When the People Who Care Are Too Tired to Care

by Rebecca Thomas

I can’t really describe just how tired I am today.

Actually, I can.

I am absolutely bloody exhausted.

Not yay, it’s Friday tired, or even normal end-of-term teacher tired. I am the kind of tired where someone asks you a perfectly reasonable question and you have to concentrate really hard on not being irritated that they asked it. The kind of tired where you walk into a room to do something, forget what it was, stand there for a moment and then decide that perhaps you didn't need to do it anyway. The tired where you sit in your car after school and don't actually start the engine, you just sit, because nobody needs anything from you in there.

At the moment school feels like we are sailing a ghost ship.

Except that's not quite fair; there are people on the ship — thank God there are people on the ship — beautiful, tired, ridiculously committed people who keep turning up (the ones who are well enough to be there that is). The leaders teaching, managing, finding cover, answering phones, dealing with the crisis that appeared before the previous crisis had actually finished. The relievers (if we can find them) walking through the gate into someone else's chaos and saying, essentially, Righto. What needs doing? I am enormously grateful for every single human who turns up. But bloody hell, we are tired!

This evening, I started wondering what that tiredness is doing to us.

I’m not just on about ‘physically’, but also mentally; to our empathy and tolerance. 

Somewhere amongst the endless needs and interruptions and behaviours and conversations and people needing something from me, I had a horrible thought. Am I becoming numb too? Not uncaring, just numb.

There is only so much human distress you can absorb in a day before your brain starts protecting itself from it. The first child who cries gets everything. You crouch down low and you listen. You have time. By the fifth? You're still kind, of course you're kind, but somewhere inside your head another voice has started saying: Please. Not another thing. And I hate admitting that, these aren't things, they're children.

That fifth child's hurt is just as real as the first child's. They don't know that three other children have melted down, someone has gone home sick, two staff are away, you've missed your lunch, and there is another adult standing at the door waiting to speak to you.

They just know that something happened to them and they need you.

But what happens when there isn't enough you left? I kept thinking about that today.

We talk constantly about co-regulation. A dysregulated child needs a regulated adult. We understand that a calm nervous system can lend its calm to another. But what happens when the child is at 10 per cent and the adult standing beside them is running on 7? What exactly are we supposed to lend them?

Some days I think we are trying to pour from cups that aren't merely empty, someone took the bloody cups. And still the needs keep coming: another friendship problem; a child who has hit someone; a child has disappeared from where they are supposed to be; another child who won't come inside; someone can't cope with the noise. Another incident. Another human being having one of the worst moments of their day and needing you to respond as though it is the first difficult thing that has happened in yours.

Every one of those moments deserves empathy, but empathy costs something.

It requires us to notice and put our own frustration to one side for a moment and make room for theirs. And I'm starting to wonder what happens when the people doing that emotional work, over and over and over again, become completely exhausted.

Do we start rationing empathy without realising it?

Do we become slightly less shocked by things that once would have shocked us?

Does the extraordinary slowly become ordinary?

Does a child hitting another child today eventually become just another sentence in the day?

Do we hear ourselves saying, Nobody was badly hurt, and feel relieved?

Do we start measuring success by the absence of catastrophe?

Do we stop asking Why is this child hurting? and find ourselves thinking For goodness' sake, what now?

I don't particularly like writing that.

But I think there is some truth in it.

Because humans have limits.

There seems to be an assumption in education that because caring is part of our profession, our capacity to care must therefore be infinite. It isn't. Maybe compassion can remain infinite as an idea. But the human body's ability to continuously perform compassion while stressed, interrupted, overstimulated and exhausted? Surely that has a limit.

And I wonder whether our kids can feel when we are approaching it.

They must notice when we don't crouch down this time. They must feel the difference between Tell me what happened and What happened now? One word. Massive difference.

And perhaps our tiredness becomes their tiredness. Our dysregulation nudges theirs. Their dysregulation nudges ours. They get louder. We get firmer. They become more reactive. We become less patient. They need more of us at precisely the moment we have less to give. And round and round it goes.

Everybody is just tired.

So am I.

Perhaps that is why I am writing this. Not because I have an answer. I don't.

I'm writing it because today I caught myself wondering whether I could do another week.

So will most of the crew. We'll climb back aboard our slightly haunted little ship, patch another hole, find somebody to cover the missing human, make sure the kids have what they need and somehow get the thing moving again.

But I don't think keep turning up can continue to be our workforce strategy. I don't want to become someone who hears about another child's pain and thinks: Not another thing. I don't want any of us to.

Next week, notice when someone has had enough. Pick something up for them if you can. Forgive the forgotten thing, the short reply, the moment when someone isn't quite themselves. We're tired. The kids are tired. And perhaps we all need a little more grace than usual.

Then, when the holidays finally arrive — if you don't immediately get sick, obviously — go and find some of your humanity again. Sleep. Sit in the sun. Walk by the water. Laugh. Be completely useless for a day. Spend some time being a human who isn't responsible for thirty other humans.

I don't think tired teachers stop caring. I think we care so much, for so long, that eventually we can become numb to just how much caring we are doing.

Two weeks, e hoa mā.

Look after the crew.

We're nearly at the shore.