And I can’t describe the disappointment I feel.

For one: how are we lowering the raising of our own children to remunerated work?

For two: how insulting it is to the partnership itself. A husband and a wife, committing to one another for life, through bad and good, one of the most meaningful commitments in a person’s life, would be reduced to an employer/employee dynamic. I am not sure I would be called a marriage, but I might be wrong, maybe I am just opinionated and close-minded.

For three: how exactly does a paycheck make a woman raise her children better?

I see the other side of it, I truly do. I know it all seems black and white from the few words I wrote so far, but let me acknowledge this first.

Women who decide to stay at home with no paid work do lose something. And that thing has its weight and dire consequences in some cases. This is not an argument, it is a fact. Even if she decides to go back to work after a certain number of years, she still has to justify the gap in her resume and has to probably start at an entry level. Thanks to complicated workforce systems built without taking mothers into account.

So yes, I will be the first to say that the loss is real, and it is even more complicated when a separation becomes a possibility, and people do get divorced. And many women decide to stay because they just can’t make it work financially. Feeling stuck because they renounced a career that could’ve given them that choice to either stay or leave.

But is the solution being paid by the husband?

The answer is: No.

I’d rather point out to the importance of sitting down with your partner and making a plan for the most heartbreaking event you may encounter. What every big decision costs each one of you, and offer to lighten that cost. If one of those decisions is to stay home and raise the children, then there is no shame in articulating the fear of being abandoned financially one day in the future if things go wrong. We want the mother to feel safe, taken care of, and looked after, regardless of how things are between her and her partner.

The impact of her peace of mind will show on all of the family members.

We unfortunately live in this culture where money is at the center, it is the ultimate currency, and we put every aspect of our lives on a scale, opposed to it to measure it, give it a value. And as cliché as this sounds, some things cannot possibly be measured by money, because they simply existed before money did.

And I can speak of the loss because I’m one of these women. I turned my back on compensated work and chose to stay home with my kids.

Did I lose something financially? Yes. But what I got in return is something money can’t buy.

And yes, it comes with a price. Every choice does.

When you decide to leave the workforce to raise your kids, you’re also deciding to let go of a chunk of money. And to do that, you have to make a judgment: raising my children is worth more to me than what I’d earn. Which means yes, we’re in a lower financial place. No second car. No bigger house. No exotic trip once a year.

But how does that compare to your kids having their mother’s full attention?

One can almost qualify this as a purchase. A give-and-take kind of situation.

I bought years with my children I couldn’t have bought any other way, and I paid for them with money I chose not to earn. It’s a transaction I would make again.

And yet we keep stressing the sacrifice stay-at-home mothers make when they choose that same transaction. As if they lost something with nothing on the other side of it.

What is it they lost, exactly? Money, and hours in an office?

On the other side, we rarely name what women who return to work sacrifice. I’m not sure I’ve ever come across the concept. Even though she had her own sacrifices to make, they look different, but I promise you, they exist. She just can’t talk about it loudly, because she’d be blamed for it. She chose to go back, didn’t she? So what’s she complaining about?

So, she just let it all brew inside of her. Because what she lost can’t be measured in money, and if you tried, the number would come back wrong. You will get a false positive. A salary that would read like a gain.

Both women gave something up. They both sacrificed an essential thing to their lives. We only acknowledge one of them.

And we do that because we can put a number on what a stay-at-home mother loses: the salary, the paycheck, the title. Which is harder to do with working mothers, you can’t put a number on the hours she will not be spending with her children, the milestones she will miss, how the stress of a job will impact her and her interactions with her children, how little energy she will have left in the evenings for them.

And it is all real, it is the daily struggles of working mothers, a loss rarely named and thus rarely given a chance to grieve and possibly do something about it.

So here I am, wondering what went wrong… How did we get from a mother’s oldest instinct, to protect and raise her own children, to a version of her who has to be paid to do it? How did we get to this point? How is this even an option?

Let’s take a moment and turn our attention to the other part of this equation. The employer, the husband, the partner.

If he has to pay her, to care for their children, what would that mean to him? How does he see his spouse? Their partnership? Does he start giving her orders and tasks for her to do? Quarterly goals? Does she execute without objecting?

Once you start digging, it all starts to sound a lot less like a marriage. And it is unfair for that working partner, because most men who go to work every morning or every night or for weeks on end aren’t there for the love of it. They are out there to put bread on the table, to provide for their families, to ensure the children have the best possible lives, and that includes a parent present in their daily lives and another one out there making that possible

Money is real. I’m not pretending otherwise, but over time we slid from money matters to money is the only thing that counts. And once that happened, we started to completely ignore everything that doesn’t have a monetary value. Raising our children becomes an unpaid job. A childhood becomes the ultimate sacrifice a woman can make. A stay-at-home mother is considered an inactive member of society.

Money shouldn’t be the currency of our lives. It’s a tool. We’ve made it the measure.

We built a world where value has to arrive with a number attached, so we can price what one gave up and not what one got, and we can’t even see what the other one lost.

