Watching exhausted parents changed how I saw ageing, purpose and the extraordinary strength hidden inside ordinary lives.
Many happy returns
This summer I found myself at my grandson’s fifth birthday party. It was one of those gloriously hot English summer afternoons that seemed to be on repeat this year. The sky was impossibly blue, the garden was alive with the sound of shrieking children, and every available patch of shade was occupied by adults clutching cans of beer or bottles of water and silently hoping the temperature might drop by a few degrees.
The children, naturally, were oblivious. Five-year-olds are wonderfully indifferent to heatwaves. They raced between a paddling pool and balloons hanging from tree branches, as they chased each other around the garden and laughed until they could hardly breathe and somehow found enough energy to keep going long after most of the adults were beginning to wilt.
But it wasn’t the children who held my attention. It was their parents. Most of them looked to be around forty years old, perhaps a little younger or a little older, standing in that familiar chapter of life where careers, mortgages, relationships, ageing parents and young children all compete for attention at the same time.
For two hours I watched them almost continuously
One mother had barely sat down before she was on her feet again, retrieving a towel for one child, another drink for a second and comforting a third who had burst into tears because somebody else had been given the blue balloon. A father disappeared into the house carrying a child who had fallen asleep across his shoulder, only to reappear minutes later balancing plates of birthday cake while answering a work call that clearly couldn’t wait until Monday morning.
Nobody complained. Nobody announced how hard they were working. Nobody appeared remotely surprised by the endless stream of demands arriving every few seconds. They just kept going.
As I sat in the shade watching them, I had the curious feeling that I was observing something I had never really seen before. From where I was sitting now, they looked almost superhuman. Not because they possessed unusual strength or exceptional parenting skills, but because they were carrying such an astonishing amount without ever stopping to acknowledge it. The thought took me by surprise.
This had been me once
I had been one of those parents once. I know what it is to leave the house carrying enough equipment to survive a minor expedition simply because you’re taking a child to the park. I remember interrupted nights, busy mornings, the endless logistics that seemed to fill every waking hour and the constant, low-level responsibility that never really disappeared, even after my child was asleep. Yet I don’t remember ever thinking I was doing anything extraordinary.
Like the parents I was watching, I simply believed I was living an ordinary life. It was only from the distance of over thirty years that I could finally see what had been hidden in plain sight all along. We rarely recognise our own strength while we are busy using it. That thought has stayed with me ever since.
As therapists, we spend much of our professional lives encouraging people to notice their strengths. Clients arrive convinced they are failing because they feel overwhelmed, exhausted or emotionally stretched beyond what they believe they ought to be able to manage. Yet I sometimes find myself thinking exactly the opposite. Perhaps exhaustion isn’t evidence of weakness at all.
Perhaps it is evidence that somebody has been carrying an extraordinary amount for an extraordinarily long time. The difficulty is that we become accustomed to whatever life asks of us.
Human beings adapt with remarkable speed
A parent who once found the idea of looking after one newborn completely terrifying somehow becomes capable of managing two children, a demanding job, ageing parents without ever stopping to marvel at their own capacity. The challenge simply becomes normal.
Psychologists sometimes call this hedonic adaptation: our extraordinary ability to become accustomed to circumstances that once felt overwhelming. I think the same principle applies to emotional effort. We become so used to carrying the weight of our own lives that we stop noticing how heavy it actually is. Instead, we compare ourselves with everybody else who also appears to be coping.
Extraordinary lives lived out in plain sight
The result is that extraordinary effort becomes redefined as ordinary. Nobody receives a medal for remembering World Book Day, organising swimming lessons, making packed lunches, attending parents’ evenings and somehow remaining emotionally available to their partner after a difficult day at work. It is simply called Tuesday.
Being in that garden, I realised how often I have done exactly the same thing in my consulting room. Clients tell me about the pressures they are under and then apologise for not handling them better. They describe working full time while caring for parents with complex health issues, supporting children through exams, worrying about finances, navigating relationship difficulties and trying to maintain some semblance of their own wellbeing. Then, almost as an afterthought, they tell me they feel disappointed in themselves because they seem permanently tired.
