There are days when I feel like the odds of functioning the way society expects me to are stacked against me before I even get out of bed.
Not because anything catastrophic has happened.
Sometimes it’s just a normal Tuesday.
But “normal” can look very different when you’re parenting, working from home, living with chronic illness, and navigating an autistic and ADHD brain that is already processing more than most people can see.
Before I’ve even really started my day, there are already people who need me.
Someone needs breakfast. Someone can’t find something. Someone is upset. Someone needs help regulating. The baby needs me. There’s laundry waiting, dishes from the night before, messages I need to answer, photos I need to edit, appointments I need to remember, and a house that somehow continues producing mess faster than I can clean it.
And then one kid gets sick.
Suddenly the workload that already felt full gets another entire layer added to it.
Now I’m trying to keep one child comfortable while also trying to keep everyone else from catching it.
I’m washing bedding. Wiping things down. Watching symptoms. Keeping track of temperatures. Making sure everyone eats. Trying to keep little hands from touching everything.
Wondering if I cleaned enough.
Wondering if I should clean it again.
And work doesn’t disappear because someone is sick.
The house doesn’t stop needing attention.
The other kids don’t stop needing me.
My own body doesn’t suddenly become less chronically ill because everyone else needs more.
That’s the part I think people sometimes miss.
There are days when even taking a shower can feel like an enormous task.
And I know how that sounds.
It’s a shower.
You turn on the water. You get in. You wash your hair. You get out.
Simple.
Except sometimes my brain doesn’t experience it as one simple task.
It’s making sure everyone is okay before I go in. Finding clothes. Getting the baby settled. Knowing I might be interrupted. Dealing with the sensory transition of getting wet and then getting cold afterward. Washing, drying, getting dressed, dealing with my hair, and trying to convince my already exhausted brain to start one more process.
When you’re already overloaded, even small tasks can feel like they have twenty invisible steps attached to them.
And sometimes the hardest part isn’t even the task itself.
It’s knowing that while you’re doing it, there are five other things waiting for you.
That’s something I wish people understood more about chronic illness and neurodivergence.
You can look at someone’s day from the outside and think they didn’t accomplish very much.
Meanwhile, they may have spent every ounce of energy they had keeping children safe, fed, regulated, comforted, loved, and moving through the day.
Sometimes success looks like a clean kitchen and a finished workday.
Sometimes it looks like answering one email.
Sometimes it looks like reheating the same cup of coffee three times... or seven.
And sometimes it looks like everybody making it to bedtime.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot this week while sickness has been making its way through our house.
How do other parents do this?
Especially the parents working from home. The stay-at-home parents. The chronically ill parents. The autistic parents. The ADHD parents. The parents whose nervous systems already feel like they’re operating at capacity before anything unexpected happens.
How do you decide what gets done and what gets dropped?
Do you have a system for keeping sickness from spreading through the house?
How do you keep working when someone constantly needs you?
And maybe the hardest question:
How do you remember that you are also a person who needs care?
I don’t think I have the answer yet.
I’m mostly learning that sometimes keeping up doesn’t actually mean keeping up with everything.
Sometimes it means figuring out what matters most today and letting the rest wait.
And somewhere in the middle of all of it are these tiny moments.
A baby standing at the door, fascinated by his reflection.
A little hand pressed against the glass.
A moment that would be incredibly easy to miss while thinking about laundry, sickness, deadlines, and everything else waiting to be done.
Maybe that’s part of why I photograph the little things.
Because our lives are not only the polished moments.
They’re also the overwhelmed mornings, the messy rooms, the sick days, the reheated coffee, the work squeezed between naps, and the tiny seconds of sweetness happening right in the middle of all of it.
That’s the story, too.
