I'm so exhausted from working full time and having young kids

[Feelinglikeamoan]

I'm in my 40s, I work full time, I have a preschooler and a primary school aged child. I'm fucking exhausted.

I've always worked full time, we could never afford to reduce hours. I'm burnt out. A normal night's sleep is 6.5 hours during the week. There are simply not enough hours in the day to get more sleep.

Also, I work in a really stressful health care role which adds to my exhaustion.

What makes it worse is that I'm the only one out of my friends in this situation. All of my friends with kids have either one parent working part time, or not working at all. Many of them have grandparents nearby providing significant support with childcare giving them time to rest.

I just wanted to moan. I feel like I don't get to enjoy life much as I'm so busy and exhausted. I've felt really upset by reading a few threads recently about people retiring in their 50s. It made me feel sad that I'm already so exhausted in my 40s, and I won't be able to retire until I'm around 67.

My biggest sadness is not being able to spend as much time as I'd like with my children. I wish I could work less and see them more. I feel like I'm letting them down by not having enough time for them.

We also cook from scratch most days, but we meal plan and make sure that on weekdays we do fairly easy meals that don’t take too long - stir fry, bolognase etc. We have one day a week when it’s something basic like sausages and chips, and cook double amounts of things like bolognase and freeze the second portion for another night. What kind of things are you cooking?

I also agree with the previous poster who said that your DH could do more while WFH. I imagine that if the situation was reversed and you were WFH, you’d manage to squeeze in laundry or dinner prep in your lunch break.

My DD was also a picky eater from age 3, so I understand how stressful it is. We gave up on trying to get her to eat what we’d eat and decided that we’d just cook something plain for her, and settled on a potato waffle with plain cooked chicken and peas for meals she didn’t like. It sounds unhealthy, and I’d always said I wouldn’t be one of those parents who cooks two meals, but it took the stress out of dinner. Eventually she started trying new things, but for a few years that was her main meal for probably half the week. It was fine, and reducing the stress around dinner time probably helped her as much as it helped me.

@MuseKira Go back 3 or 4 decades and there were lots of "good" jobs in the smaller cities and larger towns. Close to where I was born in a North West seaside resort, there was a town just 20 miles away that had two large insurance offices (hundreds of staff), that employed a wide range of people from very specialised jobs such as qualified actuaries, through to qualified accountant, and down to receptionists, office clerks, etc. They both closed down when they were taken over and sucked into London based firms! I had a relative who was on the Board of one of them, and who was seriously pissed off when they were sold out and he had to relocate to London after spending most of his working life in his home town!

I think the key there was ‘go back 3 or 4 decades’. Yes, exactly. But that was then, and this is now. I’ve never been able to do the job I was in at the level I wanted outside major metro areas, but the examples you give were able once upon a time and have subsequently been centralised into metro. Some of my kids work in the examples you have given, and indeed, now, can only work in expensive capitals worldwide. Thats fine, it is, what it is. Let’s not go backwards so we can bring out the ‘it takes a village trope’, let’s modernise on the basis that village no longer exists and move forward on how we work with that.

I agree, but trouble is that there's no national plan to deal with the consequences of the people and areas that are "left behind" from the centralisation of jobs and people into a handful of cities. That's the problem! Yes, I know there's no going back, but bugger all has been done to fill the chasm left by the "brain drain" into the cities. Just like bugger all has been done to deal with the run down mill and industrial towns, run down seaside resorts, ex mining villages, ex shipbuilding towns, etc etc. These are places where there is infrastructure (roads, housing, schools, hospitals etc) that are under-utilised because of people not wanting to live there, social/crime problems because the unemployed/ex offenders have been relocated there, etc. I don't want to turn back the clock to how things used to be. I want proper recognition and resolution of the problems caused by the centralisation rather than the "I'm alright Jack" approach of those doing well in the cities and the "Sod you" approach to the ones still living in the regions.

OP I'd lower expectations on cooking everything from scratch every night. A night having eg jacket potatoes or pizza is fine. Or simple pasta dishes.
I also wondered what you do house wise for two hours every night. Please don't tell me you iron. If so ditch that