The school holidays are here - and you're drowning

The summer holidays are well and truly here. Whether you have been in them for weeks already or months, the energy it takes is real. It never ceases to amaze me how quickly the holidays creep up, it often feels like we have just got into the swing of things after the last holiday when the next one arrives!

The summer term itself is especially jam-packed. Trips, shows, sports days, end of term reports, art exhibitions, music recitals, and this year, a heatwave. There’s excitement, nerves, anticipation, celebration and commiseration to hold, alongside the mental logistics of who needs what and who needs to be where. That’s a serious amount of energy we are expending on holding all of this, that we rarely account for - no wonder we’re left depleted. And it’s at exactly this point, already running on empty, that we step into the summer holidays: more childcare to arrange, everything else to keep juggling as usual.

I always imagined I’d love the school holidays as a mum. That I’d treasure the time with my children. That we’d fill our days with wholesome activities together.

What’s actually transpired, in recent years, is that I didn’t love them. They felt never-ending - a constant logistical headache of patchwork childcare, while I tried to fit far too much work into tiny pockets of time. Add in the life admin, the health appointments, the general running of a house, and the food - the constant cycle of thinking about what everyone’s going to eat, buying it, preparing it, dishing it up, clearing it away - and I was desperate for term to start again.

I see this so often in my work, in conversation with friends and other mums, and here on Substack. We hold everything because that’s what we believe we should be doing, and because it seems like there’s no one else to do it - or they won’t do it right if they did. Squeezing in work at the end of the day once our children are asleep, effectively starting another job at the end of a long day, to try and be there and do everything.

But what is the cost of this? Our wellbeing - our psychological and physical health. Our relationships. Our ability to enjoy our own lives. Pretty big things to be quietly losing to a holiday rota.

So if you’re feeling like you’re losing your patience with your children, and possibly aspects of your sanity, I want you to know you’re not alone, and when we stop to really think about it, it’s not surprising.

Instead of feeling guilty about it, or staying stuck in the cycle of shouting and regret, I want you to see it as a symptom of the situation you’re in. You’re holding and doing way too much for one person. When we’re pushed to our limits, we’re not able to be the endlessly patient caregiver we might fantasise about. We all have limits to our patience, our decision-making, our empathy.

And so I want to share one thing that has made my experience of the holidays easier. During the Easter holidays this year we went away with family. We rented a big house with 8 adults and 4 children - and I will admit I was nervous about how it might work out. But what transpired was the children had each other to keep them entertained, and there were plenty of adults around to share the load of cooking, tidying and looking after the children. Yes there was the discussions about what everyone wanted to do and it felt like herding cats in a thunderstorm just to get out of the house. But overall, having that much support made the holiday genuinely enjoyable and by the end, I wasn’t ready for the children to go back to school! For me, that was yet more evidence that the village transforms our experience of parenting.

And so I want to ask you, how are you navigating the holidays? Are you holding it all yourself, or are you sharing the load? Are you getting enough childcare to allow you to do what you need to? Are you having time to rest and recover? I’d love to know.

I want you to know that you deserve to enjoy the summer too. And quite frankly, you will be a much better parent if you get enough childcare to do your work, to get the rest you need and do things you enjoy, rather than always doing what everyone else wants.

If you want more strategies to help you navigate the summer holidays I share them in my post Five things that changed everything available for paid subscribers. Inside the paid tier, we also explore what’s really stopping you from asking for help. Because once you give yourself permission, the village becomes possible.

With warmth,

Ellie

Dr Ellie Hambly
Clinical Psychologist