Is it only me?

When the toll of parenting is too much

It’s late at night and you’re lying with a child. They can’t go to sleep without you there. You wonder if they might be asleep and if you can risk shuffling away – there’s still time to grab a few moments alone because your body insists that you sleep.

You move. Their eyes snap open. ‘Don’t go’ they say and you relax back into them. ‘I’m here’, you say soothingly. ‘It’s okay, I’m not going anywhere’. You resign yourself to another half an hour at least.

As you lie there, you wonder if anyone else is doing this with their ten-year-old. Whether your friends would be horrified if they knew that you were still spending hours every night helping them to wind down. You think of the early days when you thought they’d grow out of this, and you wonder when that time will come when they go to bed themselves and you will have ‘an evening’ again.

You think about your day, and how it goes from task to task to task, and how there is rarely time to complete a thought or an action without an interruption. You wonder how much longer you can carry on for, and what happens when you just can’t keep it up anymore.

Your child stirs. You stay as still as a mouse.

Talking about the toll of parenting can be taboo. We’re meant to focus on how rewarding it is, how lucky we are to have our amazing children. But what about when it pushes you to your limits and there’s no one who seems to understand?

That’s what I’m focusing on in this new webinar on Friday lunchtime. Parental burnout. How to stop the signs in yourself, and how to turn things around. It’s recorded if you can’t make the time.