Nothing's right, I'm torn.

The Messy, Imperfect Juggle of Summer (...and What I'm Taking Into Autumn).

Mums - we made it. The 1st of September. Come at me!

This pleasing date for me is brimming with new year energy. Not the stressful January kind mind - the one that smells like sharpened pencils and polished loafers (are we still wearing loafers?) new notebooks and the nib of your favourite new pen. Crisp, fresh, renewed. And for me much needed after  the routine has been thrown up in the air for the last 6 weeks -  and now I’m primed and ready to catch it again. 

Before I do though, I’m gonna do as I say to my clients - esp my lovely Summer Village community - and look back honestly at the summer that's just happened. Not the highlight-reel version or the posed photos or the stuff you share at the school gates on the first day of term.  The real one in all its unfiltered glory, in 6 neatly arranged points. I give you: my summer juggle, 2026. 

1. Good Enough Summer

If you'd asked me in June what this summer would look like, I'd have described it as pretty lowkey - and it was, mostly by design. Lots of "non-planned" days, local stuff, time at home. Some deliberate white space for the kids to be bored in. But what I won’t have said is the underlying narrative of: 

" Coz obviously the kids will entertain themselves while I can work on my business here and there (really efficiently and with focus), whilst then easily putting down my business hat for a bit to be present and make memories with my children. And it will just be a seamless juggle of one thing then the next, and the kids will have such fun and there’ll be crafting, and then we will all laugh about what a juggle it was when we look back at the end of the summer".  

I admit now, I had a beautiful but flawed theory that did not take into account:

1. Siblings do not get the memo  of ‘getting on’ when you really need them to.

2. I very much either have an ‘on or off’ switch when it comes to parenting/work. I try for something in between but it’s just how I’m wired.

3. I actually needed more time away from my screen, my laptop and my business than I ever felt I should need this year.

   
   

And so summer became this strange mix of desperately wanting time off the hamster wheel of term-time admin and school runs, while also quietly missing the structure that makes work -and my sanity -possible, and just shouting things into the garden like ‘ This is a no hitting game’ and ‘ the trowel is NOT to be used as a weapon’ whilst trying to create interesting thought pieces for linkedin.

The best ever summer of parenting/ business running? Not quite. But a good enough one? I’ll take that.

2. The Guilt Trap

If you’re anything like me - and the millions of working parents world over - the guilt follows me round like a clingy toddler. When I’m working, when I’m not working, when I’m parenting, when I’m questioning my life choices at the side of the swimming pool on a wet wednesday evening.  But this year my overall feeling was less guilt which, if I'm honest, felt surprising and maybe a little like growth…?

When my two bigger ones went into holiday clubs they weren't massively keen on, I felt okay about it. So that was new. What still got me in the guilt gills though, was my three-year-old being peeled off me at nursery, crying - that one landed differently, and I cancelled his session the following week when it wasn’t totally necessary for him to go. (I realize this in itself is a privilege by the way). 

So it's not that guilt has disappeared - it's that I'm getting better at telling the difference between guilt worth listening to and guilt that's just noise.

My new guilt though (ooh fun, a new type!) that surfaced was about my business - I wanted time away from it but needed to spend time on it if I wanted it to keep running and scale later in the year. I wanted to just close the laptop and free up a bit of mental space but needed to start the planning to keep momentum come autumn. But I chose this job/life (blah blah blah) so why did I feel guilt anyway?! I think my overall vibe from this particular note of guilt was ‘feeling torn’, which ended up rearing it’s head in other ways too. 

3. Resentment Rising (Or: nothing’s right, I’m torn)

As above,  "guilt" doesn't fully capture it. So who better to quote than the immortal words of Natalie Umbruglia? She knows a bit about being a women in the world with a lot of demands put on her, right? 

I was torn between shutting the laptop for six weeks and just cracking on with work. Torn between wanting full, uninterrupted time with my kids and booking childcare purely so I could go for a walk on my own and drink a coffee in a silent house. Torn between trying to squeeze every role I hold into short, unsatisfying slivers of the day - ‘this three-hour block of work will be enough’  - when it never, ever is. Torn between believing, genuinely, that kids need boredom and downtime (and watching some of the most magical moments of the summer happen in completely unplanned pottering at home)... and then scrolling social media, seeing exotic holidays and huge days out, and wondering, should I be doing that too?

And let’s go deeper dear reader - torn between being the Village Coach who tells you to trust your own version of things -your own values, your own family set-up, your own definition of enough - and being the woman who still, sometimes, gets swayed by the comparison anyway. TORN MUCH?!

4. Self-Care & 5. Joy and Fun

Somewhere in the middle of all that torn-ness: I realised that's it's ok that I am not the expert with the magic answers. Which is lucky, really, because that was never the job. A coach's job is to guide, facilitate, and support you to find your own answers - not hand you mine and assure you they’ll be the silver bullet. 

What I do get is a slightly unusual vantage point. I hear so many stories, challenges, half-formed thoughts from the mums and parents I work with and with that overview, that  perspective across a whole community, lets me spot the themes. The similarities. The connections. The little nuggets of clarity and lightbulb moments that are almost impossible to see when you're the one standing in the middle of it.

That, more than any single "self-care win" or "joy moment," has been the gift of this summer. Watching my own juggle mirrored back at me, over and over, in the Summer Village cohort - and realising I wasn't the only one dropping balls, second-guessing the plan, and feeling both grateful for and slightly resentful of the six weeks off.

6. What I'm Taking Into Autumn

So here's my takeaway, for me and for you:

We are all in this together. Not in what it looks like on the surface - not in our individual set-ups, our challenges, our family shapes, where or how we live. But in those underlying moments of what am I doing? Am I getting this right? This feels hard. That thread runs through every single conversation I have, mine included.

There's nothing quite like new-term energy and I am embracing September as my real new year-  in business and in mum's life. But I'm also accepting a summer that was just... ok.  A massive, imperfect, messy juggle that's left you a bit frazzled, spun out, knackered and not sure if you’ve done things right, wrong or just who even cares anyway. 

Today is a new day. And that forward motion - taking what you've learned about yourself and using it, rather than beating yourself up with it - is what coaching, at its heart, is all about. I’m taking that - along with a fresh new pencil case - enthusiastically, into a good enough Autumn.