It's Just a Phase

Someone said it to me again last week. I was standing in the school car park, coffee gone cold in my hand, telling a friend that I hadn't slept properly since March. She meant well. She always means well. She smiled and said "don't worry, it's just a phase" and then the conversation moved on to something else, the way it always does.

I used to say thank you when people said that to me. Now I just nod, because I've learned that arguing costs more energy than I have.

Here is the thing nobody tells you about phases. You're still living inside them while they're happening. Nobody experiences a phase from the outside. There is no calendar counting down the days until it ends. There is just tonight, and the night after that, and the quiet fear that this might be forever, even when you know, somewhere logically, that it isn't.

When my youngest wasn't sleeping through the night, people told me it was a phase. It was. It lasted fourteen months. Fourteen months of being told something was temporary while I lived every single day of it as though it were permanent. Because that's what exhaustion does. It erases your sense of time. It makes tomorrow feel exactly as far away and exactly as close as forever.

Phases don't stop. They just change shape.

What nobody tells you is that phases don't stop. You think you're building towards some finish line where the phases run out and you just get to be a mum, settled, sorted, done. But they don't run out. They just change shape.

The newborn phase was about survival. Feeding, sleep, keeping a tiny person alive on almost no information and even less rest. Then it was toddlerhood, tantrums in supermarkets, the exhausting business of teaching a small person how to be a person at all. I thought once they started school the phase would finally ease off. I thought I'd get some of myself back.

Instead the worry just moved house. Now I'm a mum of school age kids and the phase I'm in is quieter, but it's not smaller. It lives in my head instead of in sleepless nights. Are they hitting the levels they're supposed to be hitting. Are they growing socially the way they should. Do they have friends, real friends, the kind that make school feel safe rather than something to survive. Am I doing enough at home to back up what they're learning. Have I remembered the non uniform day, the reading log, the permission slip, the packed lunch that needs to be nut free, the birthday party on Saturday, the fact that it's my turn to bring snacks.

Nobody warns you that this phase is just as consuming as the newborn one. It doesn't look like exhaustion from the outside. It looks like a woman checking her phone in the school car park. But inside it's a constant, quiet audit, running in the background of every single day, checking whether my child is okay and whether I'm the reason if they're not.

What the phrase is really doing

I think what bothers me most isn't the phrase itself. It's what the phrase is doing. It's closing a door. It's the verbal equivalent of a hand raised to say we don't need to talk about this anymore. It's not cruelty. Most of the time it's discomfort. People don't always know what to do with someone else's tiredness, so they hand it back wrapped in reassurance, and reassurance feels like the kind thing to offer, even when it isn't what's needed.

What I actually needed, most days, wasn't reassurance. It was someone to say that sounds really hard, and then stay quiet long enough for me to actually answer.

I've started noticing how rarely that happens. How rarely anyone asks a mother a real question and waits for a real answer. We ask "how are you" as a greeting, not an inquiry. We've built an entire social language around not really wanting to know.

So here's what I'm asking for

So here's what I'm asking for, not just for me but for every mother reading this who has been handed a phase like it was supposed to make her feel better.

Don't tell me it's just a phase. Tell me you see how hard this particular stretch of road is. Ask me what today actually looked like. Let me tell you about the 3am wake up, the school run I nearly missed, the load of washing that's been sitting damp in the machine since yesterday. Let me say it out loud without you rushing to shrink it down to something smaller and more manageable for you to hear.

Phases end. But then another one starts, wearing a different face, asking something new of me. I'm not asking anyone to pretend otherwise. But dismissing what a mother is carrying while she's still carrying it doesn't make the weight any lighter. It just makes her feel like she has to carry it alone, and quietly, and with a smile on, because apparently that's what's expected of her while she waits for this one to pass too, before the next one arrives.

I don't need anyone to fix it. I need someone to sit in it with me for five minutes. That's the whole ask. It's smaller than people think, and somehow it's also the thing we almost never get.

So the next time a mother tells you she's tired, or overwhelmed, or barely holding it together, try not reaching for the phrase that ends the conversation. Try staying in it with her instead. It won't take long. It might be the only five minutes of her day that feel like they were actually seen.

🖤