Hiya,

Do you ever feel guilty about wanting some time away from your children?

Because spending MORE time with them was probably one of the reasons you chose this life. And now here you are, wondering when everyone is just going to LEAVE YOU ALONE for a bit.

Wanting a break can feel like admitting something you’re really, really not supposed to admit. You’ve taken on this responsibility, so you should be happy and content with everything it ever asks of you.

Right?

Because…you CHOSE this.

But, actually, that’s a massive expectation to put on yourself. And I think the reason why this feeling of guilt blindsides us so hard is because of the form it comes in.

You probably didn’t choose this life believing every moment would be lovely. You knew there would be hard days. You knew your children would argue and get frustrated and need help with things. You weren’t imagining some perfect childhood where everyone just wandered around smiling at each other.

But it’s not that stuff that breaks us. It’s the stuff that isn’t supposed to be hard. Like…when your children aren’t really doing anything ‘wrong’ at all.

They just want to tell you something, or show you something, or have you join in with something. They want help, or company, or someone to listen while they explain a thing they’re excited about. All the lovely stuff you wanted more time for, actually.

And yet, by the tenth or twentieth or fortieth or NINE THOUSANDTH conversation or interruption, you can find yourself physically recoiling and wanting to hide in the pantry or bathroom. Go on, tell me I’m wrong 😂

Then you look at their face and think…ugh. They just wanted to tell me something. Why do I feel so smothered by it? Why can’t I stop and make time for it and find joy in it every time?

Which, taken as one isolated moment, seems like a fair question. But that’s the problem with thinking about these things as individual moments. Almost every one of them seems small enough to say yes to. Almost everything you want to do could, technically, wait a little longer. And so you end up making that same decision every single time, with no boundaries for yourself, and resentment slowly building up.

Then, instead of seeing that for what it is, we start wondering why we can’t be more patient. Why we’re getting irritated by such small things. Why we can’t just appreciate having all this time with our children that plenty of parents would love to have.

We turn something totally understandable about life into something we don’t like about ourselves.

And then, naturally, we try to fix that. We’ll be more present tomorrow. We’ll remember how quickly childhood passes, and how much we’ll miss being needed like this one day. We’ll respond to every conversation, and need, and interruption, and story, and show-and-tell.

Which comes from a good place, but what you’ve just done is make the problem worse. Way, way worse. Why? Because you’ve realised you’re finding it really hard to be available for everyone all the time, so you’ve decided that tomorrow you’re going to…try even harder to be more available to everyone all the time.

And so the loop continues 😅

It’s so, SO easy to go from “I’m responsible for helping my child have a good childhood” to “I should be able to give them whatever they need from me, whenever they need it, and my needs should always come last”.

Which means time to yourself (and your projects, ideas, hobbies, downtime, whatever it is) will always be conditional on everyone else being fine with you having some of it.

And I can tell you from personal experience that will only lead to more resentment, and probably eventually burnout.

To really drill this home, let me give you an analogy drawn from adult life.

Imagine you start a job you really wanted. You believe in the work, you like the people, and you’re excited to get stuck into it.

Then, a few months in, you realise that everyone is expecting you to be available all the time. Day and night, almost. Your lunch break keeps getting eaten into, your evenings fill up with emails and calls, and every time you try to take a day off there ends up being something you’re needed for.

Would you think…well, I applied for this job, I wanted it, so I suppose I need to work on being more grateful and more available?

Or would you think…okay, I really like working here, I really want this job, but we also really, really need to sort a few things out around everyone’s expectations of me.

It would be the latter, right?

You’d probably have a conversation about what was reasonable to ask of you. You’d explain when you were available and when you weren’t. You might ask for more help, or point out that the amount of work being thrown at you couldn’t possibly fit into the time (or energy) you have. You’d understand that boundaries and personal time and rest and other things outside your job are extremely important, and you’d have no problem saying that.

And you wouldn’t see any of that as going back on your decision to take the job. You’d see it as working out how to keep doing something you really wanted to do without having it take over your entire life. Without leaving absolutely nothing for, or of, you.

You also wouldn’t expect everyone to be super happy about it. Someone might quite like being able to get an answer from you at nine o’clock at night, especially if they’ve gotten used to it. But that doesn’t mean you have to keep answering. It means they have to adjust what they’re expecting.

We understand all this quite clearly when we put ourselves in those shoes, right? Choosing the work doesn’t mean agreeing to every possible expectation that could ever come with it, reasonable or not.

But for some reason we seem to forget we can (and should) apply that same kind of thinking here.

We can love home educating and still say to our partner or parents or friends or whoever, “Hey, I REALLY need us to work out when and how I’m going to get some proper time to myself, because what we’re doing now isn’t working for me.” We can be genuinely interested in what our children are doing and still say, “I’d really love to see that, but I need to finish this first.” We can make plans for ourselves and actually keep them, even when someone would prefer us to be doing something else.

That might take a bit of getting used to, especially if everyone’s accustomed to you putting yourself last. But their being used to it isn’t a reason to keep doing it.

If you’re finding yourself desperate for some space, please take that seriously. Have the conversation, ask for the help, work out what needs to change. Give it the same attention you’d give something that wasn’t working for your child.

You don’t need yet another promise to yourself to be more patient tomorrow. What you really need is less demand on that patience.

Talk soon,
Issy.

P.S. If this feels familiar, you should listen to my episode called ’What being together all day REALLY does to your relationship with your child’. I take you through the research on time together and parent-child relationships, because what it tells us is really useful for families like ours. Why doesn’t more time together always bring us closer? What makes the difference? And what can we actually change when all that togetherness isn’t feeling how we hoped it would?

Collection members can listen here. And if you want to talk any of this through, come and join the conversation in my private community.

If you’re not a member yet, you can join us and get access to the full Collection (this episode, and over 90 others like it) right here.