This time will be different
When you can't go on with things as they are, what comes next? False starts, slow resolutions and glimmers of hope
It felt fitting that 2023 – the year I feared the wiring in my brain had been detrimentally altered, where most days I teetered close to blowing a fuse – ended with an actual power cut.
Around 7pm on New Year’s Eve we were cast into darkness. Something had malfunctioned – the fuse box unclear. I won’t bore you, but it was a switch connected to all the circuitry in the house. A warning that something was not right. A warning to pay attention.
My husband set about investigating.
‘Put on some rubber soles before you touch anything electrical,’ I shouted to him.
Two minutes later, he appeared in the glow of my phone’s torch light, accessorised with grey Crocs and canary-yellow washing-up gloves.
Room by room, appliance by appliance, he went around the house turning everything off, forcing a complete shut down. Then, one switch at a time, he turned everything back on, while I stared at the fuse box playing electrical Cluedo, hoping to discover who the culprit was (was it the bathroom fan? Was it the hob? What a thrill…).
We never worked it out, but suddenly everything was functioning again, the house filled with light. We reset timers, reprogrammed kitchen clocks, began again. It felt oddly symbolic.
Later that night, having swerved social plans in favour of donning pyjamas on the sofa, we popped a bottle of Champagne and I asked my husband what word we should choose as an ‘intention’ or ‘focus’ for the year ahead. Given we were no longer sat in darkness, his eye roll was perceptible.
‘Humour me,’ I said.
He nodded. Took a beat to think. Then raised his glass and said: ‘To… renewal.’
It was the perfect word, shaping into clarity my unnamed yearning. So much so that I began crying before our drinks had even clinked.
So many times last year I said, ‘I cannot go on like this.’ Usually after another sleepless night, another week of feeling ragged. For a good deal of 2023, part of me felt compromised, as if I was living a half-life. There in body, but not fully in spirit because so much of what I was doing was experienced through a haze of bone-deep exhaustion.
Many of you will have joined me here because of this post I wrote. It’s currently the most-read piece on Tiny Chaos.
I’m not surprised. There are a lot of extremely tired mothers out there.
Tired from childcare, tired from the mental load, tired from juggling careers and home, tired from making compromises, tired from tending in the night as well as nurturing in the day, tired from holding it together because taking a break is made to feel like a luxury, or selfish, or worse, not an option at all.
Women who are tired from having the work of mothering devalued and disregarded while simultaneously having impossible standards – steeped in judgements – placed upon the ways in which we care for our children.
But I was tired of feeling tired. Finally tired enough to know change needed to happen.
Galaxies
We skipped town in the last few days before school started and tucked ourselves away in an Airbnb in the Cotswolds. It was a cosy cottage, with cool stone floors and low wooden beams, and sheep that roamed from nearby fields towards the rear of the garden. For every night we were there, the two-year-old decided he would wake up approximately six times a night, while my four-year-old morphed mentally into a petulant teenager. I watched the shadows under my eyes grow opaque despite the restorative benefits of country air we’d left the city in search of. I felt drab and uninspired for the new year. I was ready for the holiday to be over.
My oldest was sleeping in a bedroom decorated with cute nautical wallpaper, a bean bag and fluffy rug, with an eclectic collection of books on the shelf. One was about taxes, another corporate accounting. Several others were brown-tinged paperbacks of 70s thrillers and maritime escapades. On our final night, I pulled down a hardback called Stargazing For Beginners and lay next to him on the slim single bed. It turned out to be a rather technical tome detailing constellation coordinates and how to set up telescopes, but the images were spectacular.
We flicked through its pages past spirals of stars and nebulae – the kaleidoscopic swirls of gas and dust left over from a star’s death – then paused on a page that looked like fireflies twinkling over a purple night sky.
‘What’s that?’ asked my son.
‘Beyond our own galaxy,’ I read from the caption, ‘there are countless others. Clusters of galaxies, some 13 billion years old.’
My son can have trouble navigating what day of the week it is. A regular Tuesday to him can feel like infinity. But even he felt the weight of this image. The vertiginous incomprehensibility of the universe. Or maybe he was just reacting to the way I read it.
I squeezed him closer. Pulled his cheek into mine.
