Parenting Is Taking a Toll on My Health—and I Feel Guilty About It
The morning starts with a sock. Not a real crisis, but my daughter’s voice pierces through the wall at 6:40 a.m., announcing that her yellow sock is missing, and by the way, she needs it now, and also she’s hungry, and also it’s PE day and she forgot to tell me yesterday. I am standing in the kitchen in my bathrobe, staring at the kettle, trying to remember when I last ate a vegetable that wasn’t fried.
I find the sock in the laundry basket. I was going to fold that basket an hour ago. I didn’t. The headaches have been with me for about eight weeks now, sitting at the base of my skull like a small, constant pressure. My shoulders are tense enough to make turning my head feel theatrical. I snap at my daughter because she’s holding the sock wrong—the sock is fine, but she’s holding it at an angle that suggests I should be doing this differently—and I see her face crumple. And I feel guilty. Again.
This is the part nobody warns you about. Not the sleepless nights or the teething or the homework battles. The part where your own body starts to complain, loudly, and you still have to get everyone dressed and out the door by 8:15. The part where you catch yourself thinking, if I could just have one weekend to recover, immediately followed by, but I chose this. I love them. What sort of person needs to recover from their own children?
That second thought is the killer. The guilt wraps itself around the exhaustion like a vine.
I mentioned it at the school pickup one afternoon, mostly as a joke. “Parenting’s really taken it out of me lately,” I said to my daughter’s teacher, Mrs. Chen, while my daughter hung upside down from the climbing frame. “I think I’ve had a headache for a month.” I expected her to laugh and tell me to take a paracetamol. Instead, she looked at me with that specific look teachers have when they’re professionally diagnosing you without wanting to say the word. “You know,” she said, “being tired isn’t the same as being used to it. You’ve gotten used to being tired.” Then she handed me my daughter’s backpack and smiled. “We have a saying in my family: you can’t pour from a cup that’s empty. But honestly, I think it’s less about the cup being empty and more about the cup being cracked. You’re not pouring anything out. You’re leaking.”
She wasn’t being therapy about it. She was just stating a fact. And it stuck with me because it made me realize something uncomfortable: I’d stopped noticing how physically awful I felt. The chest tightness that I’d mentally filed under “normal parenting anxiety” was probably the fifth cold I’d caught in two months. The jaw clenching at night had left a ridge along the side of my tongue. I was running on fumes, and I was also running a constant internal commentary about how a better parent—a selfless parent—wouldn’t mind.
Here’s what no one explains: guilt makes the physical strain worse. It raises the stakes. When I snap at my daughter, I don’t just feel bad for a moment; I replay it while I’m making lunch, while I’m washing dishes, while I’m lying awake at night. That replay is its own kind of work. It keeps the stress hormones going long after the actual stressful moment has passed. I’m not recovering from the difficult moments because I’m too busy punishing myself for having them.
The turning point wasn’t dramatic. There was no grand epiphany, no candlelit bath with essential oils. It was a Wednesday. I was at the kitchen table after dinner, staring at the wall, and my husband asked me what I wanted. I couldn’t think of an answer. I genuinely could not identify a single thing I wanted for myself beyond “this meal to be over.” That scared me more than the headaches did. It was like the brain version of losing my sense of taste.
So I did something much less poetic but much more practical: I lowered the bar. Not all at once, but deliberately. I stopped folding the kids’ laundry and told them to dig through the baskets. I bought ten pairs of the same socks for my daughter so a missing sock no longer required a morning crisis. I made the rule that breakfast on school days alternated between exactly two options—toast or cereal—and if they didn’t want either, they could have nothing. Shockingly, they both chose toast most days. The world did not end. Nobody called social services.
The second thing I did was adopt what I’ve come to call the ten-minute rule on school pickup days. I sit in the car in the school car park for ten minutes before I go in. Not scrolling, not talking to anyone. Just sitting. It’s strange how much of parenting is about being “on”—ready to answer three questions at once, ready to break up a bickering match before it escalates, ready to sign forms and check booster notices and fix hair—and how much energy that takes. Ten minutes of nobody needing me. That tiny thing has probably done more for my health than anything else.
The third thing was harder. I had to start saying what I actually needed, out loud, to actual people. My husband took the kids for three consecutive Saturday mornings—to the trampoline park, of all places, which I never would have chosen voluntarily, but the exhaustion made me accept the help. I also called my sister and asked her to take the kids for a single Sunday afternoon while I lay on the sofa with a heat pack. Saying the words “I need help on Sunday, from two to five” was almost physically painful. I’d been raised—or perhaps I’d simply absorbed from the endless noise around me—that mothers don’t schedule their need for help. The guilt whispered that asking was a kind of failure. But the every-other-Saturday version of me is a much better mother than the permanently depleted version ever was.
It’s worth saying that I’ve also had to change how I talk to myself when I do snap at them. The old voice would say: You’re ruining your children. You’re not cut out for this. The new voice says something more practical: You did a hard thing. You lost your temper. It happens. Apologize, and move on. Realizing that repair is more important than perfection was genuinely useful. When I kneel down and say, “I’m sorry. I was really grumpy. I should have taken a moment before I got annoyed about the sock,” I’m teaching my daughter something about what to do when she’s overwhelmed. That’s an educational moment, not a confession of maternal failure. I watch her accept my apology with unnerving grace, and I wonder whether learning how to repair things is maybe one of the most useful skills a child can have.
The headaches have not fully gone away. My shoulders are still tighter on Sunday evenings than they are on Friday mornings. The guilt also hasn’t left entirely—it appears at strange times, like when I’m enjoying a coffee alone and my sister-in-law is at gymnastics with my children, and I remember that I’m supposed to be feeling gratitude, but I actually just feel tired and a bit odd.
But I’ve stopped thinking of exhaustion as evidence of failure. Every cramp in my neck is not a secret judgment. A bad morning is not a verdict on my whole parenting.
The other day, my daughter came home with a drawing. She drew two people sitting at a table, one short and one tall, and a sun in the corner. “That’s us having breakfast,” she explained. “You’re drinking your coffee and I’m eating toast. You look happy.” I looked at it, and she looked at me, and I thought about how all these small adjustments—the socks, the ten minutes in the car, the Saturday trampoline park—have added up to something. She draws a version of me that is rested enough to smile over a coffee cup. She sees that person, even when I don’t.
So the work I’m doing now is not about eliminating the guilt or fixing my health once and for all. It’s more ordinary than that. It’s about accepting that parenting sometimes has a physical cost, and that feeling guilty about that doesn’t make the cost smaller. It makes it heavier.
Today is Thursday. My daughter has already informed me that her blue sock is missing, which is fine, because we own ten pairs of identical socks now. I’m drinking water instead of a second coffee. The drawing with the sun in the corner is still on the fridge, and I keep looking at it. It’s not a perfect picture. The sun is a bit lopsided, and the table is floating slightly. But she drew me happy, so I’m doing something right.
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