Human blind spot
I often want to interrupt. Not to challenge them, but to ask whether they have any idea what they have just described. If somebody else told them the same story, would they conclude that person lacked resilience? Or would they think, ‘I’m amazed you’ve managed to keep going.’ It is one of the peculiar blind spots of being human.
We are often kinder to strangers than we are to ourselves.
The birthday party unexpectedly became a lesson in perspective. Watching those parents from the outside allowed me to see something they couldn’t. They were too busy living their lives to appreciate them.
And perhaps that is true of all of us. We only fully appreciate the mountain we have climbed once we are standing on the next one, looking back. I don’t think this observation is limited to parenting. People caring for a partner with dementia rarely stop to acknowledge the emotional endurance required simply to get through another ordinary day. Someone building a business often fails to notice the courage it takes to keep showing up after repeated setbacks. A nurse working back-to-back shifts no longer experiences her own resilience as remarkable because it has become woven into everyday life.
True resilience is keeping going
The same is true of grief. Those who are mourning often tell me they cannot understand how they have survived the past year. My answer is usually the same. You survived it because there wasn’t another option. The remarkable thing is not that you struggled. The remarkable thing is that you kept going. Perhaps that is what I had really been watching in that sun-drenched garden. Not parents. Not children. Not a birthday party.
I had been watching human beings getting on with the complicated business of loving other human beings. There is nothing ordinary about that. And yet we behave as though it is.
As I walked home later that afternoon, I realised I hadn’t spent much time thinking about the children at all. The parents stayed with me. Long after the balloons had burst and the last slices of birthday cake had been added to the party bags, I found myself thinking about the extraordinary demands placed on people in what is often described as the busiest decade of life.
Forty is a remarkable age
For many people, it is the point at which life reaches maximum complexity. Careers have become more demanding just as children require increasing emotional investment. Parents begin to age. Friendships need maintaining. Relationships require attention. Financial pressures rarely ease. Somewhere in the middle of all that, there is usually somebody occasionally wondering why they no longer have time to exercise, read a book or finish a cup of tea while it is still hot.
It is little wonder that so many people arrive in therapy believing they have somehow lost themselves. Perhaps they haven’t lost themselves at all. Perhaps they are simply carrying more than any one human being was ever designed to carry without occasionally feeling overwhelmed. I sometimes wonder whether we have become so accustomed to admiring extraordinary achievements that we have stopped recognising extraordinary resilience.
Society celebrates the entrepreneur who builds a successful company, the athlete who wins a medal or the celebrity who fills a concert hall. Yet every day millions of ordinary people perform acts of astonishing resilience that nobody notices because they do not happen on a stage. They happen in kitchens before seven o’clock in the morning. They happen in hospital waiting rooms. They happen during school runs, on late-night supermarket visits and beside children’s beds at three o’clock in the morning. They happen without fanfare. Perhaps that is why we overlook them.
Watching from the sidelines
As I reflected on the afternoon, another thought came to me that was far more personal. For the first time, I realised I had become an observer rather than a participant.
That recognition brought no sadness. In fact, there was something unexpectedly comforting about it. Life had gently moved me into a different position without my really noticing. There had been no announcement, no ceremony and no obvious dividing line. One day, I found myself standing on the edge of the action rather than at the centre of it.
That is one of the curious things about ageing. We imagine it will arrive dramatically, yet most of the time it slips unobtrusively into our lives through moments like these.
One afternoon you notice that your children are now the adults organising family gatherings. You realise you have become the person people turn to for reassurance rather than practical help. You discover that your greatest contribution is no longer measured by how much you can carry, but by how calmly you can stand alongside those who are carrying far too much themselves.
