A letter from one overextended mother to another.

I wrote this a few months ago and then sat on it.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to share it. It felt a little too honest, a little too close to the bone. The kind of writing you do for yourself and then quietly close the tab on.

But then this afternoon I removed a mushroom from my kids’ bathroom wall.

An actual mushroom. Growing. From the wall. Please don’t judge me.

Then I came across this article and thought – you know what, I’m sharing it. Because minus the fungal situation, I am fairly certain I am not alone in any of this. If you’re reading this feeling all of the things I’m about to describe, I want you to know, neither are you.

Let me paint you a picture of my morning. Most mornings, actually.

Before 8:30am I have navigated two different school schedules, two different drop-off/pick up arrangements, remembered kids medication, as well as my own, mentally logged that the dog needs his walk before the heat kicks in, answered a work text and started building what I genuinely hope will become something viable and bill paying, for our future – my own business – in the seventeen minutes between the morning farewells and the moment I have to be somewhere else entirely.

My husband is a teacher. I know what you’re thinking – that’s handy – and yes, in many ways it is. But teaching doesn’t end at 3:30pm. It never did. We live on a property that demands its own kind of relentless attention through every season. There is always something that needs doing outside (and inside) and it has a way of making its presence known at the exact moment you sit down.

I teach casually to pay the bills. I build my business in every spare minute I can find. We live in a town away from family. Our beautiful, moulting dog requires love and long walks and he gives it all back tenfold – but he is also, technically, another living being depending on me to show up.

I have two boys. Twelve (almost thirteen) and fourteen and a half. One of them has 22q11.2 deletion syndrome – a chromosomal condition that brings with it a layered stack of medical challenges that requires a particular kind of vigilance that doesn’t clock off. Ever. Both boys play basketball. One also plays soccer. They are at two different schools, which means two different calendars, two different rhythms, two different sets of everything. We are not nailing this at all – missed casual clothes days and unsigned permission slips.

I have also, in recent times, been working my way off anti-anxiety medication that I’ve been on for two and a half years. Medication that became necessary after some genuinely hard things happened in a workplace. While coming off it is its own quiet, careful journey, I’m doing it. Slowly. On purpose.

I’m telling you all of this not for sympathy – I know you have your own version of this list, probably with your own very specific flavour of chaos – but because I want you to understand that what I’m about to say isn’t coming from someone who has figured it all out. It’s coming from someone who is right in it, just like you.

I’ve been reading about something that researchers call a mental load. One therapist described it as having forty-seven browser tabs open that never fully close. I read that and laughed in a way that was probably more cathartic than funny. Because that’s it, isn’t it? That’s exactly it. It’s not even the tasks themselves. It’s the anticipating. The constant background hum of remembering, managing, scanning, preparing. It runs even when we’re technically resting.

Over time, it becomes exhausting in a way that ordinary rest doesn’t fix. Not really. Because the environment we rest in is the same environment that triggers all the responsibilities in the first place.

Here’s what I’ve come to understand, partly from research and partly from lived experience…

The times I have felt most like myself again – not the mum, not the carer, not the teacher, not the small business owner with a notebook full of plans – have been when I’ve physically stepped outside the environment that holds all of those roles.

Travel does something specific to the brain. When you remove the visual cues of responsibility – the to-do list on the bench, the medical appointment reminder on the fridge, the muddy boots by the back door – the thinking part of your brain is actually allowed to shift gears. It moves out of executive functioning mode and into something closer to recovery. Nature accelerates this. Slower pacing helps. So does the particular feeling of being somewhere that doesn’t need anything from you.

I am on a genuine mission right now to get myself back to the mentally and physically healthy version of the person I was before kids. Not because that person was better, or because these years haven’t mattered. But because I miss her and I think she deserves to come back.

That journey is real. The challenge is real. The positive mindset it requires is something I have to actively choose, some days more than others. Coming off anti-anxiety medication while running this life is not small work. Neither is building a business from scratch while being everything to everyone else.

But here’s what I keep coming back to – the research is clear that travel – even a weekend away, even something local and unhurried – creates what one psychologist called a new biological blueprint. The nervous system actually learns regulation. The body remembers what calm felt like and it holds onto it.

For me, that’s not abstract. That’s the whole point.

I’m not writing this to sell you something. I’m writing it because I think we – mothers carrying this kind of invisible weight – have been told for too long that rest is indulgent, that stepping away is selfish, that we’ll get to ourselves eventually.

But eventually has a habit of never arriving.

Stepping away, even briefly, even imperfectly, is not abandonment. It’s not irresponsible. It’s actually one of the most scientifically sound things you can do for your nervous system, your mental health, and – quietly, honestly – for the people who need you to still be standing in twelve months’ time.

The browser tabs don’t close themselves. But sometimes, for a few days, you can close the laptop.

I think we owe it to ourselves to let that be enough.

With love from someone who is also figuring it out,

Erin