No one warns you about this part.
The part where your body aches from being hit and kicked, where your arms are covered in scratches you can’t explain to anyone without feeling ashamed. The part where your ears are still ringing hours later from being screamed at — not once, not twice, but for what feels like the entire day.
No one tells you how it feels when your own child — the one you love more than anything, the one you’d take a bullet for without hesitation — looks you straight in the eyes and spits, “I hate you. I wish you weren’t my mum. I wish you were dead.”
You tell yourself, it’s the overload talking. It’s not them, it’s the sensory storm, the frustration, the anxiety spilling out of them like wildfire.
But that doesn’t make the words hurt any less.
It doesn’t stop your chest from tightening like someone’s standing on it, or your throat from burning because you’re swallowing every scream you want to let out.
And then come the summer holidays.
Six long weeks.
No school. No respite. Just long, endless days where routines collapse, energy runs high, and every single emotion in the house feels turned up to maximum volume.
Six weeks of tiptoeing around, trying to predict the meltdowns before they erupt, while still trying to give your other kids a summer that doesn’t feel like they’re just surviving too.
People tell you, “At least you’ll get to make memories! Go to the beach! Have fun!”
But they don’t see what it takes to leave the house, how even a simple day out can end in screaming, hitting, threats, or the heart-crushing moment when your child refuses to get out of the car because the world just feels too much.
No one tells you how lonely it feels, either.
Friends will say they “get it,” but they don’t. They don’t hear the words you hear daily. They don’t feel the exhaustion of being a punching bag — physically and emotionally — for the person you love the most. They don’t understand how, at night, you sit on the bathroom floor, lights off, scrolling on your phone just to numb your brain, because you can’t face crawling into bed and crying yourself to sleep again.
And here’s the thing:
It doesn’t mean we love our kids any less.
It doesn’t mean we don’t see their magic, their brilliance, their light.
But no one tells you how soul-crushingly heavy it feels to love someone so fiercely while being the person they unleash all their pain on.
No one tells you how much it eats at your mental health — how you start every day already tired, already bracing yourself for the storm, already questioning if you’re strong enough to do another six weeks of this.
So I’m telling you.
Not because I want pity, but because if you’re reading this and whispering “me too,” you need to know you’re not failing. You’re not weak. You’re not a bad parent because some days, you fantasize about disappearing, just for an hour of peace.
You’re human.
You’re exhausted.
You’re surviving something most people will never understand.
And sometimes, surviving really is enough.
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