “unlocked” of one’s breastmilk suddenly drying up out of nowhere. One user wrote, “That can happen?? That suddenly?? Just one day it dries up? I’m so sorry!”

Charles responded to the comment with a response video. “In my case, I think it’s been happening slowly because I have been weaning my daughter,” she explained. “I think my body just slowly stopped producing and then last night just completely stopped.”

“So a lot of things can contribute to your milk drying up: diet, hormones, weaning, exercise, stress. There’s a lot, but in my case, I think it was because I was previously weaning her from her daytime feeds and when she slept through the night those few times, my body just decided to stop producing ...” she continued.

After a beat, Charles makes one last prediction for the cause of her breastmilk drying up. “Or, I’m pregnant,” she says quickly.

Sure enough, exactly one month after that TikTok video, Charles shared the news that she and her husband are expecting their second child.

“I can’t wait to do this journey all over again. Love you all,” she captioned the sweet video.

Charles is due with baby no. 2 in May 2023. And that baby will have a great mom.