When You Cannot Quietly Quit from Parenting

(3/3) This story forms the second part of a 3-part story series, exploring the experience of parental burnout. Subscribe to The Hard Truth to be notified of the next release.

She can feel the sun on her skin as she lies in the camping chair that she found sitting in a dusty corner of the veranda. When they bought these chairs, they had so many aspirations on the places they'd go, the holidays they'd take once they had kids. Bright-eyed, recently married, feeling as though they could take on the world.

As she sits there, eyes closed, she can feel the sun absorb her wet cheeks from earlier.

Without thinking, she grabs her phone from next to her as she clicks on the photos app. She scrolls to photos before the kids. Looking at herself in the photos, the big smile cheesing at the camera. She remembers the moment clearly. They had just found out they were pregnant with their first child, Tom. The joy, the anticipation. David and her felt so lucky for it to happen quickly.

As she looks up from the phone, she watches Daisy crawling across the grass. Daisy looks back at her, cooing at her glance. She smiles softly back, feeling her internal struggle inside.

Everyone warned her of the pregnancy, how tiring it was going to be, how unwell she might feel and needing to juggle work with the 9 months of pregnancy. She spent so much time focusing on getting through the pregnancy that by the time her first, Tom, was born, it simply became a whirlwind from one thing to the next.

Nobody taught her how to parent. She had her natural parenting style but that doesn't mean it worked for her two very different children.

She has been letting the tears fall all morning since she dropped Tom at school, trying to let herself feel it all. She knows she needs support, but she hasn’t been ready to ask for it. Her mum has offered to help more but she didn't want her to know that she needed it.

As she opens her WhatsApp to message her mum about calling in, she sees some old unread messages from her mother’s group that she had muted when she was struggling and withdrawing from others.

Without thinking, she opens the conversation and starts to read through all the messages up until what looks like a conversation this morning about the challenges of going back to work. She giggles at one of the mum’s messages that includes a photo message of their work dress being covered in baby-consumed oats that clearly have been regurgitated out.

Without consciously realising it, she touches the baby food that Daisy had smeared earlier across her work shirt with a small smile. A sense of connection, a sense that she isn't alone.

Without thinking, she types in a message ‘Would love to catch up. Can very much relate’, adding with a quick selfie of her shirt equally covered in baby food.

As she lays her phone on her lap, she can already see message replies coming through with laughing emojis and ‘sounds great, let’s make it happen!’.

She closes her eyes and lets the sun fall onto her face as she feels the warmth lightly touch her eyelids. I am going to be OK, she whispers to herself. I just need to ask for help.

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Parenting is hard. It is one of the very few universal facts of life. Even if you desperately love the role of being a parent, it is still hard, and as with any burnout, it occurs when there is a misbalance between the demands placed on you outweighing the resources you have to cope.

But, unlike a professional role, we cannot resign or ‘quietly quit’. We cannot ask for less work when it comes to parenting. We cannot take extended leave or a day off. We can’t just wake up and be like sorry I don’t want to parent today, I am going to call in sick.

It is a continued responsibility so, unlike other types of burnout, we have limited ability to reduce the demands side of the burnout equation.

This means to be able to address parental burnout, we may be able to take a couple of extra items off our plate, but once we reach the non-negotiable responsibilities of being a parent, what else can we do? We must think about how to increase the resources we have to cope with the demands that come with being a parent. We must be willing to accept ourselves as the perfectly imperfect humans that we are.

This might mean noticing the shared experience of other parents, helping us see that we are not alone. It might be realising that how we feel is experienced by others, that the struggle is real and normal, even if it is hard. In turn, we can help ourselves develop self-compassion to remember we are doing the best we can with the resources we have available. Acceptance that things may not always (or ever) be perfect, and not expecting ourselves to have it all together all the time, which isn’t possible.

Most importantly, we need to allow ourselves to be okay with doing our best in any given moment, letting ourselves to truly believe that our best is good enough.

Because the reality is if you care enough to think about how you can be the best parent ever, you are likely doing an amazing job - even with smeared baby food on your work shirt.

Camille Wilson is the founder of Grow Together Now?and partners with companies as a mental health speaker, author and consultant on engaging with mental health in the workplace.