Hi Reader,

The school holidays just ended.

If you are a working parent you will know exactly what I mean when I say that the fortnight before the end of term I was already doing mental gymnastics trying to figure out how we were going to manage two weeks with the boys at home.

There has been a lot in the news lately about the childcare gap that school holidays create. And what strikes me every time I read about it is how neatly it gets framed as a logistics problem. A scheduling challenge. Something to be managed.

It is not a logistics problem.

It is a systems problem. And women are the ones absorbing the gap.

Even if both parents take all of their annual leave at different times across the year, it does not come close to covering the twelve weeks Australian kids have off school. And that is before you factor in the private school calendar which adds more again. The only options for families without grandparents nearby, which is us, are vacation care or having them home and trying to work through the creative chaos of two boys under eight who have decided that entertaining themselves means dismantling something.

We made it work. We always make it work. That is what women do.

But this school holiday period had me sitting with something I think about a lot in my coaching work.

The load that mothers carry is not just logistical. It is the cost of living that makes two incomes non-negotiable. It is the ageing parents who need more support than they used to. It is the body quietly going through perimenopause while you are in back to back meetings and nobody in that meeting knows what is happening underneath the surface. It is the mental load of holding every moving piece of everyone else's life while trying to find ten minutes to think about your own.

And the thing that gets me is how often we internalise this as a personal failing rather than naming it for what it is.

The system was not designed for us. It was not designed with us in mind at all.

That does not mean we cannot build something better within it. But it does mean we have to stop pretending that the exhaustion is a personal problem we could solve if we just managed our time better or got up earlier or said no more often.

The exhaustion is the correct response to an incorrect system.

And you are allowed to name that.

If any of this landed for you this week, I would love to hear from you. Hit reply and tell me what your school holidays looked like. I read every one.

And if you have been thinking about what it might look like to have proper support, not just to manage better but to genuinely build something different, my Discovery Call is always a good place to start. Link here.

In joy,

Alisha