By June, the feelings that were easier to carry in September or January may start to feel heavier.

Children may show it through behaviour. Adults may show it through shorter patience, quieter exhaustion, or that familiar feeling of having very little left to give at the end of the day.

So if June feels heavier than you expected, you are not alone

You are getting enough sleep. Or close enough. You are going to bed at a reasonable hour, waking up at a reasonable hour, doing the things you are supposed to do. And you are still exhausted. Not tired in the way a good weekend away would fix. Tired in a way that seems to sit underneath everything, that rest does not seem to touch, that you have quietly started to wonder might just be who you are now.

Mothers are capable in ways that don’t always get named. They adjust without being asked. They notice without being told. They carry what needs to be carried, often before anyone else realizes it needed attention in the first place and it is easy to take for granted—not because it’s small, but because it’s constant.

A teacher is a role. A profession. A job title that appears on a contract and a timetable and a staff list. There are millions of teachers in the world right now and every single one of them matters.

But THE teacher is something else. 

Purpose, in its most useful form, is not a dramatic discovery. It is a quiet orientation. A direction of travel. A set of values, held consistently, that guide the small decisions of an ordinary day. You probably already have it. You may just not be calling it that.

The care you bring to an ordinary morning — the greeting, the patience, the moment of genuine interest in a child's world — is depositing something into a child's development that does not show up on any observable measure but that shapes who they are becoming.

You will never see the full extent of what you are doing. Almost no one who does work that matters ever does.

This is not a consolation prize. This is the reality of meaningful work.

When we are not present to what is actually happening, we miss it. The child who is trying to tell us something with their behaviour, not their words. The moment of beauty in an ordinary afternoon. The rising tension in our own body that, if we had noticed it twenty minutes earlier, we might have been able to address before it became the sharp word we later regretted.

We are living in a world that pulls us away from each other — toward screens, toward productivity, toward the management of anxiety rather than the cultivation of joy. Choosing connection in that world is a small act of resistance. It is also, it turns out, one of the most effective things we can do for ourselves and for the children in our care.

We spend so much time talking about what women do. The invisible work, the emotional labour, the impossible balancing act. And all of that is true and worth naming. But underneath the doing is a being.

When we hold limits with children, we're not withholding care. We're teaching something real and important: that other people have needs, that those needs matter, that genuine care is not the same as unlimited provision. The parent who can never say no isn't giving more love. They're actually depriving their child of one of the most valuable lessons available.

The same logic applies to you.

Adults co-regulate with each other too. We always have. That friend who can hold a crisis without panicking. The colleague who makes you feel steadier just by sitting across from you. The person who lets you say the thing that's actually true without making you manage their reaction to it.

Everything I teach in Positive Discipline at its absolute core is about this kind of attunement. Women who teach and parent well are already doing the attunement that Positive Discipline formalizes. They were doing it before anyone gave it a name.

What they haven't been given is recognition that it is work. Real work.

I started Women's Month planning to write something polished. A proper opening post. Something that felt finished and confident and, you know, appropriately celebratory.

And then I sat down to write it and what came out instead was this: I am still figuring so much out.

This month of February arrives carrying its usual symbols — hearts, flowers, reminders to love loudly and visibly. But beneath all of that, many of us are walking through our days holding quiet concerns, unanswered questions, and a deep sense of care for a world that feels like it’s hurting.

Gratitude isn’t denial. It’s grounding.

It’s the practice of noticing what still exists when everything feels like it’s unraveling. The relationships that hold. The small moments of safety. The fact that even in a hurting world, care is still being offered — sometimes quietly, sometimes imperfectly, but genuinely.