I’m Already So Fatigued—Will It Really Get Worse as a Parent?
The kitchen was doing that thing where every sound seemed too sharp. The kettle hissing, the toast popping, my daughter asking for the pink bowl—not the blue one—for the third time. My son was crying because his sock had a wrinkle. I was standing there in yesterday’s shirt, holding a half-empty coffee mug, trying to remember if I’d brushed my teeth.
A friend had texted earlier: Does it get easier? I typed back something honest: I don’t know yet. But the question I kept asking myself was different. Not if it gets easier. I was already so tired that I couldn’t imagine doing this for another year, let alone eighteen. My real question was: Will it actually get worse?
Because people love to warn you. They say, “Just wait until they’re teenagers.” Or, “Oh, you think this is hard? Wait until they have homework and sports and friends.” And there I was, barely able to pour cereal without wanting to lie down on the floor.
Here’s what I didn’t understand at the time: fatigue isn’t just about sleep.
I used to think tiredness was physical. If I could just get a full night—eight hours, maybe nine—I’d be fine. But with kids, tiredness becomes something else. It’s the mental load of remembering everything. The appointment that needs scheduling. The permission slip that’s due today. The one laundry load that’s been sitting in the washer so long it smells. It’s the constant decision-making—what’s for dinner, what shoes fit, when to push the nap and when to let it go. That kind of fatigue doesn’t go away with a nap. It goes away when someone else takes part of the load. And sometimes nobody does.
I remember breaking down one evening because my partner asked, “What do you want for dinner?” I didn’t have an answer. I didn’t have the energy to even make a choice. That was the moment I realized I wasn’t just tired. I was depleted.
Around that time, my neighbor—who used to teach kindergarten for fifteen years—stopped over with her own toddler. I was apologizing for the mess, for the fact that I’d been wearing the same sweatshirt for three days. She looked at me and said, “You’re not getting worse at life. The load is just getting heavier. You need to put some down.”
I asked her what that meant, practically. She laughed and said, “It looks different at seven in the morning than it does at seven at night. You just have to find what you can drop without everything else collapsing.”
So I started experimenting. Small things, but real ones.
At breakfast, if my daughter couldn’t decide between the pink bowl and the blue one, I stopped offering two options. I chose one and said, “This is what we have this morning.” She cried for a minute, then ate her cereal anyway. The worst didn’t happen.
My son’s socks? I stopped fixing the wrinkle. He cried. I said, “Your sock feels uncomfortable. We can get a different pair if you want, but I’m not going to fix this one.” He stood on the doormat another minute, then shrugged and ran off to play.
The funny thing is, I wasn’t being cold. I was just being practical. The exhaustion was so real that I had to lower the bar. And once I did, I noticed that the bar had never been that high to begin with. I’d been carrying a mental image of the “good parent” who always offers choices and validates every feeling and never lets a child cry. That parent doesn’t exist. She’s just exhausted.
There were other shifts, too. I started saying things to my partner that sounded strange at first. Not “I’m so tired” or “I need help.” Instead, I said, “I need ten minutes where nobody needs me. Can you take them?” That was different. That was specific. He could act on it.
I also stopped trying to solve everything in the moment. Late night, when the kids were finally asleep, I used to scroll through parenting advice on my phone—looking for the right approach to tantrums, to bedtime battles, to sibling fights. That was making things worse. I was filling my last waking hour with more demands, more expectations. I gave that up. I read a novel instead. It didn’t fix anything, but it stopped the dripping tap.
So, does it get worse?
That’s the question I couldn’t answer until I lived a little more of it.
Here’s what I’ve learned so far: it doesn’t get steadily worse. It gets different. The fatigue of having a baby is physical in a way that nearly breaks you—your body doesn’t belong to you, sleep is a myth, and your brain feels like it’s wrapped in cotton. With a toddler, the exhaustion is more mental. You’re on guard all the time, watching for sharp edges and dangerous stairs, and you narrate everything like a sports commentator. With a school-age kid, the tiredness shifts again. There’s homework and friend drama and the beginning of “You don’t understand me.” That brings a whole new kind of drain—emotional, relational, even existential.
In some ways, it’s harder because the problems are bigger. But in other ways, you get better at carrying them. Not stronger. Just more practiced. You stop expecting the end of fatigue. You start working with it instead of fighting it.
I also talked to a teacher friend once about all this. She told me something that stuck. She said, “I can always tell which parents are running on fumes. It’s not the ones whose kids are messy. It’s the ones who look like they’re bracing themselves all the time.” She said she sometimes tells parents, “You don’t have to enjoy every minute. You just have to get through this one minute without adding to the mess.”
That phrase helped me more than any parenting philosophy. Get through this minute without adding to the mess.
So now, on the hard mornings, I don’t try to be patient. I don’t try to be the gentle parent from the Instagram post. I just try to not make things worse. I don’t yell. I don’t make a new rule on a tired day. I pour the cereal, pass out the mismatch socks, and let my daughter wear her jacket inside because she likes it. Those are the days I’m not aiming for a memory. I’m aiming for ten minutes of calm so we can all survive until the school drop-off.
The other day, I caught myself sitting at the table while the kids ate breakfast. I wasn’t bracing. I wasn’t scrolling. I was just there, watching them both eat—one with a pink bowl, one with a blue bowl, one sock on each, slightly wrong colors. Nothing special was happening. No profound moment. But I noticed I wasn’t waiting for it to be over.
That’s not a victory story. It’s just a Tuesday. But it felt like a small piece of evidence that “worse” isn’t the whole picture.
I’m still tired. I’ll probably always be tired. But I’ve stopped measuring my life by the amount of fatigue I feel. I’ve started paying attention to the moments when the tiredness isn’t running the show—when I can put my coffee down and actually notice my kids, even if it’s only for a breath before someone drops a spoon on the floor.
Does it get worse? Honestly, I think it gets less terrible once you stop pretending you’re not exhausted. Because the exhaustion was always there. The difference is whether you’re fighting it or working with it. Some days I do a good job of that. Some days I don’t. I suppose I’m still figuring out what “worse” really means.
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