And then we wonder why fewer and fewer people want to have kids at all.

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I thought this was going to be a different article.

I thought this week I’d finally share a link. Show you the thing I’ve been building. That was the plan. It’s actually why I skipped last week, I told myself I just needed one more week to be ready.

Boy oh boy, was I wrong.

I am not ready. Not even close.

Here’s what I believed: once I cracked the coding, once I had AI to write it for me, that was it. I’d done the hard part. The rest would be easy.

It turns out there is so much more to a product than the code.

Let me tell you where I actually am.

In the last article (You can find it here in case you missed it), I told you I’d started making little tools with AI, for homeschooling, for managing the house, for keeping my kids busy. And then I realized I could use it for something bigger. Not just for me. Something other parents might need too. A way to get a little time back for themselves.

And here’s the thing: I did it. I actually made it work.

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I have a tool right now that makes genuinely good printables. I’ve tested it on my kids, on my friends’ kids, all kinds of sheets. And what comes out the other end isn’t just a random coloring page from a cluttered website. It’s more than that, and it’s good. I’m proud of it.

So that’s the part I thought was the whole mountain. And I climbed it.

But then.

Getting a user from opening a website to holding that good printable, while explaining, in a glance, what this even is and what they’ll get from it… That turned out to be a whole other story. A whole other set of skills. Ones I don’t have. Ones I didn’t even know I needed.

I thought: I have an idea, I’ll make it. Done.

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What’s taking the time now is everything around the thing. It’s called user experience. And the simplest way I can explain it: you know that exact frustration I feel hunting for printables, the cluttered pages, the hundred clicks, the ads? I have to make sure my users never feel that. The product has to be clear. It has to be linear. A tired person should get it in seconds.

Or more broadly, when you stumble into a website not understanding what’s what, where to click, what it is offering exactly. That’s literally what I am trying to avoid.

That’s a skill, an actual job. There are people who do only this and get paid for it. It is their trade.

And here I am, trying to build it with none of their training. Learning it one confusing screen at a time.

So that’s where I’m stuck. Iteration after iteration. A version feels right one night and wrong the next morning.

And yet.

Here’s the part I didn’t expect: I’m enjoying it. Genuinely.

I’m outside my comfort zone by miles. I’m learning, stumbling, falling, getting frustrated, and getting up the next day to try again. And it’s making my life interesting. It’s making my brain work in ways it hasn’t in years.

I catch myself lying awake at night thinking about how to make the website better, instead of what I’m going to feed my picky toddler for lunch.

And I like that. I like it more than I know how to say.

So no, the link isn’t coming this week either. Maybe not next week. I’ve stopped promising myself dates, because I keep getting them wrong.

The product isn’t ready. I don’t know exactly when it will be. And I don’t know what this next week will bring.

But I’m not going anywhere.

For the first time in a long time, I’m building something. And somewhere in the middle of all the stumbling, it started building me back.

I’ll see you in the next one. Same day. Same time.

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I’ve done the work of understanding her, her limits, her flaws, her humanity. I’ve made peace with the fact that she meant well and just couldn’t always deliver on it. Good intentions she didn’t have the tools to carry out.

And here’s the thought that keeps me awake, literally, staring at the ceiling at 2 am:

One day, my kids might feel the exact same way about me.

They might lie awake untangling what I handed them. They might say, “I love my mother, but.”

And I’m left with two choices. Accept that. Or fight it.

If I choose to fight it, and I always have, will I even win?

Is winning even an option? Or is this a losing battle I just haven’t admitted is lost?

Because I do act like her. Sometimes.

There are moments when I freeze in horror, hearing myself repeat the same sentences, in the same tone, in almost the same voice. It’s as if I vanish and she takes over.

The exact words I hated. The exact coldness I promised my kids would never feel. Out of my mouth, in my voice, aimed at little faces that look up at me the way I once looked up at her.

So what then?

Would an apology undo it? If I kneel down, look them in the eye, and say I’m sorry, that wasn’t okay, does the damage rewind? Does the moment un-happen?

Or is it already in them, the way hers is already in me, waiting twenty years to come out in their voice, at their own children?

And a promise, would that save me? If I promise myself, tonight, that she’ll never take over again, does that guarantee she stays gone? Or will she come back the next time I’m tired enough, stretched thin enough, empty enough to disappear?

I don’t know.

That’s the part that keeps me awake. Not the fear that I’ll fail once. Every mother fails once. We're human after all, cliché as that is.

The fear that I can’t promise I won’t do it again.

But maybe I’ve had it wrong all along.

Maybe I’m asking the wrong questions. Maybe I’m in the wrong fight entirely.

Am I chasing perfection? And how could I possibly believe I’d reach it? Why do I keep ignoring my own humanity?

Because a childhood with no marks is an impossible thing. It’s like a whole life with no struggle, no conflict, no hardship. And I have yet to meet a single person who’s had that life.

I never will. Because if I did, I’d probably be meeting an alien.

But I can do what my mother couldn’t.

