A very long post about maternal burnout

With thanks to Clover Stroud who said it all much more succinctly if you prefer a shorter read.

This is a larger than life-size doll I made as part of my therapy. She is called The Mother Monster. She represents what mothering means to me.

I read a post by

Clover Stroud

this morning about maternal burnout. As I read I nodded my head so violently, I gave myself whiplash. There is so much good stuff but the paragraph about telling your family how exhausted you are and their responses is both very funny and sadly true. In summary she says;

My to-do list as a mother is long, and it never, never ends, and always needs doing before I've got anywhere near my, you know, real, actual work. And the point is, I could be burnt out to a crisp, but all this work of parenting still needs doing. And while I’m not saying my husband is too busy running a business, but, well, yeah, he kind of is, actually.

Once, when Tilly, who is my eldest, was a toddler, we were alone together one Sunday and I drew a bath for us to splash about in. When I got out of the bath and was just about to lift her out, my left hip packed up. I’d had emergency surgery a few years previously and some rough handling while I was out for the count meant that from time to time my left hip did, and still does, wander off and forgets it needs to bear my weight. I was out the bath, she was in it and I was crumpled up on the bath mat trying to figure out what to do next. Every time I tried to get up, the pain was so sharp I could see stars. I didn’t have a mobile phone, and before I could find my way to the house phone I had to deal with a slippery, wet toddler who was beginning to shiver with cold.

She had begun to shout ‘Out! Out!’ raising her arms. I explained I was poorly, so she leaned forward to pat me and said; ‘Oh dear,’ before recommencing with the shouting. Eventually, I pulled myself up to a point where I could rest most of my weight on the side of the bath and got her out. Then came the painful job of dragging myself across the landing to the phone and entertaining a naked toddler while waiting for the cavalry to arrive.

Over the years I have thought about that day over and over again. I felt so utterly helpless in those moments and yet there was no question that I would have to find the wherewithal to parent my child. Even when I have been incapable of getting to my feet, I still had to set in motion the safety net and call in the favours that allowed me to stop for a minute. And I don’t mean stop in a nice way. I mean stop because the only other option if I carried on alone was some kind of Lord of the Flies situation in which I was cast as Piggy.

There is no off switch to parenting.

I have parented through terrible pregnancies, multiple miscarriages, chronic illness, poor mental health and surgeries. I have parented through a divorce, a remarriage and fourteen house moves. I have parented through times of no money and times of all the money. In the times I have had a job, I have negotiated working at all hours of the day and night while still earning so little it is me that has had to find the flex in my schedule to accommodate the vagaries of childcare.

I have raised three children, each four years apart in age, which at times has meant navigating three different schools and their stubborn refusal to believe that this is not your only child for whom you can do everything asked of you. I have made daily decisions that would make the Solomon’s baby conundrum look like a walk in the park.

I have always failed and I have always had to let someone down somewhere along the line. If my parenting were being Ofsteded I know there were times when I would have been put in special measures. With three children and only two hands and two knees, the only thing that was capable of holding everyone equally was my heart, which always swells to fit. What I have learned is, thankfully, that’s the important bit. But when the chips were down and I was painfully aware of everything I wasn’t doing, it was hard to remember that. Sometimes it still is.

At the beginning there was no alone time, ever. Baths, showers, toilet breaks were all accompanied by small, sticky people who really want to touch you, all the time. Every meal cooked required me to have eyes in the back of my head and ears like a bat. In fact everything required that.

They fell down the kitchen step. They threw a toilet roll into the loo to see what would happen and started panicking about it. They rolled icing in craft glitter and glue and ate it. They painted themselves in black poster paint from head to toe and went for a nice walk around the house. They trapped their sister in a suitcase and couldn’t unzip it. They have fallen out over a lovely game that turned feral, twenty seconds after I left the room. They have trapped their leg in a trampoline spring. They have ridden their bikes off the decking. They have eaten some gravel to see what it tastes like. They have decided to run away to next door’s house where everyone is nicer than me (I have often thought about running away to next door’s house too, to be honest). They needed me to build The Globe theatre out of cardboard by tomorrow for homework. No homework in the first ten years of a child’s life is ever done by a child, but parents’ evening is a good time to go and suss out the other parents’ crafting abilities. Nobody tells you that on top of everything else, when your child goes to school, you also go back to school, but they should.

