I picked a cleaner because the kids like her.
Not everyone’s most important trait in a cleaner, but it is to us. Because if they don’t like her, they won’t let her help, and I still end up cleaning all the spaces they spend most of their time in. They still sometimes won’t let her in their rooms. But that’s ok.
We chat as she cleans the kitchen and I wash the pots. I load the washing machine and hang out the wet stuff while she hoovers the floor. Sometimes I catch up on a DIY job I haven’t had a chance to do — build a cupboard, fix a door. Sometimes the kids come and chat too, or they go and hide in their rooms. Often they decide that right now is the time they need me to make food, so I’m making food and trying not to get in her way, or her mine.
It isn’t rest. But it’s someone sharing a small piece of what I carry alone the rest of the 24 hours of every other day. It’s one less thing to do, in an endless list of things to do that I can never seem to keep on top of.
It’s a drip in the ocean compared to what I could actually do with help in the house. But once a week, for a couple of hours, I get to not be carrying it all. Even as I clean or tidy a different area while she does the others, it’s something that is shared, and just for that moment I’m not carrying it all alone.
Recognition is not redistribution
The last piece in this series was called The Watch Is Not Mine Alone. I called it that because, although the story began with mine, it isn’t only mine. The public record is full of families doing the same thing: noticing, watching, anticipating what might happen next, and trying to get systems to respond.
But I’ve been thinking about those words in another way too.
The watch may not be mine alone because there are parents standing watch in homes everywhere. Knowing that can help. It can make us feel seen, understood, and a little less alone in it all.
But each of us can still be carrying that watch alone in our own home.
For the watch to truly not be mine alone, someone has to share some of it with me. Someone else needs to notice. Someone else needs to act. Something has to be taken off the pile without something else being added in its place — or the same thing quietly finding its way back to me later.
That sounds simple. In reality, it is surprisingly hard to find.
And it takes more than offering a parent a few hours of respite.
Why there’s no neat answer
People ask me what helped. I wish I had a neat tidy answer, but I don’t.
It’s been a hard, hard journey. And I’m aware I’ve been lucky in some ways.
I like to think of things stacking, rather than one thing being the thing that brings it all down. It’s often so many big and little things all stacking together. A child’s health. An environment that doesn’t suit. Stressful hospital trips, each one chipping away at their sense of control, autonomy and safety, day by day. Then we have the clothes that itch, the uniform that’s got to be worn, the times of day that we have to be places, and many, many more. One adding to the other, so it’s impossible to say which one is THE problem. They all tangle up together and make the other harder.
Today the stack is relatively small.
One child is unwell — the sensory issues that come with that, the feeling rubbish, the tiredness. And I’m navigating peri-menopause alongside adenomyosis and endometriosis, and the constant pain that comes with those. As I bend and wash and put away shopping, each moment adds to the pain, knowing that later tonight I will pay for this, and maybe enough to need the morphine I have for the worst days.
One has not left the house for a few days and wants to go out. The other understandably won’t, so I hold the tension and try to find a solution. For one, we let any official learning go today — there is plenty of time to catch up, as they both love learning. For the other we lean into sharing science videos together and reading some biology books. Food needs to be easy today, something she can take upstairs to her nest, sweet and easy, but something warm and nutritious waiting for when she is ready. The washing machine got blocked, so I need to fix that, and the smell is one the kids hate. It also means the favourite and only pair of jeans that will be worn aren’t out and drying when they should be, so that might be something that stacks tomorrow.
And I’m trying to negotiate cleaning some bedding. Changing bedding is hard — the smell will be new, the feel different, and understanding the hygiene reasons is out of reach. So I have to carefully navigate and negotiate and compromise on that.
That’s just the first few hours this morning. The afternoon will bring other things.
But to balance them: today we have no timetable to follow, nowhere we couldn’t cancel being, and my work is later, when they are sleeping.
What it looks like day to day
Day by day it looks like us consciously noticing the stacking piles, pros and cons, and choosing when we can.
We need to leave the house today for a scary medical appointment, so maybe the demands of hair brushing or washing have to drop, and food is easy, and nutrition gets priority another day. Perhaps this week has a big event coming up, so we choose to stay home in the run-up to reduce demands and conserve some energy and resilience.
And all the while I carry that cost, because I know how I’m judged. If my child’s hair is not brushed. If the house is a mess. Nobody sees the whole picture of what I carry day to day, of each stack needing careful managing. Some just judge the bit they can easily see.