I can chase the tools she lacked. I can do the introspection. I can name my flaws out loud, to my own children. I can go back, after I slip, and repair what she never knew how to repair.

I can do better. Not perfectly. Just better.

And there's no avoiding it. In some moments, I will become her. Some tired, stretched-thin evening, she’ll surface, and I’ll hurt them. That part might be unavoidable.

But the hurt isn’t the end of the story. There’s an antidote, and it’s almost embarrassingly simple.

You go back. You kneel down. You say, I’m sorry. That wasn’t okay, and it wasn’t your fault.

You un-hurt them.

And I know the objection, because I was raised on it. That a parent shouldn’t show weakness. That if you admit you were wrong, you hand your child a weapon, they’ll lose respect, push every boundary, walk all over you.

It’s one of the biggest lies we’ve been told about raising kids.

An apology doesn’t cost you your authority. It’s where your authority comes from. A child who gets apologized to learns that they matter, that fairness is real, that love doesn’t require pretending. They start to see you as human, to see themselves in you, and through that, they can relate to you. They don’t respect you less. They trust you more. And trust is the only authority that ever actually holds.

The parent who never admits fault isn’t strong. They’re just scared.

And that’s exactly how her voice starts to fade in me.

By catching it. Naming it. Going back and repairing after it slips out. Every time I do, she loses a little ground. The voice doesn’t get fed. It doesn’t get to run wild and untamed. It gets caught, held, checked.

That’s how you get rid of it. Not all at once. But in a thousand small repairs.

Now imagine yourself, now. A grown adult.

Imagine your mother came to you and apologized. For the short temper. The coldness. The moments that left a mark. An apology you didn't have to ask for. That you didn't have to explain, or justify, or drag out of her. One she came to on her own, and offered freely.

Imagine she gave you more context. Imagine she looked at you and acknowledged the hurt, named it, owned it.

What would that do to you? Even now. Even this late.

And now imagine she’d done it back then. When you were small. When you needed it most. When you were trying to make sense of the world around you, relying on your parents as your main guide. When a single I’m sorry, that wasn’t you, that was me could have changed the story you told yourself for the next thirty years.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

Not a mother who never slips. A mother who comes back.

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If any of this landed, I'd love to hear your story. The comments are yours."

I built a website.

Which would be a perfectly normal sentence, except for one thing: I have no idea how to code.

None. Zero. I didn’t study computer science. I’ve never written a line of anything. My background is nowhere near tech, and for years, “building a website” sat in the same mental category as “performing surgery.” Something other people did. People with training. People who were not me.

Let me tell you what I actually know how to do.

I have two master’s degrees. Both in marketing and communications. After that, I worked at an advertising agency for about three years. YouTube ads, audience reach, optimization, market research. You get the drill. I won’t bore you with the details.

Then I got pregnant.

And I was one of those women who genuinely believed a baby would just be an addition to my current life. Nothing would really change. I’d keep everything as it was, just with a baby on top. All roses.

That’s why leaving my job was never part of the plan. Not once did I imagine I’d become a stay-at-home mom. It never crossed my mind.

Anyway. I had three months of maternity leave.

After that, I worked from home with my baby beside me. It was one of the hardest stretches of my life. Navigating postpartum while working. Nobody tells you what that actually costs.

Eventually I burned out. Completely. And right at that point, work needed me to travel abroad for a week.

I said no. I handed in my resignation.

I told myself I’d figure it out later. But right then, all I wanted was to snuggle my baby, breastfeed him, and take care of my house and my family. That was the whole plan.

So here’s my actual skill set. I know how to market a product. I know how to do market research. I know how to find an audience and reach them. Facebook ads, Google ads, online channels. Except even that is rusty now. And honestly, half of it doesn’t apply. I worked with big brands. Big budgets. Teams. Money to burn on testing. None of which I have.

And that’s it. That’s the toolbox.

I am not a technical person. Not even a little.

And I didn’t have the money to hire a web developer to build me a website, or an app, or whatever idea came into my head.

And ideas, I never lacked.

I homeschool my kids, so naturally I do a lot of reading, a lot of research, a lot of looking into what other people are doing.

And sometime this past year, I started noticing something.

Homeschooling mothers. Regular ones, like me. They were building small things to make their homeschooling lives easier. A little curriculum app. A progress tracker. A portfolio tool. Basically whatever they needed and couldn’t find anywhere, or didn’t want to pay a fortune for, they’d just make it themselves.

They were using AI to do it.

So I started doing the same. I got more organized. I made myself little custom tools that fit exactly how we work.

And look, I know how AI is perceived, especially by people who aren’t tech savvy. I know the eye-roll. But I’ll be honest with you: it made my life easier. It saved me an enormous amount of time, especially on the repetitive stuff.

While all this was happening, I was still trying to carve out pockets of time for myself, and the organization helped. It gave me some of my day back. But the toddler needed more. She always needed more.

So I started using printables to keep her busy. And they worked, she loved them. But finding the right one, the thing she’d actually engage with, and keeping it fresh and varied so she didn’t get bored? That was no easy task.

It was a real pain in the ass.

