The Load

A love letter to barely holding it together

Last week I did the school run in my pyjamas, a weights vest strapped on because I am over 40 now so I have to lift weights, right? Fresh from lathering on my HRT, with a pair of my daughter’s pants in my hair. Not on purpose. Just gravity, and the general chaos of a house that is currently also mid renovation, where everything is happening at once and none of it is happening well.

Nobody tells you about this part. Not the tired part, everyone tells you about the tired part. I mean the part where you become the kind of person who doesn’t notice she’s wearing underwear as a hair accessory, because her brain is already four tasks ahead, drafting an email while looking for a shoe while calculating whether there’s time to fit in a workout before the school gates close, because the workout is the only ten minutes of the day that belong to no one but her.

I didn’t take maternity leave. Not really. I don’t say that to be impressive, because it isn’t. I say it because I think it’s the reason I’ve never known anything else. There was no before and after, no clean line where I got to put the old life down and pick up the new one once I’d learned how to hold it properly. I just kept buckling in. Every day, a new set of straps, and you tighten them as you go.

We’ve had help here and there. A wonderful French nanny when the kids were really small and we were living in our flat in London, back when both Brad and I were trying to keep our own businesses alive at the same time as keeping two small humans alive, which is, it turns out, two full time jobs pretending to be one. Both our parents live that bit too far away to lean on for regular childcare, and honestly, I didn’t want to gate crash their well earned retirement with two tiny, exhausting children. We tried an au pair a couple of years ago too. It didn’t stick, not because she wasn’t lovely, but because something in me kept refusing the help even as I was drowning for want of it. I also just don’t really like someone living permanently under my roof.

Here’s the truth I don’t say out loud very often: I don’t want help. I want to be with my kids. Even when I don’t. Even when I am so depleted that being with them feels like one more demand on a body that has nothing left to give. I want it anyway. So I’ve had to accept that I am doing both, always, at the same time, forever, the business and the mothering, and that most days I am not doing either one particularly well. I am doing them both at about 70 percent, which from the outside might look like 140 percent of a person, but from the inside just feels like never quite arriving anywhere.

And when I do manage to do one of them properly, really show up, really nail the client call, or really be present on the floor building the Lego tower, or pretending I really want to be in this moment colouring in a mermaid, it costs something. I can feel the bill coming due. First in my body. The shoulders go, or the back, or I catch a cold that a well rested person would have shrugged off. Then, if I don’t stop, it moves up into the mind. That’s the part that frightens me. The physical falling apart is almost a relief, a permission slip (see, I really was carrying too much) but the mental unraveling is quieter and harder to point to, and by the time I notice it, I’m already in it.

I wish there was another word for juggle. Juggle sounds skillful. It sounds like something you’d applaud at a party, a person keeping bright objects spinning in the air, look how clever, look how coordinated. But that’s not what this is. This is not juggling. This is load bearing. This is a woman who is also a wall, and the wall does not get to decide, halfway through the day, that it would like to stop holding up the roof. A wall mid renovation too, as it happens, propped up while the rest of the house gets rebuilt around it.

A load is not something you toss and catch. A load is something you carry until you put it down, and I haven’t found the place yet where I’m allowed to put it down. Maybe there isn’t one. Maybe that’s the actual invisible part, not the tiredness, which is visible enough if anyone bothered to look, but the fact that there is no scheduled moment, no designated hour, when the carrying stops and someone else takes a turn. You just keep walking with it, recalibrating your grip, and calling it juggling because the truth is heavier than that word and people don’t always know what to do with the heavier word.

So this is that word. This is the load. The pants in the hair, the vest under the jumper, the two businesses and the two kids and the man beside me carrying his own version of the same weight, and yes, the builders in the kitchen too. I’m not writing this because I’ve solved it. I’m writing it because I think a lot of us are out here carrying the same thing and calling it something lighter than it is, and maybe it helps, a little, to just say this is heavy, actually. And I’m still here. Buckled in. Carrying it all anyway.

To anyone carrying a similar load, I see you.

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Thank you so much for reading No Place Like Home. It genuinely means the world.

The book is out on 10th September and, if you were planning to buy a copy anyway, I’d be so grateful if you pre-ordered it.

Apparently (and this was news to me), pre-orders are a Very Big Deal in publishing. For a first-time author, they’re what tell publishers and bookshops, “This one’s worth getting behind.”

So if No Place Like Home was already on your list, ordering it now rather than later makes a far bigger difference than you might think.

No Place Like Home by Jojo Barr

Thank you for being here, for reading, and for cheering me on. I don’t take any of it for granted.

Jojo x