My fourteen-year-old noticed and is worried

Something practical: I do the cooking earlier and eat later. It costs me nothing and it removed the daily friction entirely.

The evening meal was the hard one. Everybody else hungry at six and me not hungry until nine, and it took a year to find a workable shape.

What I have been careful about is not making my eating a topic at the table. My children do not need a running commentary on any of this.

The birthday cake question comes up in this circle every few months, and the answer that works for me is to have a piece and say nothing.

Nothing useful, just that I have been exactly here.

What surprised me was how much my patience improved once the tiredness lifted, and how much of parenting is just having enough patience.

Something practical: my medication lives somewhere the children cannot reach and everybody in the house knows where and why.

I found the exhaustion harder to manage than anything, because there is no version of a school morning that waits for you.

Isla has already said most of this and I want to add the one part that was different for me.

What helped was letting standards drop for a season. Three months of very simple food and nobody suffered and I recovered.

Saying it out loud helps other people say it too. Thank you.

Somebody suggested keeping something easy in the freezer for the evenings I have nothing, and it has saved me perhaps thirty difficult nights.

I have found that eating something at four in the afternoon means I can sit at the table at six and be present rather than negotiating.

My weekends are the difficult ones because the structure is gone, and I have had to build a very loose one deliberately.

No advice, just company. Here if it helps.

My experience is that the logistics settled at about six months and everything since has been ordinary parenting, which is difficult enough on its own.

The thing I would say to a new parent here is that this is genuinely harder with small children and you are not doing it badly.