And then it dawned on me.

Can I make that?

I already knew exactly what it needed to do. I’d been the frustrated user a hundred times over.

And that’s when it landed.

The wall I’d been staring at for years wasn’t there anymore. It hadn’t moved just for me. It moved for everyone. The thing that always separated people with ideas from people who could build them, the code, had quietly stopped being the barrier.

I had the idea. I had the marketing, rusty as it is. I had the hour.

I just didn’t have an excuse anymore.

I’ll see you in the next one. Same day. Same time.

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Tell me what you think. I read every comment.

It is hard to care for small people and have anything left for yourself.

I’ll admit it first. There is no space between well-fed children, bedtime stories, picking the right toys, creating a nice environment, keeping your shit together while making sure your tone stays gentle, and still showing up for yourself.

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And that’s when everything goes according to plan. Which it rarely does.

Some days you cook the thing nobody eats. You are behind on laundry. The toddler is impossible two days in a row. The sleep training goes out the window.

And on those days, the questioning starts. What could I have done better? Why did I lose control? Why am I not more organized? Why does everyone else seem to manage?

The next day, you wake up and try your best. You just skip brushing your hair. The day after, you stay in your pajamas all day. Then you cancel the hair appointment that you already postponed 3 times. And it keeps going like that, day after day, without you ever really deciding to. You give up the small things that were supposed to be yours.

And as harsh as this might sound, letting those things slip away is the easy choice.

I know. Nobody would ever pick “give up on yourself” from a list. Nobody wakes up and says, today I stop mattering. But in those circumstances, drowning, behind, questioning everything, letting the small things slip is the path of least resistance. It’s one less thing to do. One less person to take care of, to negotiate with.

Because here’s how the math works when you’re overwhelmed: something has to give. And you look at the list. The kids can’t give. The meals can’t give. The laundry will scream eventually. Everything on that list fights back when you drop it.

Except you.

You’re the only thing on the list that goes quietly. No tantrum, no consequence, no mess on the floor. Drop yourself, and the day actually runs smoother. That’s the brutal truth of it. Giving up on yourself isn’t weakness. In the moment, it’s the most rational move available.

But make no mistake, it is still a choice. A small, quiet, reasonable-looking choice that you make the next day again, and the day after that.

And all those little choices, stacked on top of each other, slowly turn into the big one.

Giving up on yourself.

And no, it’s not too late. And yes, you can do something about it.

Only you, though. No one is coming to save you but yourself.

And it can change the same way it started.

One small choice at a time.

You can make it happen. You are in control here, more than it feels like. You can decide to brush your hair the same way you decide to feed your kids. Same verb. Same you.

We are tormented when we raise our voice at our kids, or snap at them. We feel guilty over the smallest failures. Yet we never extend any of that care to ourselves.

If you cared for yourself even half as much as you care for your children, you’d reap the benefits. And not just you. Your family would too.

So start small. Stupidly small.

Brush the hair tomorrow. Put on the real clothes the next week. Read two pages from your favorite book. Take the ten minutes. Pick one small thing that’s yours and defend it the way you defend their nap schedule.

And what’s beautiful about the small things is that they grow.

The ten minutes become an hour. The two pages become a book, then a shelf, then an idea of your own. The small thing you defended becomes the space where you finally allow yourself to dream again. And the dreams, if you let them, will evolve with you. They won't look like the ones you had before, they'll fit the woman you've become. But they'll be yours.

Because you deserve that, and your children deserve to see their mother not give up on herself.

One small choice at a time. That’s how it slipped away.

One small choice at a time. That’s how it comes back.

Dear tired mother, don’t give up on yourself.

With you,
Safa.

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I’ve decided to do something with it.

Because I want to prove the world wrong. I want to prove everyone who thought that if you choose to be a stay-at-home mother, then you’re done. Your intellect is gone. Your ambition, down the drain. And you’re incapable of doing much anyway.

I’m in a battle, guys. And I plan to win. Against the societal norms. Against every person who frowned at me when I told them I wouldn’t be working anymore, that I’d be raising my kids instead.

Because here’s the thing: I’m raising my kids to the best possible standards, and I’m doing everything I can to keep the ambitious side of me alive.

Both. At the same time. That’s the whole point.

I’ve Wanted This for a Long Time

Having my own business has always been a dream. Even before kids.

And I tried. I tried a lot of things. A candle business. A tutoring business. A baking business. One by one, I gave them up. Not because the ideas were bad, but because I couldn’t fully commit. I couldn’t deliver the way each of them needed me to.

The candle business needed manufacturing. Hours of making, packaging, marketing, chasing new clients, keeping old ones happy, creating social media content, seasonal candles... The tutoring business became impossible after my second baby, there’s just no finding the time to teach other people’s kids when you’re home teaching one and breastfeeding the other. So, one after another, I let them go.

For the last three years, I haven’t done anything professionally. But the dream never left. It just sat there, quietly, at the back of my mind.

