Five things that changed everything for me in the holidays

I want to share an experience you might resonate with. It is a composite of a few mums I’ve worked with recently, with details changed or removed to protect their privacy - but it’s a conversation I keep having, in one form or another. After yet another version of it this week, I felt compelled to write this for you.

It is a week into the summer holidays and she already feels at her wits’ end.

She feels like she is drowning in the thousands of micro-decisions she has to make each day. What everyone is going to eat, do, play with, not play with. Whether to say yes to that snack or that screen. Whether to enforce the rule right now or let it slide. How to respond to that text message, when to organise the play date, which load of washing to put on - you get the picture.

The shouting matches have started again, after months of feeling calmer in the house - something she had worked hard to change.

She had been trying to work in the evenings once her children were in bed, so she could keep up with everything while still being at home with them during the day. But this left her exhausted when she managed it, and frustrated when she “failed” to. She was replying to emails in the cracks of the day, squeezing in medical appointments, and providing emotional support to relatives - all while cooking dinner.

Her children were getting frustrated with her for not doing things “the right way,” or for being distracted. She was losing her patience with them when they weren’t grateful for everything she was trying to do. She was pushing herself physically, psychologically and emotionally to try to do everything and be everyone.

We covered a lot in our session, but the thing I want to share with you is this: when I asked if there was any more childcare she could put in place, her response spoke volumes. She hadn’t even considered it.

As an incredibly clever woman, she is used to working out everyone else’s problems and situations. But it is often not possible to do this for ourselves. We have blind spots. We have implicit expectations placed on us that we’ve stopped noticing are even there.

So, if you feel like you are only just keeping your head above the water this summer holiday. I want to give you five things that have transformed my own experience of the holidays. They may sound simple but they took me a while to realise, with the help of some great people in my life.