by it girl™

It is biology, not you
It started with a number that stopped me cold. Almost half of American working moms are in active burnout right now. For years I had been treating mine like a private failure. The kind of thing you fix by trying harder and going to bed earlier and being a little more organized.
The number says otherwise. You cannot have a discipline problem that lands on half of an entire group of people the exact same way. That is not a character flaw spreading person to person. That is a pattern, and patterns have causes. What I finally understood is that the bone-deep exhaustion I felt at the end of every day was not weakness showing up.
It was my body running a program that the load I carry sets off automatically. The shoulders that will not drop, the hum that will not quiet, the sense of bracing for something at six o'clock with nothing left in the tank. That is real and physical, and once I knew that, the first thing that lifted was the shame.











