You’re tired, so very tired. Almost numb now, you’ve spent years being an emotional punchbag for not just one person but for many.

You cook, you clean, you parent. Then you sort out the dog and then have to fit in time with your child.

Did I say you’re tired?

There is no support out there. No help. The whole time you are trying to hold it together. Because although you don’t tell anybody how much you are suffering You won’t admit it, not because you don’t want to be perceived as weak but because for them you need to be seen as strong.

It is sometimes 10 pm before you finally get to settle down. But you cannot relax. You never can. Because one refuses to go to sleep and the other is on edge because of it.

So you soldier on, each day the same as the last. Each day you find yourself dying a little more.

Did I say how very tired you are?

Sometimes you cry. That’s ok though because it’s healthy, it’s a release. Stops the pressure building up so much. Without that little release you would succumb to the pressure.

You don’t want to go to bed (even though you are so very tired) because the sooner you do the sooner you wake up and go through it all again. The shouting starts early. Because they don’t want to go to school or eat breakfast, They don’t want to do any homework or eat what you cooked. So they shout some more . You try to get them to bath and you get abused. And God forbid you should ask them to go to bed.

It’s not the big things that set you off. They just eat away at you. But the little things? They make you blow up.

Because you are so very tired.

Everything you own gets ruined. You take little pleasure in things anymore. Everything takes so much effort, even reading (which was, until recently, one of the one things that kept you grounded).

You feel lonely, unappreciated, unloved. But you don’t vocalise it. How can you? You are scared, because when all this is over you are worried, that you will have given everything and have nothing to show for it. And at this point you will be too far gone, too broken, too tired.

You are lost in the shuffle, lost your very own identity. You cling to things because they have have become who you are.

You are tired.

Everyday is a fight but it’s a fight that you keep on struggling through. But you are too tired to battle anymore.

Everyday when you awake you are feeling overwhelmed, with the situation, with emotion, with exhaustion.

You are so very, very tired.

But I see you. I’ve got you. This isn’t just your fight anymore. It’s ours. And we will win.