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13 Hours. That's How Long I Have To Get Through. My kids wake up at 6:30 AM. Bedtime is 7:30 PM. That's 13 hours. Every single morning when I hear them stir through the monitor, the first thing I think — before "good morning," before "I love you," before anything a mother should think — is: "13 hours." And then I start counting. 😔 By breakfast it's 12. By the time they're dressed and the fight about socks is over and someone has cried about something and the cereal is on the floor — it's 11. Park? That kills 2 hours. Now it's 9. Lunch and the mess and the negotiation about what they will and won't eat? Another hour. 8. Naptime — if it happens. If the stars align and nobody fights it and nobody wakes up after 30 minutes. That's 2 hours. 6 left. Afternoon. The long, slow, endless afternoon. Where every minute feels like ten. Where the house gets loud and the patience gets thin and the clock on the microwave becomes the only thing I look at. 4 hours. 3 hours. 2. Bath. Teeth. Stories. Negotiations. "One more book." "Water." "I have to pee." "There's a monster." "Can you leave the door open?" And then. Silence. And I sit on the couch and I feel... nothing. Not relief. Not peace. Not enjoyment of the quiet I've been counting toward all day. Just empty. Too tired to enjoy the only hours that are mine. I've been doing this for three years. Every single day. A 13-hour countdown to silence. 🤐 And I know — I KNOW — that this is wrong. I know these are "the years." The ones everyone tells me I'll miss. The ones the older moms at the store talk about with wet eyes. "Enjoy it. It goes so fast." I want to enjoy it. God, I want to. I look at them sometimes — my son building something on the floor, my daughter talking to herself in that little voice — and I think: "This is it. This is the part you'll cry about later. This is the part you'll give anything to get back." And I still check the clock. Because knowing I should be present and being able to be present are two completely different things. My brain says "be here." My body says "survive." I don't hate my kids. I don't resent motherhood. I love them so much it makes my chest hurt. But every morning I wake up already dreading the day. Not the day specifically. Just the length of it. The relentlessness of it. The fact that it starts at 6:30 and doesn't stop until 7:30 and there's no pause button. No intermission. No five-minute break where nobody needs anything. I tried to make the days feel different. Activities — I signed up for everything. Swim class. Art class. Music class. Library storytime. Playdates. Every day had a thing. And every thing was just another block of time to survive. I wasn't enjoying them. I was using them to make the clock move faster. Being "present" — I read an article about putting your phone away and being fully present with your kids. So I did. Put it in a drawer. Sat on the floor. And within 10 minutes I was counting again. Not on the phone this time. In my head. Because the phone was never the problem. The counting was never a choice. It's automatic. Like breathing. I can't stop it. Caffeine — more coffee, earlier. Energy drinks by noon. Thinking if I just had more energy I could enjoy this. All it did was make me jittery and counting faster. "Enjoying the little moments" — everyone's advice. So I tried. I'd sit with them at lunch and think "enjoy this." Watch them play in the sprinkler and think "enjoy this." Read bedtime stories and think "enjoy this." And I'd feel nothing. Just a woman telling herself to feel something while the clock ticked behind her. And every night, same guilt. Same thought: "You wasted another day. They were right there. And you missed it. Again." 😔 The worst part is the math. I did it once at 2 AM and I wish I hadn't. My son is 5. At 18 he leaves. That's 13 years. Sounds like a lot. But subtract school hours — 7 hours a day, 180 days a year. Subtract sleep. Subtract the time he's with friends as he gets older. Subtract the teenage years where he won't want to be around me. The real time I have left with him — actual, in-the-room, he-still-wants-me time — is maybe 4 years. Maybe less. And I'm counting the hours until he goes to bed. That math destroyed me. I lay in bed and cried because I'm wasting the only years I'll ever get. And I can't stop. That same night — 2 AM, tears, phone — I found a woman who wrote about counting. She said: "I counted every day for four years. From the moment they woke up to the moment they slept. I thought it was burnout. I thought I needed a vacation. I thought I was a bad mom. Turns out my nervous system was so overloaded that it couldn't experience the present moment. It could only endure it. My body was stuck in a state where every stimulus — every sound, every touch, every 'mommy' — registered as something to survive, not something to experience. The counting wasn't a choice. It was my nervous system's way of coping with a day it didn't have the capacity to live." She said: "You don't count because you don't love them. You count because your body is in survival mode and survival mode doesn't do enjoyment. It does endurance. And endurance needs a finish line. Bedtime is your finish line." She mentioned an app. 5 minutes a day. Nervous system regulation. Not more activities. Not more presence. Not "enjoy it." Just bringing the body out of endurance mode so it can actually experience the day instead of just getting through it. I started the next morning. 6:30. They were still asleep. 5 minutes. In the kitchen. Alone. Week 1: Still counted. But I noticed something. The numbers didn't come as fast. I wasn't calculating at 7 AM. The first count came at maybe 9. Two and a half hours I didn't count. That had never happened. Week 2: My daughter was playing in the sandbox. I was sitting next to her. And for maybe 15 minutes, I forgot what time it was. Didn't check. Didn't calculate. Just watched her dig. Her little hands in the sand. The concentration on her face. 15 minutes of not counting. It felt like a miracle. Week 3: Saturday. Whole day with them. I made pancakes. We went to the park. They fought, they laughed, they spilled, they cried. And at some point in the afternoon my son said "mom, this is the best day" and I realized I hadn't looked at the clock in two hours. Two hours of just... being there. 😭 Week 5: Bedtime came and I wasn't ready. For the first time in years — I wasn't ready for them to go to sleep. My daughter wanted one more book and I said yes. Not because I should. Because I wanted to. Because I wasn't done yet. The day still had something left in it. And so did I. Week 7: Morning. 6:30. Monitor. Little feet. "Mommy!" And the first thought wasn't "13 hours." It was: "They're up." That's it. No number. No countdown. Just my kids, awake, another day. And I got out of bed without calculating the distance to silence. I still get tired. I still need bedtime. I still have hard afternoons. But I'm not counting anymore. I'm not enduring my children. I'm not watching the clock while the years disappear behind me. Because I wasn't a bad mom who couldn't appreciate her kids. I was a depleted woman whose nervous system had turned motherhood into a 13-hour endurance test. And once it came out of survival mode, the hours stopped being something to survive. They became something to have. 5 minutes a day. Before they woke up. That's all. If you count the hours. If you know you should enjoy it and you can't. If the guilt of watching these years slip past while you wait for bedtime is eating you alive — it's not you. It's not your attitude. It's not your gratitude. It's a nervous system that can't be present because it's too busy surviving. Take the free quiz. 2 minutes. See what's actually happening. These years are going. You deserve to be here for them. Not just through them. 💛