Motherhood: The silent strain no one talks about

Nobody tells you how quiet disappears when you have a child.

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One day you have a routine, a rhythm, a you. And then you have children, and everything that was yours just… goes.

If you grew up hearing that self-care was everything, that you had to fill your own cup first, girl, motherhood will humble that fast.

And if you’re doing it away from home, without your village...I see you. I have been there. And I just want you to know that what you’re carrying is real and it is heavy, and you are not imagining it.

People mean well. You know they do.

“Just put them in daycare.”

they say, like it’s that simple. Like the worry dissolves the moment you sign the forms. But daycare is the thing you do to help you get to work, it's not a nanny system, or mother's help.

Before signing them in, you’re scrolling reviews at midnight, questioning whether the space is stimulating enough, whether you’re somehow shortchanging your child by choosing it, and then the invoice lands and you question everything all over again.

And even when you find somewhere good. It’s not rest. It’s never rest. It’s rush to drop off, sprint to the station, race back before pickup closes, and do it all again tomorrow.

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Daycare wasn’t my breathing space. It was survival infrastructure. That’s it.

I was on that treadmill for years. And I didn’t even fully realise how exhausted I was. I just kept going because what else do you do?

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What self-care actually looked like for me

Everyone says it, don’t they.

Self-care.

Fill your cup.

You can’t pour from an empty vessel.

And listen, they’re not wrong, but what nobody tells you is that self-care looks completely different depending on the season you’re in.

When my kids were tiny, self-care was a £3 coffee and two hours sitting in a coffee shop doing absolutely nothing. Not journalling. Not being productive. Just existing without someone needing something from me.

Self-care was sleeping.

Just sleeping.

If I had a day off while they were in daycare, the most radical thing I could do was resist the urge to catch up on everything,

the laundry,

the life admin,

the guilt list,

and just. be. still.

I was touched out. And I want to say that out loud because not enough people do.

There is a very specific kind of exhaustion that comes from being needed physically, constantly, by small humans who love you so completely they don’t understand where you end and they begin.

In that season, self-care wasn’t a luxury. It was the bare minimum to keep going.

So if that’s where you are right now, give yourself permission to let it be that simple.

A silent coffee moment counts.

The nap counts.

It all counts.

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The part I kept quiet for a long time

Okay, this is the bit I didn’t used to talk about. But I’m talking about it now because I think a lot of us feel this and say nothing.

In those years, I felt like I had abandoned God.

Like I wasn’t showing up the way I should.

My prayers were half-formed and whispered.

Quiet time?

What quiet time, someone small was always walking in.

I wasn’t giving Him what I thought He deserved, and the guilt of that sat on top of everything else like an extra weight I was already too tired to carry.

And then, because exhaustion has a way of lying to you, I started to feel like He’d abandoned me too. Like the silence was mutual. Like I’d fallen too far behind to be worthy of being met where I was.

But that was never the truth.

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” Matthew 11:28

He was not waiting for me to get myself together first.

He was there in the exhaustion.

He was there in the coffee shop staring at nothing.

He was there in those barely there prayers I offered from the floor of my own depletion, and really the silence I offered.

Grace doesn’t have a capacity requirement. And you being tired, you being in survival mode, that was never something to be ashamed of in front of Him.

If you’ve felt unworthy, like you’ve drifted too far to find your way back, the door was never closed. I promise you. It was never even fully shut.

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Coming out the other side

When my kids were around seven and four, something in me started to shift.

I began to surface.

I wouldn’t even call it reclaiming myself at first, it was more like remembering there was a self worth reclaiming.

That’s when I started revisiting the Bible. That’s when the questions I’d been too tired to ask started coming back:

Who am I outside of all of this?

And what exactly am I showing my children?

Because the best thing I can give my children is not a perfect mother.

It’s a real one.

One who shows them what getting back up looks like.

One who tends to her faith not out of obligation but out of genuine need.

The faith I was given as a child, I didn’t appreciate it then, I just moved through it. But when I came back to it in the hard years, I wasn’t starting from zero. That foundation held. Those were gifts my parents gave me, and they are gifts I want to pass on, not through what I say, but through what my children see me do.

If you’re still in it, I see you, sis.

The barely sleeping, touched-out, running-on-nothing version of you. I have been her. And I just want to say, it gets easier.

Not in a brush it off way. In the real, I lived it, I promise you way.

The season you are in is not permanent.

Your children will sleep.

They will become more independent.

And you will get pieces of yourself back, one by one.

The prayers you whisper half asleep still reach Him.

The love you give from an empty tank still counts. You haven’t fallen behind. You haven’t been forgotten.

Hold on. The light at the end is real.

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