I thought my house should look like it belonged in a Better Homes and Gardens magazine.
Dishes done. Laundry washed, folded, put away. I’d come in from the fields and make sure every last thing was handled before I’d even let myself think about stopping.
Kids. House. Farm. All of it. All me.
And I was tired.
Not the kind of tired a good night’s sleep fixes. The bone-deep kind. The kind you carry around for so long you start to think it’s just who you are now.
So I did what I knew how to do. I reached for food.
I told myself it would give me a little relief. A little something for me at the end of a day where everything else went to everyone else. And for about five minutes, it sort of did.
But it never lasted. It never actually rested anything in me. I’d eat past full, feel worse, get up the next day, and do it all again.
I was overweight. My blood pressure was high. I wasn’t sleeping. And underneath all of it was a story I told myself on repeat:
Nobody is helping me. I have to do it all.
One day my husband looked at me and told me I needed to stop — or I was going to kill myself.
He was right.
Here’s what I eventually figured out, and it took me longer than I’d like to admit.
The exhaustion and the overeating weren’t two problems. They were the same one.
I was running on empty and reaching for food to fill a tank food was never going to fill. My body didn’t need a snack. It needed rest. It needed me to stop. And I had never once given myself permission to do that.
So I started small. Before I dove into the nightly routine — farm, kids, house — I let myself sit down for a minute. Just a minute. And I reminded myself of something that turned out to be true the whole time:
I did have help.
They just needed me to ask.
That “nobody helps me” story wasn’t the facts. It was a story. My people would have helped all along. I never asked them. I was too busy proving I could carry it by myself.
There’s a verse I come back to.
“And he said to them, ‘Come away by yourselves to a desolate place and rest a while.’” — Mark 6:31
Here’s what I love about it. If you read what comes right after, the disciples were so busy with people coming and going that they didn’t even have time to eat. Sound familiar? And Jesus doesn’t tell them to rest once the work is finished. He pulls them away in the middle of it.
Because the work is never finished. Not on a farm. Not in a house. Not with kids. There is always one more load, one more chore, one more thing waiting.
Rest was never meant to be the reward you get after you finish.
You rest because you’re a person. Because your body does hard work all day and needs to repair. Because a tired body will lie to you — it’ll tell you you’re hungry when what it’s really asking for is sleep, or a break, or a few days away.
And I mean the real rest too. A full night’s sleep, yes. But also a few days off the daily grind. A break. A vacation. Time where the routine doesn’t have its hands on you. You would be amazed what a couple of days can reset in your body and your brain.
For me, the thing that finally helped me stop was coaching. That was my shift. It's a lot of what I still work on with women now — not just the food, but the stories underneath it.
So this is your permission. From one tired woman who waited way too long to give it to herself.
Sit down for a minute before the nightly routine.
Ask for the help. It has probably been there all along.
Go to bed.
And when you can, come away for a while.
Your crew doesn’t need a perfect house and a mom running herself into the ground.
They need you.
~Amy