Mum Life Fatigue: Causes and Symptoms

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An old post for a new audience.

Mum Life Fatigue: What is it?

Let’s face it, everyone gets ‘fatigued’. You had a late night, a physically demanding day, the guy down the street had a party and no respect for your slumber, you didn’t get the z’s you needed to be a fully functioning human being. Every person in the world has at some point in their lives been fatigued!

But there is one type of fatigue that only mums understand, one type of fatigue that makes you want to crawl into a deep, dark crater and observe the world go by. One type of fatigue that makes you lose your care factor concerning just about everything and be enraged enough to commit murder at the same time. One type of fatigue that makes you weep over every tiny little thing and earns you the negative version of the nickname ‘Mumma Bear’.  This type of fatigue is what I call ‘Mum Life Fatigue’.

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Causes:

Mum Life Fatigue is more than your average ‘fatigue’. It’s what happens when you haven’t slept through a single night in 4 years. When your entire day seems to consist of changing nappies, bed sheets and outfits (your babies and your own. Wait…correction, you don’t get time to change your own). When you’ve rocked, bounced, cuddled and sang to your infant for hours on end and they still resist the slumber. When you’ve multi-tasked to the point of feeding a baby, reading to the toddler and hanging the washing on the line at the same time. When you’ve fed, dressed and bathed the kids, done 2 truckloads of washing, vacuumed the floor 3 times, washed the dishes, cleaned poo and crayon off the walls, picked up all the toys and the house still looks like a frat party hit it. When no matter how much time you spend on your feet, there still seems to be 10 more hours of it just around the corner.  When your afternoons and weekends are full of taxiing kids to various sports, activities, play dates, school disco’s, job interviews, shopping trips, hospital visits to remove various tiny objects from body orifices, etc, etc, etc and when your only “me time” consists of sitting on the toilet for 2 minutes with the door locked and ten little fingers wiggling underneath it.

All these things and then some, are the major cause of ‘Mum Life Fatigue’.

Symptoms:

Below is a list of 10 symptoms you may experience while suffering ‘Mum Life Fatigue’.

  1. Your brain no longer functions at a low capacity let-alone an average one (i.e. you can’t remember the names of anything anymore, most objects become ‘things’, ‘thingies’ or collectively ‘stuff’ and nobody’s name can be recalled if it has more than one syllable.)
  2. Your always late for everything including your own bedtime, but that’s because you stay up till midnight in the attempt to get just a little bit of time to yourself without having to answer a thousand questions about why apples aren’t called ‘reds’ or ‘greens’ since oranges are called ‘oranges’.
  3. You spend the whole day using every ounce of strength to stay upright and conscious only to finally get into bed and be wide awake for the next three hours thinking about everything you did that day and need to do the next. Not to mention worrying about whether you mummy’d well enough that day.
  4. You constantly misplace your sunglasses, bank cards, and car keys and have to waste hours searching for them only to find them right where they belong in your handbag, purse or hanging by the front door.
  5. You forget what the outdoors look and feel like and the view of your lounge room and or kitchen is permanently burned into the back of your eyelids, so even when you close your eyes it’s like your still there.
  6. Your hair and face take on a permanent greasy appearance and the clothes you wear during the day double as pajamas because let’s be honest, it takes too much damn energy to get changed anyway.
  7. You have repetitive thoughts of killing, maiming and otherwise making suffer (and I’m sure we’ve all been here) your snoring partner in the bed next to you while you’re up for the 28th time that night.
  8. You break down crying in the grocery store because some old guy who smells like he hasn’t had a shower in a month, snatches the last bunch of spring onions out from under your nose, right after you discover they are ‘clean-out’ of your favorite chocolate.
  9. You keep calling your kids the wrong names and eventually give up and just shout ‘hey you’.
  10. You swear if your partner tells you one more time that they are tired, you will sneak off in the middle of the night, hop a plane and spend the next ten years picking fruit at various orchards around the world.

If you are suffering any or all of the above symptoms, you more than likely have ‘Mum Life Fatigue’ and should consider treatment.


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Treatment:

There are various treatments you can consider if you are diagnosed with ‘Mum Life Fatigue’, one of them being sleep (this can be expensive however since you may need to hire a full-time nanny) but the cheapest and most effective option is to wait until your children reach the age of 18 and go off to live their own lives.

‘Mum Life Fatigue’ is a temporary condition that can vary in length (depending on how many children you are foolish enough or brave enough to have) and eventually goes away on its own. It is however hereditary (if you have any female children), and it can return later in life under the redefined condition known as ‘Grandparent Fatigue’.

  Related articles:

Mum Life Burnout: 5 ways it can affect you and your family

Mum Life Burnout: 10 ways to cool down

How To Find Balance: Is it even possible?

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