Every night, as I get into bed, I run through the day in my mind. I didn’t play enough. I shouted too much. I didn’t give him enough varied food. Did I validate his feelings? Has he had enough outdoor time? Did I give Nova enough attention? What was that weird rash she had after the bath? I open Google to search for photos of rashes – eczema. I open Amazon to order ointment. Shit, I haven’t taken her to any sensory classes yet. She won’t be as smart as Ren, and it will be my fault. I close Amazon before I check out. I search for Baby Sensory classes near me, but they only do Thursdays and Fridays, I’ve already gone back to work on Fridays, and I have Ren too on Thursdays. I shouldn’t have gone back so early, but we need the money, I don’t have a choice.

I put down my phone and roll over.

The washing basket is overflowing again. I forgot to clean out the air fryer. And I didn’t make my overnight oats. Where shall I take them tomorrow? Will it be warm enough for the park? I pick up my phone again, and open the weather app. Shit, Nova has no socks, and I must remember to order that Snoozeshade for the holiday; she won’t take long naps in the pram otherwise. I open the Amazon app and add a Snoozeshade to my basket. Ren’s outgrown all his t-shirts, or they’re all stained. I must order Vanish. I close Amazon, open the Tesco app, book a slot, add the vegetables I didn’t feed Ren today to my basket checkout, and forget to add Vanish. Oh, the socks.

I’ll pick some up in Sainsbury’s on the way to the park tomorrow. I open the Instagram app. I see a video of a woman who starts her day at 3.15am. She removes her mouthtape and heatless curlers, puts on her gym gear and goes for a 10k run. She returns, drinks her Symprove, and then warm water with a freshly squeezed lemon. She has breakfast, showers, puts make-up on, and gets dressed in a perfectly put-together outfit. She preps her kids’ lunches and breakfasts with pancakes and fruit that look like little bears with smiling faces. She lays out their outfits for the day, goes to wake them up at 7am, and the video ends. I’m furious. I feel even worse than I did when I first got into bed. I close the app, and I close my eyes. I feel like a failure, and I better get some sleep before I get ready to do my best again tomorrow. Shit, the ointment. 

This narrative is not exclusive to bedtime; it lives in my mind permanently, like 100 tabs open on a browser, each with unfinished searches, work and reading. It hums in the background while I put on a superhero cape and do my best Ghost Spider impression. It ticks over while I put on my silly voice and sing to Nova in the bath. It never goes away, but the weight of it creeps further and further to the forefront of my mind, and it usually erupts as a snarky comment to my husband for not taking the bins out or an overreaction because Ren won’t just put on the clothes I got out for nursery that day. The truth is, it isn’t my fault. I’m trying to do it all and have it all in a society that just doesn’t allow us to. 

As a millennial, I’ve been raised to believe that women can have it all. We can do whatever we want to do, we can be whatever we want to be – the sky is our limit! We’ve grown up during a time of change, where there’s hope that women can be equals. In the workplace. In relationships. In finances. In sports. However, equality has yet to penetrate the surface of child-rearing and childcare support. We’re buying homes, getting married and having children at an older age than ever, allowing women to progress their careers and find themselves more comfortable financially before starting a family. Still, the downside to this is women are being faced with an impossible choice once they’ve had those children. Do we go back to the job we love and our family relies on to survive, at the detriment of time spent with our children, or do we look for something with less pay and more flexibility and struggle to give them the life we worked so hard to lay the foundations for? Most of the parents I know rely heavily on grandparents’ support to make going back to work a possibility, and even then, they still feel like both their work and family life are suffering because ‘the balance’ doesn’t truly exist. And that isn’t exclusive to work, either.

I once saw a video online of a woman with several empty cups in front of her, one representing family, one work, one social life, one self-care, one relationship and one home, and a jug of water representing her time and effort. She took the jug and poured equal parts of water into each cup. None of them were full. She explained how if you’re equally balancing your time and efforts between each area, none of them are being done as well as you’d like them to be. You may have a big work project, and you pour some water out of the social life, family life and self-care cups to fill your work cup up to the top. Sure, work now looks great, but the other cups barely have anything in them. You feel guilty, so you pour from social life and self-care into the family cup. Your kids get more time and attention, but you feel completely burnt out. You book a spa day with friends. Social life and self-care are full, but your home cup is now empty. You come home to a full washing basket, nothing in the fridge, and a list full of life admin. You drain your social and self-care cups to fill the home cup again. Oh, wait, your relationship cup has had nothing in it for months. And so, the cycle continues. 

This was a powerful metaphor for me because it laid out in such simple terms that what I was trying so hard to achieve every day was actually completely impossible. Of course, I couldn’t simultaneously be the best version of myself in all areas of my life. There simply are not enough hours in the day to do everything you need and want to do to the absolute best of your ability. And so I try to tell myself that I don’t have to have it all and do it all; I just have to do enough. But still, the unrealistic expectation – and fucking infuriating Instagram videos – still get the best of me, and those nights where I lay in bed berating myself still happen far more often than I’d like.

This mind-fucking narrative starts as soon as you have your baby, and you’re told to ‘sleep when the baby sleeps’. Has anyone actually ever done that? Maybe, in those first couple of weeks, when your partner is still off work, and your family bring over hot dinners and do the washing up while they are there. But that phase doesn’t last long, and if you really slept every time the baby slept, you’d be living in absolute squalor, your child would have no clean clothes, and you’d be lucky to achieve 1000 steps a week, let alone the recommended 10,000 a day.

As our children grow, we’re told we should leave our babies to get out for some me-time, to focus on self-care and filling our own cups back up, but again, it feels like it’s at the detriment of your new family, and that choosing yourself comes with such a massive pang of guilt, it hardly ever feels worth it. We’re supposed to always put our relationship first above all else because that is the most important thing for your children, but how are you supposed to do that when after a day of making meals then cleaning them up, holding space for big feelings and diffusing tantrums, thinking of what to eat for dinner, making dinner, trying to convince your children to eat the dinner, cleaning up dinner and then of course, bedtime, all you can muster is sitting in silence on opposite ends of the sofa?

I’m not saying that, as women, we shouldn’t be shooting for the stars, but I think if we were all a bit more honest with one another about the sacrifices we have to make in all other areas of our lives in order to thrive in one of them, we wouldn’t feel so alone. And what is more important to one parent will be far less important to another. I might be okay with skipping the homemade batch cooking for my children, never wearing make-up and not perfectly organising the inside of my kids’ wardrobes, but getting outside for a daily walk, being present for bedtime most days of the week, and making sure I eat balanced meals are now all non-negotiable for me. If we could all agree that those ‘how I get it done by waking up at 3.15am’ videos should be banned worldwide, or at the very least be treated as satire, then maybe we wouldn’t still be lying awake punishing ourselves at the time this woman wakes up to ‘do it all’. The thing is, while on the surface, she may seem to have her shit together, we don’t know what is really going on behind closed apps.

I’ve accepted, through gritted teeth, that I’m not going to be the best mum, wife, daughter, friend and colleague on the same day – or even in the same year. And honestly, that’s fine.

Now pass me the mouth tape, I’m going to bed.