I Love Being a Mum — It’s Everything Else I Can’t Stand

I need to say something that I think a lot of mums feel but struggle to put into words, because it sounds like a contradiction until you live it.

I love being a mum. I genuinely, hand-on-heart love it. I chose to home educate my two girls specifically so I could be present for their childhood. I didn’t want to hand the best hours of their day to a system that didn’t know them. I wanted to be there for the questions, the discoveries, the slow Tuesday mornings and the chaotic Friday afternoons. I chose this. And I would choose it again every single time.

What I don’t love is everything else that tries to steal me away from it.

The Stuff That Gets in the Way

The admin. The emails. The bills. The hold music with the council. The car that needs an MOT. The boiler that breaks in February. The food shop that takes two hours if you include the meal planning, the list-writing, the actual shopping, the putting away, and the realisation that you forgot the one thing you actually went for.

The mental load — that invisible, relentless scroll of things to remember, organise, book, chase, cancel, reschedule, and worry about — that runs in the background of my brain like an app I can’t close. I chose motherhood. I didn’t choose to be the household project manager, the family calendar, the appointment tracker, the permissions granter, the sock finder, and the only person who knows when the bins go out.

Every hour I spend on hold with HMRC or filling in forms or dealing with a co-parenting email that could have been a sentence is an hour I’m not spending with my girls. And that makes me furious. Not at them — never at them. At the system. At the life admin that expands to fill every gap in your day if you let it.

Why Home Educating Makes This Sharper

When you home educate, people assume you have endless time. “You’re at home all day!” they say, as if being at home with two children while also being their teacher, their social coordinator, their curriculum planner, and their emotional support human leaves vast stretches of free time.

The truth is the opposite. Home education means you’re always on. There’s no 9am-3pm window where someone else takes responsibility. When my girls are learning, I’m facilitating. When they’re not learning, I’m planning what comes next. And somewhere in between, I’m trying to run a business, keep a house standing, and remember to eat something that isn’t toast crusts.

I don’t resent the home education — it’s the best decision I’ve ever made. I resent the fact that the world isn’t designed for families who do things differently. The appointments that only run during “school hours.” The activities that assume your child is in school Monday to Friday. The local authority letters that arrive with thinly veiled suspicion about why your child isn’t in a classroom.

Co-Parenting Adds Another Layer

When you’re co-parenting, your admin doubles. Everything requires communication with another adult who may or may not respond promptly, agree easily, or remember what was discussed last time. Handovers, holiday planning, medical decisions, school — sorry, education decisions — all filtered through a relationship that ended for a reason.

I’ve written extensively about co-parenting communication because it’s one of the biggest energy drains in my life. Not the children. Never the children. The logistics around the children. The texts that should be simple but aren’t. The calendar that needs constant negotiating.

Every minute spent managing that is a minute not spent reading with my daughters, or walking in the woods, or having the kind of slow conversation that only happens when you’re not rushing to be somewhere.

What I’m Actually Angry About

I’m angry that motherhood — the actual being-with-your-children part — is beautiful, and everything around it is designed to pull you away from it.

I’m angry that we’ve built a society where raising children well requires so much admin, so much bureaucracy, so much financial juggling, that the thing itself gets squeezed into the gaps between everything else.

I’m angry that mums are expected to do all of this invisibly, without complaint, and with a smile — and that when we say “this is too much,” we’re told to practise self-care, as if a bath bomb can fix a systemic problem.

I’m not burned out on motherhood. I’m burned out on everything that motherhood is wrapped in.

What Actually Helps

Ruthless prioritisation. I stopped trying to do everything well and started deciding what actually matters. My girls’ education matters. Our time together matters. The house being spotless does not matter. The emails can wait until they’re in bed.

Saying no without explaining. No, we can’t make that appointment. No, I’m not volunteering for that. No, I don’t have capacity for a phone call today. No is a complete sentence. We built the Boundary Toolkit partly because I needed those scripts myself.

Automating everything possible. Online food delivery. Direct debits. Batch cooking. Templates for co-parenting messages. Anything that can be systematised should be, because every system frees up 20 minutes you can spend on something that matters.

Finding your people. The mums who get it. Who don’t judge your house or your schedule or your decision to educate at home. Who understand that you can be completely devoted to your children and completely overwhelmed by your life at the same time. If you haven’t found those people yet, the Darling Mellow Community was built for exactly this.

The Point of All This

If you’re reading this and thinking “yes, that’s exactly it” — I want you to know something. You’re not failing. You’re not ungrateful. You’re not doing too much or too little.

You’re a mum who loves her children so much that every minute stolen from them by admin, bureaucracy, and life logistics feels like a personal insult. And it is. It is an insult to the work you’re doing. The most important work there is.

Protect your time with your children fiercely. Outsource, automate, delegate, or drop everything that isn’t essential. And on the days when the to-do list wins and you barely see your kids between the cooking and the cleaning and the emails — forgive yourself. Tomorrow you’ll build a den instead.

That’s the whole thing. Love your children. Resent the admin. Build a life where there’s more of the first and less of the second.

You’re doing it right. Even when it doesn’t feel like it.