I feel guilty every time I want to be alone from my children

Dear Delyara, I love them. That should be enough to say. It isn’t. Because some evenings I want them to stop talking, stop touching, stop asking, stop needing. I want my own skin back. I want a room with a lock. I want ten minutes where “Mum” does not mean now, respond, soften, decide, fix, carry. And the second I feel that, guilt arrives. Not gentle guilt. Harsh guilt. The kind that tells me I should be warmer, more patient, more grateful, more maternal, more endlessly open to the life I created. The kind that takes ordinary overstimulation and turns it into a moral failing. I do not think mothers speak honestly enough about how love and depletion can sit in the same body at the same time. Mine do. Every week.