Three Days Off Felt Like Five Days On

Long, three-day weekends feel like hazing when you're a toddler parent

Hi,

It’s Wednesday. I should be writing to you with something tidy — a small observation from a week that mostly behaved.

I’m writing instead from the residue of Memorial Day weekend, in the particular exhaustion that a lot of women understand and a lot of men do not.

The official version: three days off. No meetings. No deadlines. Kids around. Open time, on paper.

The actual version: three days of being the operating system for everyone in the house. Breakfast decisions. Sunscreen reapplication windows. Who is bored, who is hungry, who is hot, who is cold, who needs the bathroom right now, versus saying so because the other one said so. Which kid is moving from “playing nicely” to “about to make the other one cry,” and the half-second of intervention you have to land before that crosses over. Snacks. Snacks again. A grocery order because we ran out of the only bread one kid will eat. A round of “who’s going where this afternoon.”

Continuous decision-making with no off switch. O-VER-STIM-U-LATED.

Here’s the thing about ADHD and autism. Executive function — the part of you that gets started, sequences the steps, keeps the right priority on top — runs on external structure. Calendar appointments help. Deadlines help. Other people’s schedules act as scaffolding I clip my own attention onto.

But for me, three-day weekends remove the scaffolding. The kids are home; the schedule is “the schedule we make up as we go”; every decision is fresh; every transition is a negotiation. By Monday night, I was more depleted than I am after a normal workweek, and I had less to show for it.

I used to think the problem was a personality flaw — the kind of person who can’t relax, the kind of person who needs to be told what to do. The actual mechanism is more boring than that. My brain runs on external input. Take the inputs away, and it has to generate them itself, and that generation cost is enormous. At the end of three days of self-generated structure, I am not rested. I am fucking drained.

And I feel guilty for being a mom who was on edge instead of “relaxing” — but it’s really hard being a neurodivergent parent to three neurodivergent kids, okay? I’ve never lived this life before — there’s no instruction manual (other than my decision to do the opposite of my own parents), and every year is my first year having this exact combination of kids at their ages and stages.

On Sunday, a friend sent me this Thread:

We laughed and agreed that these long holiday weekends actually feel like punishment for parents of toddlers (she and I each have a 2-year-old; I also have a 4-year-old and almost-7-year-old). It’s hazing, really. A humiliation ritual.

“On duty” is the closest word I have for what most long weekends feel like once kids and a household and a startup are in the mix at once.

I don’t have a clean ending for this post. I think the recognition is the thing. If you came out of the long weekend feeling like you should be more rested than you are, and instead you came out drained — you were probably on duty. The math is mathing.

A question for you:

What’s the work in your life that gets called “rest” by everyone else and feels like work to you?

— Rachel