Parents are exhausted — and finally feeling it

As a kid, I remember lying in bed after hours at the roller-skating rink, still feeling my legs move. My body had stopped, but my mind hadn’t fully caught on yet.

Lately, that’s how life feels — like we’ve slowed down, but everything inside us is still pulsating. Or perhaps it’s a little more like the soreness that hits a day or two after a strenuous workout: the delayed result of having pushed yourself too hard.

In recent days, more than a few friends and parents I work with have told me how exhausted they feel. Just totally wiped out. I know I’m not the only one who went into the weekend with a migraine. As a therapist who speaks with parents every day, I hear the same quiet confession over and over: we’ve been running for so long that slowing down reveals a deep, penetrating exhaustion.

Yes, we just finished a long stretch of chagim — beautiful, meaningful, and demanding. But this fatigue runs deeper than late nights or extra cooking. It’s the kind that settles in after holding your breath for too long—after trying to hold it all together for too long. For two years now, we’ve been living in a collective clench. Holding, bracing, waiting. Running an emotional marathon none of us signed up for, or emotionally carb-loaded for in advance. And maybe — finally — we’re starting to exhale. The moment we put down the weight, we feel for the first time all that we’ve been carrying.

We’ve been worrying about our soldiers — the ones we know personally and the ones who feel like sons we’ve never met. We’ve been worrying about miluim families juggling single parenting and empty seats at the table. We’ve been worrying about hostages whose faces and favorite foods we’ve learned, as if obsessing over such details could tether them a little more tightly to life. We’ve been worrying about displaced families living with borrowed clothes in borrowed homes. And of course, we’ve been worrying about our children — what they’ve heard that can’t be unheard; what they’ve seen that can’t be unseen. We’ve been trying to protect their innocence while building real resilience. And we’ve been worrying about the state of the world they will inherit— about good and evil, about security and safety, about moral confusion and hatred, and about whether light really will overcome darkness.

These past two years we’ve cried quietly after bedtime. We’ve doom scrolled and worried and second-guessed. We’ve performed the small rituals that make us feel like we’re in control in a world that’s been spinning out of it. The collective result is a deep, spiritual bone-weariness that doesn’t respond to a single good night’s sleep.

So yes, we’re tired. Deeply, spiritually bone-tired.

But maybe that’s what it looks like when you stop running and finally feel the ache. When the adrenaline fades and the healing begins.

So what now? How do we move from surviving to healing — without pretending the hurt didn’t happen?

We check in on one another. We send the message we’ve been meaning to send: “Thinking of you. Miss you. You’ve been on my mind.” We tell people we love them — not dramatically, but with a hug, a call. We ask for help before breaking down. We notice small sweet moments and we let ourselves savor them. We talk about how hard it’s been — not to complain, but to connect. We remind ourselves that the soreness means we moved—sometimes we moved mountains—and we give ourselves credit for having done something superhuman. We also give ourselves a bit of grace and the right to not bounce right back. We let ourselves feel the weight and the relief at the same time. As a clinician who teaches parents and kids to hold grief and gratitude at the same time, I’ve seen how naming the ache can make it less painful.

The exhaustion will ease. It always does. But the strength that remains — the resilience — is what lasts.

If you’re feeling the exhaustion, give yourself permission to slow down for a while. Preferably with coffee. And maybe a pastry.  Because emotional marathons deserve carbs, too.