For years I thought wisdom was about having answers
Now I suspect it has much more to do with noticing. Noticing the parent who has not sat down all afternoon. Noticing the friend who insists they are fine while looking utterly exhausted. Noticing the colleague who is holding everything together with remarkable grace while privately wondering how much longer they can continue. Perhaps growing older sharpens our vision in ways we rarely acknowledge.
We stop being dazzled by appearances and become more interested in effort. We begin to see not just what people have achieved, but what it has cost them to achieve. We recognise the invisible emotional labour that sits behind so many apparently ordinary lives because we have carried our own share of it. You can’t learn that perspective from a book. It is earned through experience.
It is one of the reasons I still love being a therapist after all these years. People often assume therapy is about solving problems, but much of it is actually about helping someone recognise themselves more accurately. Clients frequently arrive with a catalogue of perceived failures. They tell me where they believe they have fallen short, the mistakes they have made and the standards they have failed to meet. Yet I am often struck by something entirely different. I see their courage.
I see their resilience. I see people who have kept getting out of bed every morning despite circumstances that would have defeated many others. I see people who have spent years protecting their children from difficulties they carried alone.
Recognising the strength in others
I see men and women who have held families together while believing they were somehow not doing good enough. Sometimes the most important thing I can do is simply reflect back what they cannot yet see for themselves. “You’ve been carrying an enormous amount.” Those few words frequently produce tears. Not because they are dramatic, but because they are true. Recognition is a powerful form of compassion.
Perhaps that is what I had been doing unconsciously at the birthday party. I had recognised something the parents themselves could not yet see. They were too immersed in the demands of everyday life to appreciate the everyday heroism of what they were doing.
One day, many years from now, they may stand where I was standing and watch another generation of parents racing after excited children. They too may feel that same sense of admiration and wonder. They may look back at photographs of themselves and realise they were stronger than they ever gave themselves credit for. I hope they do.
Measuring our life
I think we spend far too much of our lives measuring ourselves against impossible standards instead of acknowledging what we have already achieved. The older I become, the less interested I am in asking whether life has been successful and the more interested I am in asking whether it has been meaningful.
Those are not the same question. Meaning is found in thousands of moments that never make headlines. It lives in school assemblies and bedtime stories, in hospital visits and family meals, in difficult conversations and acts of forgiveness. It is built through showing up again and again for the people we love, even when nobody is watching, and no reward is waiting.
That is what I witnessed in a suburban garden on an exceptionally hot afternoon. Not a children’s birthday party. A masterclass in ordinary love. And perhaps that is why it affected me so deeply. As therapists, we often remind people to notice the present moment because it passes so quickly. I would add something else.
Notice yourselves. Notice what you are carrying. Notice how much of your day you spend caring, organising, comforting, earning, worrying, and loving. One day you will look back from another season of your life and see yourself more clearly than you can today.
When that day comes, I hope your first thought is not, “I should have done more.” I hope it is, “I had no idea how well I was doing.” Because the truth is this.
Most extraordinary lives never look extraordinary while they are being lived. They simply look like another ordinary day.
Looking back
As I left the party, I found myself looking back across the garden one last time. The children were still laughing, the parents were still moving from one small crisis to the next and, as far as I could tell, none of them had any idea how extraordinary they looked. Perhaps that is how life works. We rarely know we are living through the years that will one day define us. We don’t recognise our own resilience while we are relying on it. We don’t appreciate the emotional weight we carry because we have no choice but to carry it.
Only later, when life has moved us into a different season, do we gain enough distance to look back with tenderness at the person we once were. We see the effort that once felt ordinary. We recognise the courage that never announced itself. We understand that what appeared to be an unremarkable afternoon, an ordinary week or another exhausting year was, in fact, a period of our lives that asked more of us than we ever realised.
Standing in that garden, I wasn’t mourning the passing of youth or wishing I could return to those years. I was simply filled with admiration for the people living them. I hope that one day they will look back with the same generosity. Not wishing they had done more, or been better, but recognising that they were already doing something remarkable.
Sometimes it takes growing older to become the witness your younger self never had.
