Nobody talks about the days where you don’t want it. Where the last thing that you want is to be needed. By everyone. All the time. For everything. I know there are people out there who would give their right arm, literally, to feel needed. But wow. The relentlessness of it. The emotional toll, the physical pain, the slow grinding.

Some days I don’t want any person within a two metre radius of my body. I don’t want anybody to touch me. I don’t want anybody to reach for me, to lunge in my direction, to call my name. I don’t want to be the only person who can calm my screaming baby. I don’t want to be the only one that seems to understand what it causing him so much distress. I don’t want to be the only person who can fix some seemingly-minor-but-actually-vitally-important issue for my three year old. I don’t want to be the only person who can do meal times for them. I don’t want to be stuck.

Some nights the last thing I want is to climb into bed with my baby and breastfeed him back to sleep. Seventeen thousand times. Some nights his little hands that wander all over my body make me want to scream and scream and scream. Some nights I just want to put the white noise machine on for myself, turn up the traffic noise as high as possible, and hide.

The vast majority of days are not like this, and I have to remind myself of that. Tomorrow will be better.