The most natural thing in an unnatural world.

There is a particular kind of tiredness that doesn’t show up in photographs. It’s one that I’m feeling right now to be exact.

You can be standing in the kitchen at 6.40am in the morning, hair done enough, coffee in hand, a child folded warm against your hip and from the outside it looks like a life that is working. And it is. That’s the strange part. Nothing is broken. The mortgage is paid, the inbox is moving, the small person in your arms is thriving in the deep, unmistakable way that tells you the mothering is landing. By every external measure, you are doing it.

And yet somewhere underneath the competence, a quieter voice has started keeping its own ledger. It notices that you cannot remember the last time you did a single thing that was only for you. It notices that “later” has become a place you send all your own needs to live, indefinitely, like a drawer you keep meaning to clear out. It notices the hormonal weather shifting beneath your feet - the body recalibrating on its own timeline, indifferent to your calendar - and it wonders, gently and without drama, how long this particular arrangement can hold.

I want to talk about that voice because it’s not spoken about enough. And because of that, the awareness of the wider world is lower than it should be. This is not an essay to incite alarm or panic, but one to inform and create meaningful change.

The duality nobody warned us about.

Most of the conversation about overwhelmed mothers is, rightly, about scarcity. The single mother with no help. The family stretched past breaking by money and circumstance. That struggle is real and urgent and I would never reach for the spotlight in a room where someone is genuinely drowning.

But there is another struggle that hides precisely because it looks like abundance - and because it hides, it rarely gets named, which means the women living it often assume they’re simply failing at something everyone else has figured out.

It is the struggle of the woman who has, on paper, enough. Enough capability. Enough drive. Enough resources to outsource the laundry and order the groceries and book the help. The very woman whose competence is the problem, because competence is precisely what the system keeps asking her to spend.

I am one of these women. I am an international lawyer, which is to say my mind has been trained for years to hold complexity, anticipate the worst, and never, ever drop the thread (even though lately it feels like I have more often than I’d like). I am also a life coach, which means I spend a good amount of time helping other people (predominantly other female leaders) find the door out of the exact rooms I sometimes can’t find my own way out of. And before either of those, in the order that matters most to me, I am a mother. If you asked me to name myself by role, that is the one I would say first, without hesitation.

That ordering is a gift and a trap all at once. Because when “mother first” meets “career big and busy” meets “barely sleeping,” the maths becomes brutally simple. The hours go to the child. The hours go to the work. And the woman in the middle - the actual living, breathing, hormonally-shifting human who is the engine of both - gets whatever is left. Which is, increasingly, nothing.

The unnatural confines of doing it “naturally”.

Here is the paradox I keep circling.

So many of us are trying to raise our children in the most natural way we can. Real food. Less screen, more soil. Slowness. Presence. The instinctive, animal closeness that every cell of us knows is right. We are reaching, consciously, for something ancient.

And we are attempting all of it inside a system that is, structurally, the least natural environment in which mothering has ever been attempted in human history.

For most of our species’ existence, a mother was never meant to do this alone, or even nearly alone. She mothered inside a village - surrounded by other women, older women, hands that took the baby so she could sleep, eat, weep, be. The work was distributed across a whole web of bodies. The modern arrangement quietly deleted the village and then handed the entire web’s worth of labour to one woman, added a demanding career on top (and by this I mean any work that a mother is doing whether she likes it or not), removed her sleep and called the result “having it all.”

So of course it feels like swimming against a current. You are doing something profoundly natural - loving and raising a child - under conditions that are profoundly unnatural. The friction you feel isn’t a personal failing. It’s the honest, physical sensation of an old instinct meeting a new and ill-fitting machine.

When “go with the flow” stops working.

I am usually the first to recommend flow. Surrender. Trust the process. As a coach, and as a person, I truly believe in it.

But lately I’ve noticed that my flow has, in places, simply stopped flowing. It’s gone still. Stagnant. And when the current isn’t moving, “going with the flow” is no longer surrender…it’s just sinking, slowly, while telling yourself you’re relaxing.

The procrastination I keep catching myself in isn’t laziness. I know laziness; this isn’t it. It’s the specific paralysis of a nervous system that has been running at full capacity for too long and has quietly decided that the one thing it will refuse to do is the thing that’s only for me. There’s energy for the drafting advice to clients. Energy for bath and bedtime. None, somehow, for the twenty minutes of movement, or the early night, or the appointment I keep meaning to make. The self is fast becoming the line item that gets cut.

And that, I’ve realised, is the main thing that’s doing the slow damage. Not the work. Not the mothering. Both of those are forms of love. It’s the disappearance of the woman holding them both up.

The reframe I’m choosing.

So, I’m not writing this from the bottom of a pit. I’m writing it from the moment of noticing and self -awareness - which, if you know anything about change, is the only place real change ever starts.

Here is what I’m holding onto.

Tending to myself is not a betrayal of “mother first.” It is the fulfilment of it. A depleted source cannot nourish anything. The most natural law in all of nature is that the spring must be replenished or the river runs dry. Putting myself back on the list isn’t selfishness sneaking in through the back door. It’s maintenance of the one instrument that everything else depends on.

I don’t need to dismantle my whole life to begin. I need one small, reliable thing that is mine - not earned, not negotiated, not squeezed into the cracks, but protected like I’d protect an appointment with the most important client in the world. Because I am.

And I’m allowed to name this struggle out loud without apologising for the abundance around it. A full life can still be a depleting one. Acknowledging that isn’t ingratitude - it’s the beginning of building a life that’s not just enviable from the outside, but actually liveable from the inside.

If you’re reading this with your own quiet ledger ticking away beneath your competence, I see you. You are not doing it wrong. You are doing something extraordinarily hard under conditions that were never designed for it - and the fact that you’re doing it beautifully and intentionally is exactly what’s been hiding the cost.

The most natural thing in the world is to need care, too. Including the woman giving all of it.

Until next time,

Roxanna

Leave a comment

Share