Rebel Mums: Why Asking For Help Is The Most Radical Thing You Can Do

by Simone Mazloumian founder, Eklektik Mama | the community for mothers in Abu Dhabi & the UAE

There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes, not from doing too much, but from pretending you’re fine while doing too much. It’s the exhaustion of the performance. The smile in the school pickup line. The “we’re fine” on the WhatsApp. The quiet, competent carrying of everything, always, without complaint — because that’s just what mums do.

Except it isn’t. Or at least, it shouldn’t be. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the word balance. It gets thrown at mothers like a challenge. Like if we could just get better at the spinning plates — the school runs and the work calls and the dinner and the emotional labour and the mental load and the global anxiety and the guilt, always the guilt — we’d crack it. We’d have balance. We’d be winning.

But the plates aren’t supposed to all be spinning at once. Some of them need to be put down. Some of them need to be handed to someone else entirely. And some of them — the ones society quietly stacked onto our arms without asking — need to be set on fire.

The Mental Load Is Not A Personality Trait

We’ve normalised the weight women carry to the point where we’ve started to mistake it for identity. Strong mum. Resilient mum. She does it all mum. The lowkey praise we heap on ourselves — and that society heaps on us — every time we push through yet another breaking point we had no business pushing through.

“I don’t know how she does it.”

We hear it as a compliment. It isn’t. It’s a description of a system that’s broken. Because the answer to “I don’t know how she does it” is almost always: she does it at enormous personal cost, mostly invisibly, and usually to the detriment of her own mental and physical health.

The mental load isn’t just the to-do list in your head. It’s the anticipatory planning, the emotional management, the contingency thinking, the constant background hum of everyone else’s needs running on a loop while you try to also exist as a person with needs of your own. It’s not spinning plates. It’s a living, breathing organism of priorities that constantly flex and shift — and when the pressure gets high enough, something gives.

Usually it’s us.

The Guilt Is The Worst Part

When something drops — when we can’t do it all, when we let someone down, when the priorities shift and a ball gets missed — the guilt is visceral. Sharp and immediate and deeply unfair.

The guilt we feel when we can’t do everything is entirely disproportionate to our actual responsibility. We didn’t design this system. We didn’t ask to be the default parent, the default planner, the default emotional regulator for everyone in our orbit. And yet when the system buckles, we blame ourselves.

I cancelled events this month. Events I had planned and promoted and that our community was looking forward to — at exactly the moment they needed each other most. And the guilt of that has been acute.

But it’s also a sign that I cared deeply and tried to do too much alone. A humbling learning experience, and I am taking notes.

Asking For Help Is Not Weakness.

There is a particular irony in being someone who consistently tells other mums to ask for help — to demand more from their partners, their communities, their support systems — while quietly running on empty myself. I know I’m not alone in this. We are so good at advocating for other women. So good at holding space, rallying around, showing up. And so terrible at extending that same grace to ourselves.

Asking for help feels like admitting defeat. Like proof that we couldn’t hack it. Like handing someone the evidence they need to confirm their suspicion that we were never really managing at all.

But that framing is the real problem. Because asking for help is not the opposite of strength but the expression of it.

The women I admire most aren’t the ones who did it all alone. They’re the ones who built something — a business, a family, a community, a life — by understanding that no single person can do it all, and that the radical act is reaching out instead of drowning under the demands.

Rebel Mums Don’t Suffer In Silence

The original vision for Eklektik Mama was always this: a community that says the hard parts out loud. That shines a light on the murky underbelly of motherhood. That refuses to let the shame and the silence and the impossible standards keep women quietly suffering.

Loud motherhood. Honest motherhood. The kind of motherhood that says this is hard and I need help without apology.

And I’ve realised that Eklektik Mama has to be more than me. A community isn’t one person — it’s a collective. And the most radical, rebellious, genuinely feminist thing I can do right now is stop pretending I can build it alone and start asking the community to help me build it together.

So this is me, doing the hard thing. Asking for help.

If you believe in what Eklektik Mama is trying to do — if this community has given you something, a connection, a laugh, a moment of feeling less alone — and you want to be part of building it:

Volunteer to host an event. Share your expertise in a digital session. Show up as a co-creator. Even start an Eklektik Mama in your area.

Because our greatest strength as women has always been exactly this: our ability to communicate, to create community, to find each other in the hard moments and say me too, and I’ve got you.

That’s the rebellion. Not pushing through alone. Finding each other and building something together.

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At Eklektik Mama, we're building a community of over 3,000 women and mothers across the UAE who refuse to accept that motherhood means losing yourself.

We create experiences - boat trips, breakfasts, fitness classes, co-working mornings - where mothers can be messy, honest, and fully human. Where you can say the hard parts out loud. Where you'll meet other women who are also brilliant, exhausted, ambitious, and done pretending everything is fine.

Because mum fun is better together.

Ready to prioritise yourself? Join our mum community and find your people.

This is Eklektik Mama. Where we take motherhood seriously enough to know when mothers need to take themselves less seriously.

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