And for all the people who say it doesn’t matter, the house will get cleaned another day — there are ten who judge you for it.
The dentist sees the teeth, and the importance that they are brushed. But doesn’t see that to do that, the hair can’t be combed, or the clothes can’t be worn. Or the week as a hospital inpatient that made all normal demands fly out of the window as we dealt with the pain and the stress of what brought us there.
Each system sees only its own part. And I’m left being the only one who sees how they all connect and work together, and trying to work out what to prioritise when they are all incredibly important.
The help
We tried people having the kids to give me a break.
Honestly, the paperwork and the housework all pile up so fast that it isn’t rest. And of course the kids got upset, and I’d then be dealing with dysregulation for days afterwards. Not worth the cost. And it made my physical work harder, because the more dysregulated they were the more trashed the house got. Or I’d go upstairs to work, and when I came back down the chaos that greeted me was more than I could deal with — my children’s way of showing that staying with someone else did not suit them at all.
Have you ever spent a week in hospital, trying to keep your child alive, parent the other one and juggle both their needs, after a blue light ambulance trip at four in the morning a week ago — only to come home to a musty, smelly house with a freezer that had broken, and nobody there to notice?
I have. And my gosh, in that moment a cleaner who could have gone in first and tidied that up would have been worth more than I can say. Because after no sleep, with a child still unwell and needing 24-hour care and inhalers every two hours, another small child full of life and mischief, and nobody else carrying any of it — to add to that a freezer fully defrosted over the floor, mouldy food, tidying, cleaning. It was enough to make me want to sit down and cry.
That’s worth sitting with, because when services talk about giving parents a break, respite is often what they mean. Someone else has the children for a few hours. On paper, the load has been lifted.
But for us, it hadn’t disappeared. It had just been moved. It waited for me, came back heavier, and often cost more than it gave.
Any help also has to be something the children can manage and accept. Otherwise it isn’t really help at all. That’s why choosing a cleaner the children liked mattered so much. It may sound like a small domestic preference, but it wasn’t. Help that leaves the people being helped distressed simply comes back to me in another form.
Then there is the help that comes with judgement, paperwork and the need to repeatedly explain and justify why you need it. Sometimes that adds more to the pile than it takes away. Being able to choose who helps us, and how, gives us back some small measure of control. And after years in which so much has felt beyond our control, that matters.
But sometimes the cost begins before any help is offered, with the risk involved in asking for it at all.
A disabled child is legally defined as a “child in need” under section 17 of the Children Act. That doesn’t mean anyone has done anything wrong. It is the legal route through which disabled children can be assessed for support.
And a child-in-need assessment is not the same as a child-protection investigation. I think it is important to be clear about that.
But the route to practical support still runs through children’s social care. The assessment looks not only at what your child needs, but at your capacity as a parent to meet those needs. If concerns are identified, it can move onto a different path.
On paper, I can understand why those things are considered. But for families who have already spent years being misunderstood, questioned or blamed, it doesn’t always feel like a neutral process.
The doors marked help and investigation may be different doors in law, but from where a family is standing, they can feel frighteningly close together.
You ask for something that might make family life a little more manageable, and find yourself having to demonstrate that your parenting is good enough. Some families decide that whatever help might be available is not worth that risk.
Not because they don’t need it. But because the cost of asking feels too high.
What I actually need a break from
There is something important underneath all of that which I don’t think we say often enough.
I enjoy being with my children. They enjoy being with me. We don’t need support that gives us less time together. If anything, we need more space to enjoy that time without all the other things constantly crowding in.
It isn’t being with my children that I need a break from. It is some of the endless work wrapped around caring for them.
Cleaning exhausts me. It leaves me in pain, overwhelmed, dysregulated and, honestly, grumpy. It uses up energy that I would much rather spend listening to my children, learning alongside them, making food with them, going somewhere together, or simply being available when they need me.
Having someone else clean doesn’t take me away from my children. It gives a little bit of me back to them.
Since they were tiny, people have offered to hold a baby for me.
It was kindly meant. When you see one person with two babies, I suppose it seems obvious that taking one of them for a while would give her a rest.
But when you are one person with twins, you already spend so much of your time having to choose which baby to pick up first. Which one needs you most. Which one can wait for just a moment while you settle the other.
I have always had to split myself between them. And they have always had to share me.
So having someone take a baby from my arms didn’t feel much like rest. It felt like giving away some of the time together that we never had enough of in the first place.
