I underestimated the mental and emotional labor of being a parent. This job doesn't have any downtime.

• Before having kids, I thought parenthood would be like a 'second shift,' after work.
• It's not like that. It's a constant hum running in the background of everything else.
• There's no clocking out of being a parent.

The babysitter canceled at 2:14 p.m.

I was standing in the kitchen between meetings, rinsing out a lunchbox that still smelled like overripe strawberries and warm cheese, when the text came through. I had already said yes to the invitation — a low-key evening at a neighborhood shop with a friend. The kind of plan that, before kids, would have barely registered as logistics. I'd lined everything up: confirmed the sitter, noted the timing, mentally pictured myself lingering a little longer than necessary, talking to adults, maybe even forgetting to check the time.

Then the text: she was sick. Couldn't make it.

Plans change all the time for parents

I moved quickly, almost automatically, thumbs already opening my contacts. One sitter, unavailable. Another, booked. By the third text, I could feel that familiar tightening in my chest — not quite panic, not quite annoyance, something closer to recognition: of course. Of course this is how it goes.

Parenting, I've learned, is less about big disruptions than a steady accumulation of small ones that require immediate response. A field trip form you forgot to sign that's due tomorrow morning. A lunch you need to remake at 7:42 a.m. because suddenly nothing is acceptable to your child except cheese sandwiches, and you are already running late. A childcare plan that evaporates hours before you need it, sending you back into the churn of rearranging — texting, calculating, asking for favors, keeping everything moving.

Before I had kids, I assumed parenthood would function like a second shift. You work, then you come home and begin the tasks of caregiving: dinner, bath, bedtime. It made sense to me as a structure — contained, if exhausting. But that framework doesn't hold. What I've experienced instead is something harder to name and harder to escape. It's not a shift. It's a current — low and steady, sometimes barely perceptible, sometimes overwhelming — that runs underneath everything else, all the time.

There's no 'off switch' for me

Even when my kids are at school — my daughter Simone in kindergarten, my son Julius in preschool — and I feel that almost illicit relief of having a string of uninterrupted hours, the current doesn't stop.

It's a persistent background hum. It's the reflexive glance at my phone when it buzzes, a flash of worst-case scenarios before I even read the message. It's knowing which child is on a sleep edge, which might melt down at pickup, and which is distraught because their bestie is on a family trip. It's the running inventory: ballet leotards that suddenly don't fit, a library book that's embarrassingly past due, a permission slip buried somewhere under a pile of drawings.

Even in the middle of a work call, part of my mind is scanning ahead. Who needs to be picked up when? What can I start for dinner that won't unravel by 6 p.m.? Did I respond to that teacher's email, or just think about responding? The thinking itself is a job constant, a sort of relentless mental and emotional labor — recursive and impossible to complete.

This is the part of parenting I didn't understand before I became a mother. Not the logistics —I expected those —but the sheer constancy.

Work often feels like a reprieve. Not because it's easy, but because it has edges. I can finish a paragraph. I can drink my coffee while it's still hot. I can stay inside a conversation without simultaneously tracking someone else's emotional state. There are defined expectations, visible outcomes, a sense — however fleeting — of completion. And yet even there, parenting is present, threading through my day in quiet, unrelenting ways, shaping how I schedule, how I prioritize, and how quickly I need to pivot when something inevitably shifts.

Part of this, I think, is a residue from those early COVID years, when I first became a mom and everything felt provisional. A single positive test at daycare could close the entire classroom for a week. Plans dissolved overnight. Care was something you secured and then held loosely, knowing it might disappear. Even now, with more stability, my body seems to remember. There's a baseline vigilance, a sense that at any moment I might need to drop everything and step back in.

It's not a shift; it's a state

By early evening, I had secured another babysitter. The plan was back on. I'd go to the shop, see my friend, have a glass of something, talk for a while. And I knew I'd enjoy it. I also knew that part of me would remain tethered — phone nearby, brain half-aware of the time, ready, if needed, to pivot again.

This is what parenting feels like to me now: a state I carry with me. Constant and largely invisible. A presence that runs alongside everything else, shaping how I move through the world, whether I'm at home or not.

Maybe that's why it can feel so exhausting, even on the days that might look, from the outside, perfectly manageable.