Over the years I have made; one Elizabethan theatre, two Greek temples, a church complete with wedding guests, grave stones and a cardboard squirrel and three volcanoes, mostly achieved whilst cooking and serving dinner and answering questions about sentence clauses, frog reproduction and life in ancient Rome. I have read The Magic Key series, three whole times and I was very bored with it even on the first iteration. I have passed every test and exam in triplicate, with the exception of maths because it gives me the fear, so we hired a tutor. Obviously I had to drive to the maths lessons and find something to entertain the remaining children with in a car for that hour because it was too far away to go home. I have sat in more dark and lonely carparks than I can count, waiting for lessons to kick out. It grinds my gears if this subject comes up and they announce: ‘You never let me do classical banjo lessons,’ or ‘It’s your fault I’m not a world famous ballet dancer.’

And forget your own illnesses. What about theirs? Well, whatever they have, they will share with you, so it will soon become your illness too. They spend their entire childhood roaming about the countryside with other, filthy children like a pack of feral wolves, touching, sniffing, licking and ingesting everything. I have navigated; nits, worms, something that looked like ringworm but wasn’t, chicken pox, ear infections, mouth infections, conjunctivitis and norovirus to name but a few. If they have all these things together, it’s a nightmare. If they have all these things one after another, it’s a different, longer nightmare. I looked forward to them going to school because it was a break, but I dreaded them going to school because of what they would bring home: nits, homework, other horrible children.

On that subject, we had the child who threw things down the stairwell at my children’s heads and threatened to knife my toddler if they didn’t hand over a sausage at tea time. We had the child who only communicated in bat squeaks when I had to take him home and whose mother didn’t pick up the phone while I drove endlessly around the estate listening to ‘SQWEEEEEKKKKKKK’ as his last known address. We had the sleepovers where nobody slept and I found myself doing jigsaws with a tearful child at 5.00 a.m. We had the child who didn’t know how to butter a piece of bread. We had the delight who parroted all his parents homophobic nonsense over the dinner table. Parenting your own child is hard. Parenting other people’s is worse.

And you spend a lot of time with other children. School plays, concerts where your child is huffing into the death throes of a recorder solo, awards assemblies where they get a badge for not kicking little Johnny in the face even though everyone knows he’s a arsehole. And the parties. Dear God, the endless fucking parties. ‘Can you come to a Wacky Warehouse by the abattoir on the ring road for three hours on Sunday? Can you stay because there are not enough parents to help with the face painting/hunger games/judging the best costume? Here’s the gift list. I hope you have flex on your Credit Card’. Times that by thirty kids in a class, because we are all invited to everything now. Then times that by three kids, and that’s your social life out the window and your bank balance orbiting Mars.

Even your own parties are bad. ‘Hi, sorry I’m early but I have to go to Jacinta’s baton twirling recital. I’ll pick little Jimmy up before 10.00 p.m. God willing. By the way, he’s lactose intolerant. No, I know I didn’t say earlier, but we only found out yesterday. Yes, he is a bit hyper. It should wear off as long as you don’t let him have any sugar.’ I threw a Halloween party once where one of the mothers said she was worried about letting her child come in case we practiced black magic. I said: ‘Did you think we were going to slaughter a goat on the front lawn?’ Her answer: ‘Yes.’

I shoulda.

For a long time, my husband and I passed each other like ships in the night. Occasionally we would get a weekend away somewhere if my health, my children’s health and granny’s babysitting service aligned. We once drove to Harrogate in a storm that was felling trees at a time when my hip was out because we were so desperate for 48 hours off. I crawled to the reception desk in the middle of a riotous Christmas party and clawed the keys from a concerned concierge. We spent the entire time we were away sleeping, reading and eating chips. I did not have to share my pudding or wipe anyone’s nose and it was blissful.

There is no such thing as a holiday while your children are small. Hotels require a level of quiet and order that is hard to sustain. When we got married, we went to Vegas and took the kids. We stayed in a fancy hotel in which Oscar became a thief and spent the entire two weeks stealing spoons. We had a spoon amnesty on the last day and left an entire canteen of cutlery on the bed with an apology note. If you don’t let them steal all the spoons and colour in the walls, you have to take them out from dawn till dusk and keep them entertained until they pass out. I’m probably the only person who got married in Las Vegas who spent an entire day at the downtown children’s library crouched in a Wendy house pretending to be a shop keeper. What happens in Vegas…

Rental houses are like your own house, but you don’t know where anything lives and they inevitably don’t have some item of domestic paraphernalia that is crucial to your family survival. Laundry becomes the focus of most holidays. A constant stream of muddy trousers, wet knickers, sandy swimmers and if like me, your children get travel sick, a lot of vomity t-shirts. One year we got to our destination only to find that while I was checking the house to make sure everything was turned off before we left, Jason and the children had failed to pack my bag. We turned up in the wilds of North Wales at 8.00 p.m. without so much as a pair of knickers to my name. I was dressed solely by Tesco that week and still spent half my life in the utility room washing other people’s pants.

