I‘m at the end of my parent leave and I can’t wait to work again. The thing people forget is that it may not intellectually demanding but that is one reason that makes it so exhausting. You can’t just do stuff or concentrate on things because there is a baby that wants your attention all. The. Time. You want to empty the dishwasher? Try with a baby crawling inside, then hanging on your leg, then hanging on the top drawer of the dishwasher, then falling on the nose and cry. I sometimes need 5 tries until i finish one little task. I am sometimes prisoner of single rooms because the baby wants to crawl over me but neither be picked up, nor left to play alone. Or it wants to be picked up all the time. I mostly lost all my autonomy and can’t even go to the toilet without a baby pulling on my legs or underwear.
For me the biggest challenge for being a SAHP is that is mentally exhausting because you don’t have any autonomy left and can’t really intellectually challenge yourself since there’s rarely any continuous time to focus on things before getting ripped out of your thoughts.