When School Admin Tips You Over the Edge: 5 Ways to Feel Better When You’re Holding Too Much
RD
There are some weeks where school admin feels manageable.
A message here. A form there. A reminder about PE kit that you absolutely saw, meant to deal with, and then immediately forgot because someone asked for a snack and your brain short-circuited.
And then there are the weeks where it all ramps up to a level that feels, frankly, unreasonable.
This was one of those weeks.
Last week, my children were sent home from school early for three days because it was too hot.
Which was fun.
For them.
Less fun for every working parent who had made the wild assumption that school would be open for the full school day.
And then this week appeared and said, “Hold my raffle tickets.”
We had the normal weekly things: Rainbows, gymnastics, dancing, cricket for both children on Friday.
Then, by some ironic coincidence, my son also had forest school, beekeeping and a band performance.
Beekeeping.
Lovely, wholesome, educational.
Also, why now!!??
Then both children came home with raffle tickets that needed returning. There was a non-uniform day requiring some sort of sweets, biscuits and plastic-filled pot situation. Then a last-minute message appeared about a beach trip in a couple of weeks, which naturally involved another form.
At that point, I could feel the overload alarm bells going off.
And if you’ve ever felt like one more school app notification might send you over the edge, I want you to know this:
There is nothing wrong with you.
You are holding a lot.
At some point, every brain reaches capacity.
This is not “just a few messages”
I think we downplay school admin because each individual thing looks small.
A form.
A kit reminder.
A message about raffle tickets.
A request for £1.
A note about wellies.
A school trip.
A non-uniform day.
A club change.
But it’s rarely the individual task that tips you over.
It’s the fact that every single one lands in your head on top of everything else you’re already carrying.
Work.
Dinner.
Childcare.
Appointments.
Birthdays.
Family logistics.
The mental list of who needs to be where and when.
The emotional work of noticing who is tired, who needs more support, who needs new shoes, who might be about to lose it because their sandwich has been cut in the wrong shape.
It is not nothing.
And for many working mums, this is happening alongside paid work, deadlines, meetings, decisions, teams, clients, colleagues and inboxes.
Previous generations might have had one letter home a term. Some of our mums were also doing this as their main job.
Many of us are doing it around work, in the margins, while trying to appear vaguely functional.
No wonder it feels hard.
So, here are five things I’m doing when school admin takes it up another notch.
1. Recognise you’re holding more than one person should be carrying
The first thing is to stop pretending this should feel easy.
It should not feel easy.
Before you even leave the house in the morning, you may already have packed lunches, sorted water bottles, found shoes, remembered snacks, checked bags, negotiated hair brushing, reminded someone to brush their teeth, dealt with emotions, answered questions, thought about work, checked the school app and mentally rearranged the day.
That is a lot before 9am.
So when the school pings with another thing, your reaction is not dramatic.
It is a normal response to holding too much.
Sometimes I find it helpful to say, “This is a full week. I am at capacity.”
Not as a complaint.
As information.
And if it is a temporary spike, I remind myself: this too shall pass.
This week will pass. The raffle tickets will pass. The beekeeping will pass. The slightly mysterious plastic pot situation will pass.
But if your life feels like this all the time, that matters too.
Because constantly living over capacity is not something to push through forever.
2. Remind yourself you are human
When you’re carrying too much, your brain will drop something.
This week, I forgot my son’s PE kit.
Then I forgot his book bag.
I also forgot my daughter’s snack for after-school club and had to do two separate trips to school before 9am.
A tremendous start to the day.
And yes, it would be very easy to make those things mean something.
I’m not organised enough.
I should be better at this.
Other mums seem to manage.
Why can’t I just keep on top of it?
But the truth is much simpler.
I am human.
My brain was full.
Something dropped.
That does not make me a bad mum. It makes me a person with finite capacity.
And you are allowed to be a person with finite capacity too.
3. Work out which balls are glass and which are plastic
There’s a brilliant analogy from Nora Roberts about juggling glass balls and plastic balls.
Some things are glass. If you drop them, there will be real consequences.
Some things are plastic. If you drop them, they bounce, roll away, and life carries on.
This matters so much when you’re overwhelmed, because the brain often treats everything as equally urgent and equally important.
The forgotten PE kit feels huge.
