When Did Exhaustion Become the Price of Admission?

There is something deeply revealing about the way we talk about exhausted mothers. We talk about them as though they are an unavoidable feature of modern life, like traffic jams or delayed trains. We acknowledge their existence, perhaps even sympathise with them, but rarely stop to question why so many women seem to be carrying so much in the first place. Instead, exhaustion has become so woven into our expectations of motherhood that we barely notice it anymore. In fact, we have become so accustomed to mothers being tired, overwhelmed and stretched to breaking point that we now mistake survival for wellbeing.

This was one of the most striking things I took away from The Motherhood Index. The report found that 61% of mothers rated their wellbeing as good, yet the same report also revealed widespread burnout, sleep deprivation and significant gaps in support. Perhaps most startlingly, 93% of mothers reported experiencing burnout. On the surface, these findings seem contradictory. How can wellbeing be good if burnout is almost universal? The answer, I suspect, lies not in the data itself but in what we have come to accept as normal.

Human beings have an extraordinary ability to adapt. Give us difficult circumstances and, more often than not, we find a way to keep going. Mothers in particular have elevated adaptation into something of an Olympic sport. We adapt to interrupted sleep, endless demands, impossible schedules and the relentless mental gymnastics required to keep family life functioning. We adapt so successfully, in fact, that we often stop recognising the burden we are carrying. The weight remains exactly the same, but because we have become stronger, everyone assumes the load must be lighter.

I know this because I did it myself.

Long before I wrote Octopus on a Treadmill, I spent years believing that my exhaustion was a personal failing. I assumed I simply needed to become more organised, more productive, more efficient. Like many women, I bought into the idea that the answer lay somewhere between a better diary, a more sophisticated to-do list and a colour-coded calendar that would finally bring order to the chaos. There is an entire industry dedicated to convincing women that if we could just optimise ourselves a little more, we would somehow manage to fit twenty-eight hours into a twenty-four-hour day.

Strangely, nobody ever questions whether the problem might be the expectations rather than the woman.

The weight mothers carry extends far beyond the visible tasks that fill our days. We see the school runs, the packed lunches and the endless taxi service that seems to accompany parenthood. What we do not see is the invisible labour operating constantly in the background. The remembering, anticipating, planning and worrying. The knowledge that someone needs new school shoes, that a birthday party is coming up next weekend, that the permission slip still needs signing, that there is no milk in the fridge and that World Book Day is somehow tomorrow despite only being yesterday about five minutes ago.

Women often describe this as the mental load. Personally, I think that phrase does it a disservice. It sounds like something that can be solved with a strong cup of tea and an early night. In reality, it is closer to being the unpaid Chief Operating Officer of an extremely demanding organisation that never closes, never stops generating new tasks and has a habit of communicating critical information at bedtime.

What makes this particularly troubling is that the consequences of carrying such weight are often individualised. When mothers struggle, we look for individual solutions. Better self-care. Better boundaries. Better resilience. Better coping mechanisms. These things matter, of course, but they can also distract us from a more uncomfortable conversation. If millions of women are experiencing the same pressures, perhaps the issue is not that women need to become better at carrying the load. Perhaps the load itself deserves greater scrutiny.

The Motherhood Index is important because it challenges us to look beyond the individual and towards the wider system. The report does not describe a handful of women who are failing to cope. It describes a generation of mothers navigating extraordinary demands with remarkable determination and increasingly limited support. The real story is not that mothers are struggling. The real story is that they are carrying so much and still finding ways to function.

But resilience should not become an excuse for inaction. The fact that women can carry enormous weight does not mean they should have to. The fact that mothers continue to show up, deliver, nurture, lead and care despite chronic exhaustion is not evidence that the system is working. It may be evidence of precisely the opposite.

Perhaps the most important question raised by this first pillar is not why mothers are burnt out. The data answers that clearly enough. The more interesting question is why we are still surprised by it. Because when a society consistently asks one group of people to carry more than anyone else, exhaustion is not a mystery. It is the inevitable consequence of the weight.

P.S Are you a woman in leadership juggling too much? Let’s fix that. Book a quick chat with me here.