I thought parenting would get easier as they got older. For me, this was not the case.

Parenting teenagers is a whole different ball game, in which you are not privy to the rules. Small children tell you everything, all the time. I know so much about Nicole’s domestic life, I could enact an Ocean’s Eleven style heist on her house in a heartbeat, even now. I know where Carter’s parents go on holiday every year and how Parveen’s family celebrate Christmas. I also know a lot about Pokemon, the metamorphosis of Hannah Montana into Miley Ray Cyrus and how to keep a pet llama. I know so much about Taylor Swift I could go on Mastermind. For the first thirteen years of a child’s life there is nothing they will not tell you, even when you beg them not to because you are trying to curate a social media account for a scented candle company whilst de-worming the cat already. Then everything changes. Suddenly they are enrolled in the teenage mafia and bound by omertà.

Teenagers know everything. Everything you worry about is because you are old/stupid/blind. Everything you provide as proof that you too, were once young and idiotic, is met with a sigh and a shrug, because you were young so long ago, Swindon was still a rainforest and pterodactyls filled the skies. They know everything and they are saying nothing. Except when it all goes wrong, and it so often does. That’s when the phone calls start.

The phone calls at one in the morning asking me to pick them up from a messy party where I can hear screaming in the background and I drive like the wind, hoping I can get there quick enough. The phone calls from the police on a quiet Sunday morning. The calls I made to apologise to someone’s parents because my child has done something unspeakable at their house. The calls I made to say I would pick my child up only to be told that they aren’t there anymore and nobody knows where they actually are. The phone calls from the school asking me to pick them up or worse, asking where they are. The driving around in the dark trying to locate them, reassuring myself that the worst hasn’t happened because forty minutes ago they were still verbal, even though they were hysterical. The times they’ve let their guard down on social media just enough for me to see what I shouldn’t.

Nearly everything I learned as the parent of a small child was useless at this point. You can’t put them to bed. You can’t calm them down. You can’t stop them and if you do come down heavy, you risk that thin thread of communication that is still open, that allows them to call you when they’re scared out of their mind and lost to themselves and everyone else, to snap completely. You’re still legally responsible for them, but you don’t know them anymore and you don’t have the answers for them, yourself or anyone else.

And when they did eventually come to me with their problems, they were grown up, dark problems that were too heavy for the child they still really were but thought they weren’t. Their problems were, so often, properly heartbreaking. Until I had teenagers I didn’t know my heart could break in so many ways and into so many pieces. Through my own children and their girlfriends/boyfriends and friends I have nursed eating disorders, addiction, self harm, suicide attempts and actual suicides, abusive relationships and more.

I have provided shelter, food and protection. I have negotiated and stood between them and bigger, scarier things. I have defended and fought for them, and all the while they fought me, even while they were asking for help. They kicked hard against what they knew they needed but didn’t want to accept. All their fear, all their rage, all their confusion and disappointment came to me. It was a funny kind of gift. It was given to me because they know I wasn’t going to leave them at the station with a label that says ‘Please look after this bear.’ It was given to me because deep down, underneath it all, they know that my love for them is infinite and always and that I’m not going anywhere, no matter how horrible things get. But it’s still hard to accept that until they’ve worked it out of their system, I was their punchbag of choice.

The teenage years also required me to learn how to step back, to hold my peace and to walk away, which is much, much harder than doing anything else I’ve done, parenting wise. Parenting small children was all about going towards the problem. Teenagers require more reversing and a lot of holding space and faith. All the worse things you can imagine have been unpacked around my kitchen table over the years, and I have had to learn to face them, to know when to put problems down and not to flinch. Some of the kids came through it. Some didn’t. Mine made it. Others were not so lucky. Some of them still haunt me.

In my experiences teenagers don’t want you to parent them, but they need you as much, if not more than they did when they were tiny. Just like they railed against bed time and fought you for the right to only eat Haribo, they rail against you again. They test every boundary you have and a few you didn’t even know about.