The raffle tickets feel huge.
The form feels huge.
The non-uniform pot of sweets, biscuits and tiny plastic things feels, for reasons I still don’t fully understand, huge. (and if you’ve ever heard of a ‘jolly jar’ you know what I’m on about 🤯)
But they are not all glass.
Some of them are plastic.
Annoying? Yes.
Inconvenient? Possibly.
Evidence that you are failing at motherhood? Absolutely not.
So when the list starts growing teeth and is chasing you around the kitchen, ask yourself:
“What actually needs protecting here?”
Your child being safe is glass.
Your work commitment that genuinely matters may be glass.
Your relationship with your child might be glass.
Your own health and steadiness are glass too, by the way.
The exact quality of the non-uniform day contribution?
Plastic. Possibly even rubber.
4. Hand over, remove or simplify something else
One of the hardest things about school admin is that it often feels impossible to hand over.
Because it’s not a neat task. It’s an entire foggy blob of context.
The message came through here. The form is in this app. The payment is in that system. The wellies need to go in on Thursday but not Friday. The beach trip needs a packed lunch but not the normal packed lunch because apparently that would be too simple.
Sometimes explaining it to someone else feels like more work than doing it yourself.
So instead of asking, “How do I hand over the school admin?” ask:
“What else can come off me this week?”
Maybe someone else sorts dinner.
Maybe dinner comes out of the freezer.
Maybe the standards drop.
Maybe you buy the cake instead of spend hours slaving in a hot kitchen at 30+ degrees.
Maybe you reply “vouchers” to every person asking what your husband wants for his birthday because you do not have capacity to become Head of Gift Strategy as well.
This week, I told my husband I was at capacity and that dinners were going to be beige.
Not forever.
Just for now.
Because this is not the week to be heroic with vegetables.
You do not have to make every part of life beautiful and well-considered when one area has become unusually heavy.
Simplifying counts.
5. Give the admin a home so it stops living in your head
One of the things I’ve noticed is how quickly school notifications become a trigger.
The ping goes off and your stomach drops.
“What now?”
“What have I forgotten?”
“What do they need from me?”
And then the task sits open in your head all day.
You’re trying to work, but part of your brain is holding the form.
You’re in a meeting, but part of your brain is thinking about raffle tickets.
You’re making dinner, but part of your brain is wondering whether the beach trip needs payment, permission, sun cream, spare shoes, or all of the above.
So I’ve started giving the admin a home.
That might mean writing it down.
Putting it in a note on my phone.
Adding it to the calendar.
Or deciding, “I’m not doing this now. I’ll come back to it at 7.40pm when the kids are in bed.”
The point is to close the loop.
The admin does not get to buzz around your head all day just because it arrived there.
It needs somewhere to go.
And finally, be kinder to yourself than your brain will naturally be
When you’re overwhelmed, your brain will focus on what you dropped.
The PE kit.
The snack.
The book bag.
The form.
The thing you forgot, missed, misunderstood or left on the kitchen side.
So you have to deliberately remind yourself of what you did hold.
You packed the lunches.
You got them to school.
You remembered the wellies.
You replied to the message.
You got through work.
You comforted the child who needed you.
You found the missing shoe.
You kept everyone moving.
You are doing so much more than your brain gives you credit for.
So when something drops, pause before turning it into evidence.
Ask yourself:
“Was that a glass ball, or was it plastic?”
Because when you’re carrying this much, something will drop.
That is not failure.
That is capacity.
And you are allowed to stop measuring yourself by the one thing you forgot when there were fifty things you remembered.
You do not need to hold everything perfectly
School admin is not really just school admin.
It is often the final thing that tips you over when you were already carrying too much.
And when that happens, you do not need to be harder on yourself.
You need more honesty, more support, and more permission to make life simpler where you can.
Recognise the load.
Let some plastic balls drop.
Simplify what you can.
Give the admin somewhere to live.
And remind yourself, properly, that you are doing a bloody good job.
Even with beige dinners.
Especially with beige dinners.
Balanced Mum Academy® opens soon for the September cohort.
This is exactly the kind of work we do inside BMA: coming back to what actually matters, learning what is yours to hold, and building the confidence to choose from that place when work, motherhood, guilt and real life all start shouting at once.