Why the End of the School Year Feels Like a Sprint to the Finish Line (Even When You're Already Running on Empty)

It's May.

Somehow.

You know it's May because the school newsletter arrived with seventeen end-of-year dates highlighted in yellow, because your child just remembered they need a poster board for tomorrow, and because someone in your house has a performance, a field trip, a last day, and a transition meeting — all in the same week.

You know it's May because January felt like it lasted four years and yet here you are, still catching up from September.

And somewhere underneath the logistics and the scheduling and the mental math of who needs to be where and when — there's this feeling you can't quite name.

It's not excitement. It's not relief.

It's a kind of exhaustion that goes deeper than tired.

If that's where you are right now, I want you to know something before we go any further:

You are not behind. You are not failing. You are not uniquely bad at this.

You have a nervous system that has been running on high alert for months — and nobody told it summer was coming.

The End-of-Year Pile-On Is Real (And It's Not Just the Logistics)

Let's name what's actually happening in May, because it tends to get flattened into "busy season" when it's so much more than that.

There are the visible things: the teacher appreciation week you remembered on Tuesday night, the permission slips, the end-of-year class parties that somehow require a themed snack, the camp forms you still haven't submitted, the pediatrician appointments you've been meaning to schedule before the summer gap.

And then there are the invisible things.

The mental load of transitioning a child — or multiple children — out of one routine and into another. The quiet work of preparing them emotionally for change, managing their big feelings about leaving their class, their teacher, their friends. The anticipatory planning of what summer will actually look like, who will cover what, how the logistics of camp and work and childcare will stack.

None of that shows up on a to-do list. All of it lives in your body.

And this year, it's landing on top of something heavier. The world feels hard right now in ways that are difficult to articulate — a collective tension, a low-grade stress that seeps into everything personal. You're not imagining it. It's real, and your body is holding it alongside everything else.

The end-of-year pile-on isn't just logistics. It's the cumulative weight of a full school year of showing up, managing, anticipating, and holding — landing right at the moment everyone around you expects you to feel celebratory.

No wonder you're exhausted.

Summer Used to Mean Something Different

Can we take a moment for the grief of this?

Because I think it's real and I don't think we talk about it enough.

There was a version of summer that felt like freedom. An actual exhale. The specific relief of nowhere to be, nothing urgent, time that moved differently. If you grew up with that — with long unstructured days and the particular magic of having nothing planned — some part of you still expects summer to feel that way.

It doesn't anymore.

Now summer means a different kind of managing. It means figuring out the childcare gap between when school ends and camp starts. It means working while someone asks you for a snack every fourteen minutes. It means the particular mental load of keeping children fed, stimulated, connected, and not entirely screen-dissolved — while also doing your actual job, which did not take the summer off.

Planning a vacation can feel like a work project. The research, the booking, the packing lists, the managing of everyone's expectations about what the trip will be — sometimes it takes more energy than just staying home.

And underneath all of it, sometimes quietly and sometimes not so quietly, is this: guilt. Guilt for not being more excited. Guilt for not loving this more. Guilt for dreading the season that's supposed to be the reward.

You are not ungrateful. You are not a bad mother. You are not someone who needs to reframe her attitude.

You are someone whose nervous system never got the break it needed — and who is now being asked to gear up for another season before the last one fully ended.

The grief is appropriate. And it's worth acknowledging before you try to push through it.

What Your Nervous System Is Actually Doing Right Now

Here's the thing about your nervous system: it doesn't read the calendar.

It doesn't know school is ending. It doesn't know summer is supposed to feel lighter. It only knows what it's learned over months of being needed, being on, being the one who holds things together.

Since September, your nervous system has been in a kind of sustained vigilance. Not full crisis mode — you're functioning, you're delivering, you're showing up. But underneath the functioning, your body has been running a quiet background process: scanning for what's next, anticipating what needs to be managed, bracing for what might go wrong.

That's what a nervous system does when it's been taught, over time, that things require managing.

And here's what happens when a nervous system stays in that state for too long without a genuine reset: the exhaustion stops responding to rest. You can sleep eight hours and wake up tired. You can take a weekend off and come back feeling like you never left. You can do everything right — the sleep, the walks, the water, the deep breaths — and still feel like you're running on empty.

That's not a discipline problem. That's not a self-care problem. That's a nervous system that has been in sympathetic overdrive for so long it's forgotten what it feels like to actually downshift.

The irritability that catches you off guard. The inability to feel genuinely excited about things you used to love. The sense of going through the motions while waiting to feel like yourself again.

These aren't signs that something is wrong with you.

They're signals. Your body is communicating something important — and it's been trying to for a while.

The question isn't why you feel this way. The question is what you do with the information.

Why Small Shifts Matter More Than a Complete Overhaul

I want to tell you about something a client shared with me recently.

She'd been carrying the particular exhaustion we've been talking about — the kind that doesn't lift, the kind that makes you wonder if something is fundamentally wrong with you. She wasn't in crisis. She was functioning. But she was running on fumes and had been for longer than she could remember.

She wasn't expecting a dramatic transformation. She was skeptical, honestly, that anything would really shift.

What she told me — and I'm keeping her words as close to how she said them as I can — is that the changes that actually helped weren't the big ones. They were small. Specific. Almost embarrassingly simple.

And yet something moved that hadn't moved in years.

I think about that a lot. Because so many of the women I work with are waiting to feel ready for the big overhaul before they start. Waiting until after summer. Until the kids are back in school. Until things calm down. Until they have more energy to do the thing that would give them more energy.

Your nervous system doesn't need a complete renovation to begin shifting.

It needs the right small thing.

And most of the time, the right small thing starts with understanding what pattern your nervous system is actually in — because when you can name the pattern, you can interrupt it. And when you can interrupt it, even slightly, everything starts to look a little different.

That's not a promise of a quick fix. It's something better: it's the beginning of actually understanding what's driving the exhaustion, so you can do something real about it.

You Don't Have to White-Knuckle Your Way Into Summer

Here's what I don't want for you:

I don't want you to make it to June the same way you made it to May — by pushing through, by managing harder, by telling yourself you'll rest when things calm down.

Things don't calm down. You know this. The season changes, the demands shift, and there you are again — still running, still behind, still waiting for the exhale that doesn't come.

What's possible instead is moving into this season with something different in place. Not a complete life overhaul. Not a dramatic pivot. Just a beginning — a small, specific shift toward understanding what your nervous system is actually doing and why.

That recognition alone changes something. I've seen it enough times to say so with confidence.

You made it to May. That's not nothing — that's months of showing up when it was hard, holding things together when everything kept piling up, keeping going when you were already running on empty.

You deserve more than just getting through the next season the same way.

If you're curious about the pattern underneath the exhaustion — the specific nervous system pattern that's been running things — I made something to help you understand it.

DM me the word SUMMER and I'll send it to you. It's free, it's specific, and it might be the small thing that starts something bigger.

You're allowed to begin before the timing feels perfect. 🌿