When the Mental Load Gets Too Heavy to Hold

There are moments in life that stop you in your tracks.

Not the big dramatic ones you can see coming. The quiet ones. The ones that creep up on you when you're already running on empty.

Mine came in the form of a phone call from my son's school.

I had missed a meeting. Not arrived late. Not rushed in flustered and apologetic. Completely, entirely missed it. It hadn't even registered on my radar that morning. No nagging feeling. No "oh I think I had something today." Nothing.

For someone who never forgets appointments, this was confronting.

At the time I was in the thick of my divorce and the mental load I was carrying was unlike anything I had experienced before. But here's the thing I didn't understand then, and what I want you to hear now:

You don't need to be going through a crisis for the mental load to reach a tipping point.

For most mums, it's not one big thing. It's the accumulation of everything, every single day.

It's the appointments and the permission slips and the what's for dinner and the did anyone feed the dog and the reply to that email and the remember to call the doctor and the notice from school at the bottom of the bag that needed to be returned two weeks ago.

It's relentless. And it's largely invisible...even to us, especially to us!

What I did instead of being kind to myself

When I got that phone call, I didn't think "of course, look at everything you've been carrying."

I thought "how could you forget that? What kind of mum forgets a meeting about her own child?"

I made myself feel worse. I piled shame on top of an already overloaded system. And in doing so, I missed the real message my body and mind were desperately trying to send me:

This is too much. Something needs to change.

Instead I just added guilt to the load and kept going.

Sound familiar?

The mental load doesn't announce itself

It doesn't tap you on the shoulder and say "just so you know, you're about to hit a wall."

It just quietly fills up. And fills up. Until one day something slips through...a forgotten appointment, a snapped response, a moment of lying in bed staring at the ceiling wondering why you feel so depleted when you haven't even done anything today.

That's not weakness. That's not failing.

That's what happens when you've been carrying too much for too long without anywhere to put it down.

What I wish I had known then

I wish I had known that the goal wasn't to carry the load better.

It was to find a way to actually put some of it down. To have a place to release what I was holding before it spilled over into the moments that mattered most.

I didn't have that then. But I do now. And it has changed everything.

If any of this sounds familiar, I'd love to hear from you. What does your mental load look like right now? You can email me directly here.

Much love

Tanya x