And I knew, whenever I came back to it, that the next thing had to be different. It couldn’t be another business that demanded more than I could give. It had to be something that could stay with me. Something that could evolve as my life evolved. Something that actually fit, my schedule, my lifestyle, the fact that I’m home, homeschooling, the main teacher in my kids’ lives.

Here’s the thing about all those failed attempts, though. I don’t regret a single one. They taught me what to look for. They taught me what I can and can’t do right now. They led me, directly, to this.

Because they made one thing very clear: the next thing couldn’t be physical.

I love working with my hands. I love making things. But I had to come to terms with the fact that I cannot commit to manufacturing and shipping physical products right now. It’s currently not possible.

So it had to be digital.

And that terrified me.

Every time I saw an online business, a digital product, something that lived on a screen and scaled without a warehouse, I felt this wave of intimidation. I could never do that. I’m not qualified. I’m not technical. I don’t have the background.

The dream was there. The want was there. But so was the belief that I was underqualified to make something people would actually want, let alone pay for, let alone something that could last.

How It Actually Started

For three years, I chose to do nothing. On purpose.

It was a decision I needed to make, for my sake and my family’s. Because raising your kids while your mind is constantly trying to figure out how to start a side hustle is no joke. It’s torture. So instead, I decided to take any free time I got to actually rest. To read. To just be. Rather than spending it plotting and planning for the next endeavor.

I didn’t want to rush it. I’d wait until something came to me. Organically. When the time was right.

And about a year ago, something did. Sort of.

It was this Substack, and I started it with absolutely no vision.

I’d just found out there was a platform where you write, and people who find your words interesting subscribe to you. It sounded great. Perfect for me. Because I love writing, and I love connecting with people. Plus, I wouldn’t have to do any extra work to find readers.

The perfect combination for my circumstances.

And, lo and behold, it turned out to be far more fun than I expected. I love it here. I love writing. I love reading what everyone else is writing. It has exceeded every expectation I had for it.

But underneath the writing, the old dream was still there. The business idea, still quietly waiting.
And then it found me, in the most ordinary place possible. My kitchen table. During a homeschool morning.

Here’s what my mornings look like. I sit down with my computer. My son on my right, my daughter on my left. He and I work through math, language arts, whatever the day holds. And to keep my little one busy beside us, I’d have a stack of activities ready for her.

She LOVED them. Especially when I printed things out just for her. She’d disappear into them completely.

And that was the moment two things clicked at once.

The first: when she’s absorbed in a printed activity, doing it all by herself, I get time back. Time to teach my son properly. Time to think. Time that’s mine.

The second: getting those printables was a nightmare. Every single time, I’d have to dig through cluttered, overstacked websites. Scroll past a thousand things. Close ad after ad after ad. Hunt for the one thing she’d actually like. It took more time to find the activity than the activity ever gave me back.

And right there, at my kitchen table, closing ad tabs with a kid on each side, the idea was finally born.

What if I made this myself?

A tool. A website. Something that gives parents their quiet time back. You enter what your kid likes, and it makes a printable, instantly! You print it, hand it over, and your child is happily busy for the next fifteen, thirty, forty-five minutes. Sometimes a whole hour.

That's where the name of this series comes from. The Spare Hour. An hour I fought for and an hour I want to help other parents find too.

The Spare Hour

I choose to lay it all out through this series. The obstacles, the wins, the losses, the process, the building, the budget, the money, EVERYTHING. In full transparency.

I’m not special. I’m not savvy. I’m just a mom who wants more, and who managed to find an hour to chase it.

I have no idea how this ends. That’s the honest truth. It might work. It might not. But I’m done letting fear and “I’m not qualified” keep me small. I’d rather try in the open than wonder in private.

So this is me. Going for it. Out loud. Where you can see.

Come along. Watch me succeed or fail.

I’ll see you in the next one. Same day. Same time.

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Questions? Doubts? Advice? The comments are open, and so am I.

And yet, I have a title that says I don’t want to be “just” a mom.

I know. Hear me out.

I won’t lie to you, embracing motherhood fully has been hard. I had to unlearn things I didn’t even realize existed in the first place. I had to demolish, reconstruct, rewire, reject, and embrace. It rearranged me from the inside out.

But don’t get me wrong. I love being a mother. At this point, it’s the part of my identity I’m proudest of.

And I hate it when people refer to stay-at-home moms as “just” moms. It makes my blood boil. As if we’re only half a person. As if we should shrink ourselves because what? Your ass isn’t at a desk from 9 to 5? That’s it? That’s all you are? As if you can’t be a person outside of that.

This isn’t me taking it back. I love this life. I chose it. I’d choose it again tomorrow.

The “just” I’m using here isn’t to diminish myself. Quite the opposite. It’s to reclaim the other parts I didn’t tend to for years. The woman in me who paused her own dreams because she believed she couldn’t have her kids and chase those dreams at the same time. The human in me who simply wants more from life.

And it has nothing to do with whether motherhood is enough.

It is enough.

And I still want more.

Not a different life. Only more things that are mine.

Becoming a mother for the first time, especially with no help, shakes and shapes the shit out of you.

Nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, can prepare you for that mutation. You can read every book, watch every video, devour every article, and none of it gets you even a little bit close to what the experience actually is.

You drown so much that the idea of it being temporary slips your mind entirely. You start letting go of things, bit by bit, to keep space for your children. You drop the hobby. The hair day. The girls’ night. The lipstick. One by one, quietly, until there’s nothing left but survival.

That’s the first two years, at least.

And you fight it. Until you reach a point where you believe the part of you that had dreams and ambitions is gone. You enter a process of anger, grief, then hopefully acceptance. But the feeling, the wanting to do or be more for your own sake, is always there. We find ways to bury it. To sedate it. And we are so good at that!

I told myself so many stories.

• I’d genuinely rather be a stay-at-home mother for my entire life than childless forever. (True, but not the point.)

• I got a taste of corporate work, and I didn’t like it, so this is better.

• My kids are my dream now. Why would I need another one?

• Wanting more would mean I’m not grateful for what I have.

So many versions, all designed to cope with the loss of my own ambition. I even reached a point where I’d convinced myself I was never that ambitious to begin with. Because, look, look at all those mothers on Instagram with more kids than me, who somehow manage to put on the lipstick, look great, and run a small business on the side.

What is wrong with me?

It turns out: nothing.

Nothing is wrong with me. I have different circumstances. I am a different person. Half of what's on Instagram is fake, and the other half is misrepresented. And the whole time, I was still doing small things for myself, they just looked different. They fit my main role. The one that matters most. Being a mother.

(If you want to see what that 'different' actually looked like for me, I wrote about it here.)

I’m here to tell you, as the mother who felt exactly that way for a long time, who initially thought kids would just be an addition to the current me with no monumental change, that part of you is not gone.

It’s dormant.

And even while it sleeps, it’s gathering information. It’s evolving, quietly, in the background. It’s reshaping your old dreams into ones that can fit around the biggest dream of all, the one you’re already living: having your kids.

And that’s exactly what happened to me.

My kids are older now. More independent. The drowning years are behind me, and somewhere in the last little while, the water receded enough that I found myself with something I hadn’t had in a decade: an hour. A real one. Mine.

Not the depleted, zombie hour after they finally fall asleep. An actual hour, in the morning, sometimes two. And I want to be clear: I worked for that. I made it happen. I built systems, slowly, ones that took time to fully integrate into our household, that give my kids things to do so I can do things of my own.

Fuel My Hour With Coffee

You don't understand what a full, planned hour means to a mother until you've gone years without one. An hour where she isn't catching up on chores or sleep. Just her hour. Where she can do whatever the fuck she wants. Pour it into a book. A coffee. A giant donut. A workout. Knitting. Whatever it is. Knowing that every day, from 11 to 12, that hour is mine, turned my life from survival into something closer to thriving.

At first I did what I’d been starving to do. I rested. I read. I sat and did absolutely nothing while my body and mind finally caught their breath.

But once I was rested, once the tank wasn’t running on empty, something else showed up. That dormant part of me stretched, woke up, and started whispering again.

Except the dreams weren’t the same. Because I’m not the same. What I want for myself now is different from what the old me wanted. I want something that fits this life. My life. With my kids and my family at the center, not pushed to the edges.

I didn’t want to climb back onto the ladder I’d left. I wanted to fill that hour building something of my own. Something small enough to fit inside it, but mine enough to make me feel like me again.

I want to build a side business in my spare time.

And I’m going for it.

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The look from the table next to you. The look from the waiter. The look from the older woman who would never have done such a thing back in her day. The look from the parents who left their kids with a babysitter that night.

You might shrug. You might pretend not to care.

But deep down, that look bothers you.

Because if you’re handing your child a screen, well, you must be a lazy parent. A bad parent. The kind of parent who can’t be bothered to entertain their own child, or just stay home if you are giving them screens.

And god forbid you actually wanted to enjoy that meal. You know, the meal you didn’t have to cook. The meal where you don’t have to wash the dishes afterward. The meal where you might, for once, have an uninterrupted conversation with your partner.

How dare you?

Well, let me tell you something.

I am that parent!

I’m the one giving her kids an iPad at the restaurant so I can enjoy a glass of wine, a proper meal, and a proper conversation with no interruption.

Not all of us have the luxury of a babysitter on call. Not all of us have someone to leave the kids with. And honestly? Even if we did, finding a good babysitter is its own full-time job. Half the time, it’s easier to just not go out at all.

But here’s the thing, I don’t want to just not go out.

In fact, I want to go out. I want to dress nicely. I want to be around people. I want to remember what it feels like to exist outside my house, outside my role, outside the endless cycle of meals and meltdowns.

I want to enjoy a meal I didn’t cook. I want to drink wine that doesn’t get interrupted. I want to remember what it feels like to be a person, not just a mother. And I am making it happen. In fact, I refuse to let go of that.

So I bring the iPad.

And before you assume the worst, let me tell you what’s on that iPad.

