iMOM

“I don’t want to practice today!” my daughter said about her daily violin practice. “Why can’t I just skip it and practice two hours on Saturday instead?” Thankfully, my husband, a musician himself, jumped in: “You get better results if you practice a little each day.” The teacher in me couldn’t agree more.

I was struggling, and my kids were too. Here’s the backstory: I noticed that when I came home from work, or even from a short trip running errands, Reese and Jack would start fighting and arguing with each other, and acting out to get my attention. They didn’t do that when I was gone because they weren’t trying to get anyone else’s attention—they wanted mine. Kids can never get enough time with Mom, right? I saw it from their side, and from the mom side too.

I never expected sideline reporting to make me a better mom. But the longer I’ve been doing both, the more I realize the skills I’ve built as an ESPN commentator follow me straight home to Reese and Jack. The sidelines are a pressure cooker. You’re reading body language, deciding on the one question to ask in a split second, and staying calm when everything around you is anything but. Motherhood requires all of that and then some. Every working mom has her own version of the sideline.

During my stint in the corporate world, I learned the value of a good intern. Every summer, I’d mentor someone who took specific tasks off my plate while learning how our company worked. Then baby number two came along, and I left that life behind. I have to admit, though, there are plenty of days I’ve wished I could have brought an intern with me to help carry some of the mental load of motherhood. These days, AI is about as close as we’re going to get.

The time I got completely trucked on live TV during a Georgia game, my only real option was to get back up. Two players came flying off the field, leveled me, and the cameras kept rolling. There’s no pause button in live TV and no do-overs. I just have to stay calm and keep going. Motherhood and live broadcasting have more in common than I ever expected. Both are completely unscripted. Both will humble you on your best day.

I cover the NFL for ESPN. I also have a preschooler and a six-year-old at home. And those two things don’t always coexist gracefully. This past fall, I had a really rough moment dropping Reese off at school. I realized I didn’t even know where to go to pick her up because I had never been there in the afternoons, not once. The mom guilt is real. I wrestle with it all the time. But I’ve learned that being present for my kids doesn’t always require being in the same room (or in the pickup line).

Some of my earliest memories of cooking with Reese involve doing it almost entirely one-handed. She was a baby, and I wasn’t about to put her down. So there we were, her on my hip, me stirring whatever was on the stove, both of us figuring it out. Jack was the same way. From the very beginning, the kitchen has just been where we are. On the days I’m anchoring NFL Live or coming off a long day of production meetings, cooking is sometimes the last thing I feel like doing.

Before my maternity leave ended with Jack, I tried to put into words what those months at home as a family of four meant to me. I posted something on Instagram—part reflection, part poem—about sifting through the mess and laundry to find the gold. About how their innocence breaks your heart and heals it at the same time. About the desperate grappling for who you were, only to discover that they make you whole.

You know your Mom Checklist that you constantly mentally manage? The one that says you need to pack the perfect lunch, respond to every school email, show up looking put-together, manage bathtime without raising your voice, and somehow still have energy left over to be present and fun? And when you do manage to check off most of the boxes, there’s that voice inside your head saying: Well, you got it done, but it wasn’t perfect. There’s a name for that pressure.

“Stop asking me about school! I’m so stressed, and you’re making it worse,” my teen shouted as she stormed to her room. Thankfully, this wasn’t my first rodeo. So her words bounced off skin already toughened by her older sibling. Every teen handles school anxiety differently. What rattles one might not faze another, and the strategies that help with test stress don’t work for social pressure or performance jitters.