Our neighbours are out the front loading up their car at 8am on a Saturday. Again. The kids have little backpacks on. There’s a cooler bag. Someone is wearing a hat that suggests a bushwalk. It’s organised. It’s intentional. They are going somewhere and they are prepared for it.

Meanwhile I’m standing at the window in my pyjamas holding a coffee, watching them like some kind of suburban wildlife documentary. My 5-year-old is behind me eating dry cereal off the couch. My 3-year-old is, I think, in the backyard? I should probably check on that actually.

They’re lovely people, the neighbours. That’s the annoying part. It would be easier if they were smug about it, but they’re not. They’re just… doing things. Regularly. With apparent ease. Farmers markets. The zoo. That place with the strawberry picking. They went kayaking last month. Kayaking. With small children. I can barely get mine into the car without someone having a meltdown about which side they sit on.

I know comparison is a trap. I know that. I’ve read enough about it to know that what I’m seeing is a curated slice of someone else’s life and not the full picture. They probably have hard mornings too. They probably fight about screen time. They probably had a terrible drive to the kayaking place and one of the kids cried the whole way.

But knowing that and feeling it are two completely different things.

Because the feeling is this low, steady hum of “why can’t I do that?” It’s not dramatic. It doesn’t knock me over. It just sits there, underneath everything, on Saturday mornings when I’m looking at the weekend stretching out ahead of me with no plan and no energy to make one.

Planning is the bit that gets me. It’s not that I don’t want to take my kids places. I do. I’d love to be the kayaking family. But the steps between “that sounds nice” and actually being in a kayak are enormous. You have to find a place. Book it. Check the weather. Pack the right stuff. Remember sunscreen. Bring snacks. Get everyone dressed and out the door at a specific time. And every single one of those steps requires the kind of executive function that my brain treats as optional.

So most weekends, we end up at the park down the road. The same park. The one with the broken swing and the bin that’s always overflowing. And you know what, my kids love it. They do. They run around and find sticks and come back filthy and happy. But there’s still a part of me that thinks I should be doing more. That other parents are giving their kids richer experiences. That I’m falling short in some fundamental way because I can’t organise a Saturday morning outing without it feeling like planning a military operation.

My partner is better at this than I am. She’ll sometimes take over the planning and just tell me “we’re going to the aquarium at 10, you need to be ready.” And I love her for it. But I also feel a bit pathetic about it. Like I’m being managed rather than contributing equally. She doesn’t see it that way (I don’t think), but I do, sometimes.

The thing I’m slowly trying to learn is that the comparison isn’t useful and it’s also not accurate. I don’t actually know what goes on in my neighbours’ house on a Friday night when they’re prepping for that Saturday morning. Maybe one of them is the planner and the other one just shows up. Maybe they meal-prep their snack bags on Thursday. Maybe it’s easy for them because their brains work differently to mine. That’s okay. Their Saturday doesn’t say anything about my Saturday.

And last weekend, for what it’s worth, we did go somewhere. The beach. It was mostly spontaneous, which is the only way it works for me. My partner said “beach?” and I said “yeah alright” and we were out the door in twenty minutes with approximately 60% of what we needed. No towels for the adults. Forgot the bucket and spade. I sat on the sand in my jeans because I didn’t bring shorts.

It was a really good day, actually.

The neighbours probably went somewhere better, but I wasn’t checking.

(Okay, I checked a little bit. Instagram. They went to a winery with a kids’ play area. Of course they did.)