Will Parenting Make My Fatigue Worse? What I Learned as a Tired Teacher and Parent
I was sitting in my car after the last bell, just staring at the steering wheel. A colleague from the math wing knocked on my window. I rolled it down. She said, “My partner wants kids. I’m already so fatigued I can barely get through a school week. Will it really get worse?”
I remember not answering right away. I think I said something like, “That’s a real question.” Because it is.
I used to ask the same thing. At thirty-four, I was teaching third grade and falling asleep on the couch before dinner. I remember lying on the floor of my classroom after school one day, not because I was doing yoga, but because the tile was cool and the room was empty. I thought: If I can’t handle a seven-hour day, how would I ever survive a newborn? And then, a few years later, there I was with a newborn. Not because I’d found an answer. I just did it anyway.
The first year was worse. I won’t sugarcoat it. The kind of tired that lives in your bones and makes your thinking feel like a foggy windshield. But something else happened around year three that caught me off guard. The fatigue didn’t disappear. It changed shape. It became less like an emergency and more like a background hum. And I got better at noticing which parts of the day were actually draining me, rather than all of it being one giant blur.
One evening I came home from a late meeting at school. I was done. My daughter was three and had been waiting for me. She started crying because her socks didn’t feel right. I remember thinking: I don’t have energy for this. But I also didn’t have the energy to fight it. So I just sat down on the kitchen floor, leaned against the cabinet, and said, “I’m here. I can’t fix the socks, but I’m here.” She screamed for a while. Then she came over and sat in my lap. We stayed there on the floor for maybe fifteen minutes, not solving anything. At some point she said, “My socks are okay now.” And I realized something: The exhaustion I felt wasn’t always about doing too much. It was often about trying to make problems disappear instead of sitting with them. When I stopped trying to fix her feelings, I stopped using energy I didn’t have.
That’s not a lesson I learned quickly. It took many floor-sitting nights. But it became a kind of rule for me. When I’m too tired to engage, I say exactly that. Not with frustration, but with clarity. “I’m too tired to talk about this right now. I’m going to sit next to you and listen in five minutes.” The first few times, it didn’t work. But after a while, my daughter started to believe that I would come back. The five minutes became a pattern. It gave her a predictable “next,” and it gave me permission to breathe.
Another thing: I stopped trying to hide my tiredness from my child. I used to smile and act energetic, and that itself was exhausting. Now, if I’m tired, I say, “My body is a little worn out today. I need to move slowly.” This sounds trivial, but it makes a difference. It teaches a child that fatigue is normal and manageable, not a failure. It also removes the massive energy cost of pretending.
In practical terms, I adjusted the environment too. I used to feel guilty for not playing with my daughter constantly. Then I realized that at her age—and for most elementary-age kids—a parent’s side-by-side presence is more valuable than full engagement. So I put a basket of puzzles and paper on the floor, and I sat in an armchair with a cup of tea. She played, I rested. We were in the same room, but I wasn’t performing. That was the lowest-effort change I made. It didn’t require special equipment or a new parenting program. It just required letting go of the idea that good parenting means always actively engaged.
There is a learning-related angle to this, too. I’m a teacher, so I’ve seen exhaustion from both sides. Children, especially between the ages of three and eight, are extremely sensitive to how much mental space an adult has left. When a parent is running on empty, the child often spins up. They whine, they argue, they get loud. It’s not bad behavior; it’s an attempt to get certainty that you’re still there. When I understood that, I stopped interpreting my daughter’s meltdowns as extra problems to solve. They were signals that she needed me to lower the load, not add to it. That shift—from “I need to fix this” to “I need to be a calm place”—saved me a lot of energy.
Of course, there are days when nothing works. Last week I was up late with a sick dog, and the next morning my daughter couldn’t find a hairbrush and had a complete collapse. I lost my temper. I said something sharp and then felt guilty for the rest of the day. I’m not saying any of this is easy. I’m just saying the question “Will it get worse?” is the wrong one.
The real question is: “Will I learn to live with tiredness without letting it make me mean?” And the honest answer is: mostly, yes. But it takes practice. It takes lowering your standards, not only about housework but about your own performance. You have to be okay with serving cereal for dinner. You have to be okay with a child who watches a bit more TV than the parenting books recommend. You have to be okay with sitting on the floor with no answers.
I think back to that colleague in the parking lot. I didn’t tell her all this. What I said was, “It will be a different kind of tired. But you’ll figure out which tired is just the background hum and which tired is trying to tell you something. Right now, you’re listening to all tired. That’s the part that makes it feel so overwhelming.”
She laughed, and asked, “So that’s a yes?”
“Maybe,” I said. “But it’s also a ‘you don’t have to decide today.’”
We got out of the car, and I walked toward the office. A few months later, I still think about that conversation. I don’t think I gave her an answer. But I gave her something closer to what she actually asked: permission to be tired and still wonder. That’s not a conclusion. It’s just the next step.
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