How small we are, I thought. What luck to be here at all.
Conversations with sons, part I
My husband was talking to our four-year-old about superheroes, as four-year-olds are wont to do. When asked what my powers were, my son said: ‘Mummy’s superpowers are being tired and going to bed.’
This anecdote was relayed to me tenderly, but even as I laughed at it, I felt devastated.
In fairness, my husband did not shine in this Q&A either (his superpowers according to my son were ‘tidying up and losing things’), but I thought, ‘Wow, of all the things I do or have done – not least the actual growing and birthing and feeding you – this is what you see?’
Missed time
It is February now. I can feel the shifting seasons in the growing light and the fact I slept without socks last night. I am in some disbelief that January is already over. While everyone else seems to have started the year like a horse bolting, I have felt more like a sloth. Actually, make that a mole – peeking out, eyes squinting with the brightness, wondering where I am and how far I’ve dug myself this time. (Usually only about three centimetres – and often in the wrong direction…)
From my half-burrowed state I have observed the articles about resolutions, self-improvement, fitness, diets and diets-masquerading-as-non-diets surge and subside. We have had Blue Monday – the most depressing day of the year (already?!) – and Quitter’s Day, the day everyone apparently ditches their new year’s resolutions. All this before I’ve even found the headspace to initiate any real changes at all.
Conversations with sons, part II
‘Why do you have so many spots?’ asked my four-year-old while staring at my make-up-free face.
‘Some people just get spots,’ I said.
‘Mummy’s tummy,’ said my two-year-old, poking the curve of my stomach and watching the way it bounced like a water bed. He giggled, as if my body was an inherently funny thing.
Despite the cut-throat directness, I enjoy the intimacy of these moments. The way they see me, study me, consider me theirs, stroke my face, sprawl across me. I wrote here that the impact of motherhood on my body was as though it was ‘private landscape granted right to roam’. Sometimes I feel touched out, but sometimes it’s as if we are all part of the same being.
I’m fine
I talked to a doctor for a work project. He needed to do an intense health assessment before I went for some tests at a high-tech clinic. He read through a long list of questions and I laid out on Zoom all my worries, aches, pains and desires. He asked me how resilient I felt. I said it depended on how tired I was. He nodded.
‘I’m actually quite jolly,’ I added, worrying I’d given the wrong impression.
Stowaway
When we returned from the Cotswolds, we found the stargazing book in our suitcase. My husband emailed the owners to apologise and promised to post it back.
Keep it, they said.
We gave them a great review.
My oldest son immediately claimed ownership and put the book on his shelf. But I find myself opening it often on the spread of those distant galaxies.
I can’t quite explain this fascination other than I find it simultaneously dizzying as well as grounding.
It helps me think about what really matters in this pinprick existence. What’s precious and important in this tiny life. And I know it’s not the size of my thighs, or how tidy my kitchen is.
Light years
Last night, my youngest slept through the night for the first time in his two years and three months. He stirred around 5am, settled himself in seconds and snoozed onwards until 7am. My husband and I lay awake from 5am in awe.
I wonder if this is the start of a new era. I marvel at how change – change that once felt impossible, unreachable – can suddenly just happen. I think about how hope can bloom spontaneously, as if one of those air plants. How bare trees bud slowly, but spring always comes.
So beautiful Amy, both the talk of galaxies and the buds got me, I find this mothering thing very much of the Earth and celestial in some ways too.
I am all for the slow easing in of the year, I feel like January was very much in-between worlds and I am only starting to make sense of things now. Also completely identify with the feeling of not being fully there with tiredness, definitely feel the depletion regularly.
And the comments on body I find simultaneously alarming and also reassuring. It’s like they say it as a straightforward observation with a sense of neutrality, not wanting you to change it.
And the sleep…the last four years I can count the number of times either of mine have slept through on one hand. It’s brutal! 7am wake up is the actual dream, did have a few of those in midwinter but youngest thought 4.40am was morning today…! Just about managed to him back for a bit between the demands about wanting to get dressed and go downstairs! xx
You are a hero to me. Maya didn’t sleep through until 2.5 and it nearly broke me. Getting through another two years of that deserves a cape.
Beautiful writing, as always. ❤️