I didn’t need someone to hold one of my babies so that I could wash the pots, make the food or sort the washing.
I needed someone to wash the pots, make the food and sort the washing, so that I had more time to hold my babies.
And I don’t think that has really changed.
I don’t need support that takes my children away so that I can clean. I need support that takes some of the cleaning away, so that I can be with my children.
What genuinely helped, and why we could have it
I knew home ed was probably best for my children, but I felt I had no option but to put them in school. I had a job I needed to get to and couldn’t afford childcare to cover all those hours, so school felt like the only option open to me. And in those first weeks it felt like such an awful trap.
But then something that was both awful and amazing happened. My first day back after shielding for months, I was told I would be made redundant. A shock — a career I’d spent decades working on, gone. But also the push I needed to go self-employed.
I’d thankfully already been approached about a role, and this meant I could say yes and take it. I worked for Sudden, offering support to those bereaved suddenly during isolation and Covid. I loved the work, and it meant working from home on the telephone. I could pull my kids out of school and use the redundancy money to keep us afloat while I worked it all out.
I never looked back from there. Working from home around my kids’ needs was a game changer, and I’m incredibly grateful for it. I know so many parents, especially single parents, do not have that luxury.
Taking away one big chunk of that stack was a literal life saver.
I say literal. We will never know. We can’t see the damage that we stopped before it occurred. We can’t say for sure what would have happened if we’d walked a different path. But I can see the trajectory it was taking, and the cost to all of us.
Does it solve it? No. It’s still hard, and the cost is high. But if we can’t fix something, we can at least reduce the things that are contributing to harm, if we can.
It took me a while to realise, too, that I could work extra hours to cover the cost of the cleaner. I love my work, and cleaning asks more of me than almost any other task. My body physically struggles now with the pain and fatigue, and my brain finds it more complex than brain surgery — my wearable demonstrated that, as it’s the thing that uses the most energy, and it can see it and show me it. So I’d rather work double the hours it takes to clean, so I have the money to pay for it, because that also means I have more energy and regulation left for kids who need me to be regulated and ready for their needs.
For someone else the calculation may be different. But for us, this is the one that worked best.
There is other support available, free, but none of it is accessible to a family like mine — or the cost is just too high in other ways. The endless justifying of the need. The constantly feeling that you’re judged and less than, because you had to beg for the crumbs offered.
And the support is distributed according to what is on offer and funded, and what someone else thinks you need. Sometimes that’s not what is needed at all. Respite for us was not respite at all. But not many places offer a cleaner — for some reason that’s judged as lazy, or taking the mickey.
Everything that helped arrived by chance, not design. Yes, I work hard to make our life work. But I’m so very aware it’s because luck, chance, fate — call it what you may — linked up some things that led to us being able to do it this way.
For many it won’t. And it should not be that way.
So how do we help families carrying this kind of responsibility, and the sentinel vigilance that grows around it?
We listen. Properly listen.
Not so that we can decide which of the existing services we can squeeze them into, but so that we can understand what would actually take something off their pile.
For one family, that might be respite. For another, it might be someone helping in the house. It might be decent, timely medical care that doesn’t add another layer of trauma. A school that is genuinely flexible, safe and accessible. Support for home education when that is what allows a child and their family to breathe. A system in which asking for help doesn’t mean having to repeatedly prove your need, or feeling judged for needing it in the first place.
And sometimes, yes, it might be a cleaner.
Mine comes once a week for a couple of hours. She doesn’t take away the watch. She doesn’t make everything easy, or solve the much bigger things we carry.
But she stands alongside me for a little while. She sees some of the pile, picks part of it up, and doesn’t hand it back to me heavier than it was before.
It may not look much like care from the outside. But it is.
If the watch is truly not to be mine alone, then perhaps that is what help has to do. Not tell families to rest while leaving them responsible for everything. Not offer the same thing to everyone because it is what happens to be available. But ask what would genuinely help, listen to the answer, and find a way to share some of what they are carrying.
It won’t fix everything. A few hours never could.
But it helps.
And perhaps that is where we begin.
Post-Responsibility Trauma, Sentinel Adaptation and the Noticing/Acting Split are proposed clinical and descriptive concepts developed by Lindsay Reynolds. © 2026. They are offered as clinical and descriptive language, not as diagnostic categories.
Lindsay Reynolds, MA, is a Senior Accredited trauma and grief therapist (NCPS) and a member of BACP, with over twenty years of clinical experience.