For me it happened when my chronic illness finally got diagnosed and surgery pushed me into early menopause with no access to HRT. Menopause was better than what went before, but it was no picnic. The teenage years were long because three kids. My youngest has only just turned eighteen. Until this year, his teenage life was, not to put too fine a point on it, carnage. Before him, it was his sister. Covid was an added complication and my parents ill health another. Layer on financial worries, two house moves, job insecurity and me having to find work, and you begin to understand why I was nodding so hard reading Clover’s post.

By the time I washed up here in London, early last summer, I was so burned out, the term was inadequate to describe me. I had, thankfully, been able to give up working in the bookshop, although I spent the first six months here trying to build a business with a friend. It didn’t take off and in the end it killed our friendship of forty years, which was nice.

Even though our finances were in a terrible state, we all knew I couldn’t carry on and that something had to give. I had spent the previous six months dealing with a suicidal teenager, a collapsing business, a house move onto a boat and a job. We had moved onto a boat out of necessity rather than choice. We had moved to London for the same reason. We didn’t have the money to hire removal men, so we did it ourselves, on top of everything else. Of course, that list is only the highlight reel of those times, because naturally, I was doing everything else too. I had two other children to think about, my parents and my marriage to hold onto. I had three cats to look after, friends to maintain and somewhere in amongst it all was the spurious notion of ‘me time’. Me time mostly involved drawing, which was so difficult I couldn’t think about anything else or sitting in my car crying.

I knew I wasn’t coping, but coping was all I did by then, so I felt completely trapped by the mess I was in and didn’t know how to get out of it. I was scaring myself, so I’m fairly sure I was scaring everyone else. I flinched every time my phone rang. I still cried a lot but I would sometimes just sit, staring into space. I was afraid that if I moved, something else might go wrong and I would have to fix it, and I knew I couldn’t fix another thing. The best feeling I could muster at this point was numbness. For a while I mistook numbness for wellness and welcomed it. I spent the summer walking through the streets of my new home, allowing myself to feel as little as possible and channel every feeling I did have into something inanimate that wouldn’t hurt me.

Eventually, with miles under my feet and the gift of time, space and therapy I began to flesh out again. I have, in recent months made great progress in reclaiming myself from the burned out wreckage of parenting. It’s slow progress, because there is years to unpick and reclaim.

I always wanted children. I have never regretted that decision, even in the darkest times. I still think about the children I lost and wonder at who they would have become. I still grieve for them and love them in a way that is entirely active and not a thing of the past.

As for my three babies who now tower over me and go to work and grow beards and own houses, I love them so much it makes my heart beat out of my chest. I would jump in front of a thousand buses for them. I would step into any pain to save them from hurting. They are magnificent humans. They are kind and generous, funny and smart. They are loving and fierce. Now that they are grown up and they can choose how they spend their time, I consider it to be a huge privilege that they choose to spend some of it with me. I make myself sad sometimes thinking that I won’t be alive long enough to see their whole, beautiful and brilliant lives play out because they are the most gorgeous, fascinating creatures I know. I am lit up with pride at their splendour.

I was lucky. I am lucky. I think my kids are great and I enjoy them. I had help parenting them. I still do. They are surrounded by the village that raised them and me, and who love us all enough to risk the thousand heartaches that parenting in any way brings. My husband deserves a special mention for taking me in when I had a four and a one year old and waiting patiently until they wanted to call him dad. And for going around again with me. He doesn’t get much of a mention here, but for a man who didn’t know if he wanted children, he has done a magnificent job of parenting. Thanks for teaching them to ride their bikes and not getting too hysterical about nits. Thanks for braving hospitals and emergency rooms, pulling teeth and not minding that time Tallulah kicked you in the nuts. You know she is the ‘twink in dada’s eye.’

I have great friends and wonderful family who understood me and stood by me and held me up when I couldn’t hold up myself. And even with all that, parenting is hands down the hardest, most thankless job I have ever or will ever do. It has burned me and broken me and hollowed me. It has brought me to my knees in pain and sorrow, love and gratitude and for me as an atheist, in prayer to a God I don’t even believe in. It’s why I never hesitate to say that I am pro choice. It’s why I never hesitate to support any woman who is childless by choice. Parenting is the best and the worst thing all the time and if you know it’s not for you, I applaud you.

Tallulah once made a safety in the home poster that was about the dangers of playing with matches. I think what she said goes double for parenting. ‘You cud be badly boont. So just be carrful’.