It’s not Cocomelon. It’s not flashing colors and dopamine hits and content designed to fry their attention span. It’s a drawing app. An educational game. Something quiet, something thoughtful, something curated.

Because screen time doesn’t have to mean what people assume it means. Not all screens are created equal. There’s a huge difference between a kid zoning out to fast-paced YouTube and a kid coloring on an iPad for 45 minutes while their parents have a meal.

But the look doesn’t know that.

The look assumes the worst. The look assumes I’m lazy, that I’m checked out, that I don’t care.

And even with all my strategy, all my intention, all my carefully curated apps, I still feel the judgment. I still have to do the mental work to ignore it.

Because the screen time taboo doesn’t care about nuance.

The Part Nobody Wants to Say

So here’s the part nobody wants to say out loud.

Screens didn’t take over because parents got lazy. Screens took over because the village disappeared, and something had to fill the gap.

Think about it. A generation ago, when a couple wanted to spend time together, they left the kids with grandparents. When the sisters wanted to go out, the kids stayed with their cousins. When women wanted a moment to breathe, there was always an aunt, a neighbor, a friend down the street.

The kids were never glued to a screen because they were always with someone.

Now? That’s gone.

Your mother lives in another state. Your sister has her own chaos. Your in-laws are unavailable, unhelpful, or absent. There’s no aunt across the street. There’s no village.

But you still need a break.

And It’s Not Just the Adults

Here’s the other part of the village that’s gone, the kids.

A generation ago, your kid would walk out the front door and find other kids to play with. There were always kids on the street, in the yards, in the parks. They entertained each other. They built worlds together. They came home dirty and exhausted and didn’t need a screen because they had something better, each other.

That’s gone too.

Everyone lives in their own bubble now. Everyone is scared of everyone. The world feels unsafe in ways it didn’t used to, real or perceived, doesn’t matter, the fear is the same.

So we keep our kids inside. We don’t let them roam. We don’t send them down the street. We don’t let them disappear for hours into the neighborhood the way we did as kids.

And when they’re stuck inside, with no siblings their age, no cousins next door, no kids on the block, what do we do?

We hand them a screen.

Because the alternative is one parent, one kid, and seven hours to fill. Alone.

What the Screen Actually Is

Let me say something I genuinely believe.

Every time a parent hands their kid a screen, there is exhaustion underneath it.

Maybe it’s “I’m too overwhelmed right now to deal with you” exhaustion.
Maybe it’s “I need 15 minutes to lie down and watch my own thing” exhaustion.
Maybe it’s “I’ve been touched, questioned, and needed for 12 hours straight” exhaustion.

We can debate the threshold. We can argue about whether a specific parent could have done differently in a specific moment. Sure. That’s up for debate.

But if you zoom out far enough, the screen isn’t a parenting failure. It’s a survival tool. A signal flare. A white flag that says: I’m out of resources. I need a moment.

And in a world without a village, what other option is there?

The Lie We Tell Each Other

We pretend screens are a problem of bad parenting.

They’re not.

They’re a symptom of a missing system.

The village provided what screens now provide: attention, entertainment, and a break for the parent. The difference is that the village was made of humans. People who loved the kid. People who taught them things. People who built relationships.

The screen does the entertainment part. But not the rest.

That’s the real problem. Not that screens exist. Not that parents use them. But that we’ve replaced an entire community with a piece of glass, and we’re acting surprised that something feels off.

The Confession I Owe Other Parents

Here’s where I have to be honest with myself.

For a long time, I would see another parent handing their kid a screen and think, “Oh my god, at the grocery store? The kid is in the cart, and he’s already on the phone? At this hour?”

I’d say it to my husband. I’d think it walking past them. I’d quietly congratulate myself for not being that parent in that moment.

And then I realized something.

I was doing the exact thing I was complaining about.

The look I felt at the restaurant? I was giving it to other parents at the grocery store. The judgment I resented? I was handing it out for free, every time I saw a screen in a context I personally wouldn’t have chosen.

If I’m being honest with myself, the only reason I was doing it was to make myself feel better. To convince myself, I was making “better” choices. To put my screen-time strategy on a pedestal so I could feel okay about my own use.

But at the end of the day, it was still the same behavior. Judging without knowing.

I had no idea what that parent was going through. I didn’t know how long they’d been awake. I didn’t know what kind of week they’d had. I didn’t know if that kid had been melting down for an hour before the cart. I didn’t know anything.

I was just being judgy. Same as the people who’d judged me. Different setting, same energy.

What I Do Now

Now, when I see a parent hand their kid a screen, in the cart, in the waiting room, at the park bench, anywhere, I try to do the opposite.

I smile at them.

A small smile. A knowing one. The kind that says, “I see you. I get it. Don’t worry about me.”

Because they’ve already got enough on their plate. They don’t need my judgment on top of it.

Is it ideal? Probably not. Would they do it differently if they had the choice? Probably yes.

But they don’t have the choice in that moment. And neither did I when I needed it.

So instead of adding to the noise, I just smile. Because that parent doesn’t need another set of eyes telling them they’re failing.

They need someone to say, “You’re not.”

