LDL. “You’re Strong Because You Have To Be”: Will Roberts’ Update Highlights the Hidden Reality of Medical Motherhood

“Having a child with medical issues changes everything.”

That single sentence—shared in a recent update connected to Will Roberts—captures a truth that countless families learn the hard way: when illness enters a child’s life, it doesn’t just change the calendar. It changes the identity of a parent.

In the post, Alexa Booth put words to an experience many mothers and fathers struggle to explain to people who haven’t lived it. It’s not simply that life gets busier or appointments increase. It’s that the entire shape of parenting shifts—quietly at first, and then completely.

“You Don’t Just Go to Well-Checks…”

Parents of healthy children often mark time with school photos, sports seasons, and routine checkups. But for a medical family, “routine” becomes something else entirely.

“You don’t just go to wellchecks,” Booth wrote. “You go to specialists. Hospital admissions. Second opinions.”

Those words reflect a life built around referrals and test results, around travel to appointments, long waits in clinic rooms, and the constant mental math of symptoms: Is this normal? Is this serious? Do we go in now? Do we wait?

Even when a child appears stable, many parents describe never fully relaxing. The baseline becomes vigilance, because they’ve learned that change can happen fast.

Parenting Becomes Advocacy

One of the most striking parts of Booth’s message was her description of how parenting evolves in these circumstances.

“You don’t just parent… you advocate. Fiercely. Constantly. Relentlessly.”

It’s a role that requires learning an entire new language: medications, labs, side effects, protocols, procedures. Parents become organizers, record keepers, and translators—collecting information, tracking changes, and speaking up in rooms where decisions are made quickly and consequences are heavy.

They also learn to ask questions that can feel uncomfortable.

“You question everything. You push for answers,” Booth wrote, adding that parents learn to trust their instincts because those instincts have been “right too many times to ignore.”

That line resonates deeply with medical families. Many parents describe the moment they realized they could no longer assume a system would catch everything automatically. They had to become the one who notices patterns, insists on follow-up, and refuses to let concerns be dismissed.

The Exhaustion People Don’t See

In public, medical parents are often praised for being “strong.” But Booth’s post emphasizes what that strength actually costs.

“It’s not just physically exhausting,” she wrote. “It’s emotionally consuming. It’s grieving the carefree version of motherhood.”

That grief is quiet, but real.

It’s the grief of realizing that parenting will not look like what you imagined. It’s the grief of watching other families worry about things that feel small compared to seizures, scans, or chemotherapy. It’s the grief of birthdays celebrated in hospital rooms, and plans made with an asterisk—if they’re feeling okay, if labs are stable, if we don’t end up admitted again.

It’s also the grief of constantly carrying fear while trying to keep a child’s world light.

Many parents talk about learning to smile while their stomach churns. About walking into appointments already braced for bad news. About trying to stay calm so their child doesn’t have to carry their terror too.

“You’re Strong Because You Have To Be”

Booth’s post ends with the line that may hit hardest for those living this life:

“People say ‘you’re strong’ like it’s a compliment. But you’re not strong because you want to be. You’re strong because you have to be.”

It’s an honest reminder that strength, for many families, isn’t a personality trait. It’s survival. It’s what happens when love and fear collide and a parent chooses to keep showing up—again and again—because there is no other option.

For those following Will Roberts’ journey, the message echoes what supporters have witnessed: families don’t just fight illness in the body. They fight it in schedules, paperwork, sleepless nights, and the long emotional labor of carrying hope through uncertainty.

And behind every “strong” parent is a person who would trade that strength for normalcy in a heartbeat—if it meant their child could be carefree again.

Sometimes, the most important thing we can do for families like these isn’t to praise them for being strong.

It’s to stand beside them—so they don’t have to be strong alone.