It’ll Only Take a Minute
On small things and cumulative exhaustion
I’m getting overwhelmed again.
It doesn’t make sense. I’ve done so much work trimming my life down. I used to say yes to everything. Now I’ve defaulted to no long enough that I’m rarely asked.
But I guess there are new partners now. New endeavors where I’m still an easy yes. So the to-do list is growing again. And my kids are out of school and the routines have changed.
I was finally comfortable not picking them up every day. Not making after-school snacks. Not meeting friends at the park three afternoons a week. I have to work. It’s not selfish. It’s a different way to be a good mom.
But now everyone’s home again.
Someone wanders through the kitchen opening cabinets even though they aren’t hungry.
Someone else asks what we’re doing today in that particular hopeless tone children use when they already suspect the answer is nothing.
I can hear them fighting from my desk.
Am I really supposed to ignore them the whole day?
That question arrives with the force of a moral referendum.
I want their day to feel special. Or at least memorable. Or at least not like they spent the whole summer watching me answer emails from the other room. So I play a quick game or make cookies. Arrange a playdate. Say yes to one or two things.
They are such small things.
A game of cards is not a big deal.
Cookies are not a big deal.
A quick trip somewhere because everyone’s getting restless is not a big deal.
But I get two hours of work in instead of eight. The difference is not small.
The pile grows.
Overwhelm builds.
The next day is worse before it even starts.
My chest tightens.
A message appears from a new collaborator. She has some thoughts on a series we’re doing. Is this technically urgent? No. She specifically says no rush. But I’m excited about the project. I want to keep momentum going. I can feel the open loop humming there while I try to work on something else.
The uncertainty makes it an emergency.
Then a literary agent reaches out about my book after reading one of my articles. He wants to see pages.
I just tore the whole manuscript down the center. Started a major revision. Major surgery.
The agent says take my time. He won’t forget me.
My body does not believe him.
I painstakingly cut, sew, tear, shred, stitch for all hours of the next two weeks.
Meanwhile the kids are home and the house keeps generating small needs all day long. Popsicles. Rides. Someone bored. Someone hungry. Someone lonely. Someone wanting me to look at something for just a second.
None of it loud.
None of it dramatic.
Just a series of very reasonable interpretations, one after another.
The auditor is very convincing about minutes.
A quick response.
A quick game.
A quick batch of cookies.
A quick trip to Target because the day feels flat and I can feel boredom moving in.
My eight-hour workdays become two-hour workdays.
The pile grows.
My chest tightens.
And eventually it’s time for another come-to-Brittney meeting where I have to lay everything out carefully and trace the collapse backward. Name where the boundary was. Name when it slipped. Name what the voice said to make the slip feel reasonable.
Because that’s the thing I keep missing.
The auditor almost never sounds cruel.
It sounds helpful.
Responsible.
Loving.
It says things like:
this matters to people.
don’t let them down.
it’ll only take a minute.
And by the end of the day nothing catastrophic has happened.
The collaborator was fine waiting.
The agent did not disappear overnight.
The kids would probably have survived an afternoon of boredom.
But somehow the day is gone anyway.
And I’m sitting here trying to figure out where it went.
Sometimes the problem is not the visible workload.
It is the accumulation of tiny reasonable things that slowly erode the structure holding the day together.
If you have a place in your life that keeps collapsing this way, we can slow it down together and figure out what is actually happening underneath it.