On why every mother needs the gift of a burn out diagnosis this Christmas
Everyone else is doing it, so why shouldn't we? Plus some very personal stuff I haven't shared anywhere else
Today I did something really radical: sometime before midday, while the kids where in school, I silenced my phone, got into bed and shut my eyes. I ignored the message from the kid’s school about a sharing assembly, from a magazine editor about a commission, from a surgery about a missed appointment, and told the world to go away for a few hours.
I don’t usually do this. Sure, I often waste time in the day, lots of it, scrolling around on Instagram, or browsing too long in the bookshop near my house before I sit down in the cafe there to start work, or talking to friends in England on their way home from work just as I’m trying to make myself start mine. I fold socks and start slicing onions and chicken to get supper partially on the go at 945am. But I don’t usually get into bed in the middle of the morning. And as I got into bed, I could also hear my own internal voice tell me I didn’t deserve that morning nap.
And yet I really did.
Because doing the caring that every mother does keeps me in a state of low level burn-out, all the time. Maternal burn out, however, feels like something I’m not really supposed to name, let alone act upon. Or perhaps I can name it, yet must not act on it, since who cares if a mother has burn out? Mothers live in a burnt out world. So I feel I need to almost say this under my breath, but is burn out a condition mothers are even allowed to catch?