What would care look like here?
I am seven months pregnant.
My partner is working away. We are renovating our hundred-year-old cottage. I spend my days with a wild and spirited toddler who is busy falling in love with the world.
It is a full season.
Most evenings, I find myself standing in the kitchen amongst unwashed dishes and unfolded laundry and crumb-covered floors, feeling very, very tired.
A few years ago, tiredness felt like a problem to solve. The more exhausted I felt, the more productive I tried to become. Stress and exhaustion would pull me towards what felt familiar, what felt safe – doing more, trying harder, proving that I could cope.
But these days, when I feel tired, I find myself wanting to bake something nourishing or sit in the garden while my toddler digs in the soil or lie on the floor while he plays beside me.
My tiredness no longer feels like an emergency. It feels like information. A message from my body about what this season requires.
And perhaps this is one of the gentlest ways healing changes us. The circumstances do not necessarily become easier, the responsibilities do not disappear, life remains beautifully unfinished. But our response softens.
We stop interpreting every feeling of exhaustion as evidence that we need to try harder. We stop fighting reality. We stop treating ourselves as machines.
Instead, we begin asking:
What would care look like here?
What would kindness look like here?
What would a relaxed woman do here?
For me, this has become one of the greatest gifts of healing. Not that I never feel exhausted, but that my nervous system has a completely different response to exhaustion. Instead of believing tiredness means I should push harder, I now believe tiredness means I need to care more deeply for myself.
Inside Becoming The Relaxed Woman, we spend a lot of time exploring these moments – the moments when our old patterns tell us to pull ourselves together and push through. And the gentler exits that become available when we learn to respond differently to ourselves.