The Honest Truth

Here’s the thing.

Even though I have a strategy. Even though my kids only get screens once a week when we go out. Even though what they watch or play is carefully curated, drawing apps, educational games, and nothing fast-paced.

I still would rather not give them the screen.

And I’m probably speaking for most parents when I say that.

We don’t hand our kids iPads because we love them. We hand them iPads because we can’t see another option.

That’s the real taboo. Not the screen itself, but admitting that we’re using it because we’re out of options. Admitting that we’re tired. Admitting that the system is broken.

The Question I Keep Asking Myself

What could I give my kid in a restaurant that isn’t a screen?

What could keep them busy for the length of a meal without robbing their attention span, without filling them with dopamine, without becoming the thing they expect every time?

What could replace the screen in the moments I need them to be occupied so I can be a person?

And what about at home? When do I need 30 minutes to make dinner? When do I need a moment to think? When I just need them to leave me alone, with my exhaustion, with my full plate, with the millions of things demanding my attention?

I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, and I’ve been figuring out some answers that I will write more about.

The Quiet Truth

The screen isn’t the problem.

The missing village is.

But until we rebuild something, anything, that gives parents real breaks without compromising their kids, we’re going to keep reaching for the screen.

And we’re going to keep feeling the judgment when we do.

So here’s what I want to say to every parent who has felt that look in a restaurant:

You’re not lazy. You’re not failing. You’re just trying to survive a system that was never designed for what you’re trying to do.

The screen isn’t the villain. It’s the symptom.

And if I can figure out alternatives that actually work, for me, for my kids, for our family, you can too.

We just have to stop pretending screens are the problem and start asking better questions about what we’re really missing.

Have you felt that look in a restaurant? Are you tired of the screen time taboo? Tell me in the comments.

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It’s as if I insist on shrinking myself every time I do something. As if I’m signaling to everyone around me: don’t worry about me, don’t mind me, I’m not doing much.

“I’m just making dinner.”
“I just wanted to check in.”
“I’m just a stay-at-home mom.”

I’m done with this narrative. Because it’s quite the opposite of the truth. I’m not doing “just” anything. I’m doing too much. I’m doing more than I have ever done in my entire life.

And I’m ready to take up space. In fact, more space than I actually need.

I want to glorify everything I’m doing, because it’s worth it. I pour my heart into it. And I genuinely don’t understand why I chose the opposite direction, why I trained myself to make it all sound so small.

So I owe myself two things: a big apology and a strict new policy.

The word “just” is banned.

And I’m writing a whole ass essay about it to make the point.

(To myself, mostly.)

Why?

I don’t really know, but this is how it feels to me.

You give and give, and you get so used to giving without expecting much in return, that eventually you start apologizing for not giving/being more. As if you owe an acknowledgment of your own perceived shortfall.
Sorry I know I could do or be more, but that’s all I can manage right now.

It stood out to me the most with strangers.

When someone asks me what I do, I’ve answered, more times than I can count: “I’m just a stay-at-home mom.”

It took a few rotations of that sentence before I even noticed the “just” slipping in. And a little longer to realize I say it with a sorry look on my face. Sorry to disappoint you. Sorry, I didn’t pick a more exciting career, the kind that would make this conversation longer, where I could tell you all the thrilling things I get to do, or where you’d light up and say your cousin does the exact same thing, and we’d both go OMG about it.

That’s what the “just” was doing. Apologizing in advance for not being more interesting to a stranger.

The truth is, it was never really about the stranger.

The stranger was just the messenger. The face in front of me in that moment. What I was actually apologizing to was something much bigger, and much harder to see.

I was apologizing to society. To the whole invisible jury I’ve carried in my head my entire life. The one that decided, long before I did, what a successful woman is supposed to look like. A title. A salary. A career that sounds impressive at a dinner party. A life you can summarize in one exciting sentence.

I didn’t pick that. I picked this. I chose to stay home and raise my kids. And somewhere underneath the “just,” there’s a quiet apology for that choice. Sorry I didn’t do what you expected. Sorry I stepped off the path. Sorry my answer isn’t the one you were hoping for.

As if I owe an explanation to a standard I never agreed to in the first place. As if a room full of people I’ll never meet gets to decide whether my life counts.

That’s what the “just” was really doing. Apologizing, on a loop, to a society that handed me a definition of worth I quietly accepted without ever reading the fine print.

But the apology is only half of it. The 'just' does something else, too. It sends a signal.

Don’t mind me. I’m here in my little corner. I’m not a burden. You don’t have to worry about me, or carry anything for me, or make any room.

Which would almost be sweet, if it were true. But it isn’t. Because I’m carrying so much. And worse, I’m not just carrying my own load, I’m reaching for yours too. Hand it over. I’ll take it. Pile it on. I can hold more.

That’s the real trick of the “just.” I shrink what I’m carrying so no one feels bad about handing me more.

Time To Take Space

This is obviously not sustainable. Not if your goal is not to lose yourself. Not if you want to keep some version of you that exists outside of what you do for other people. Not if you’d like to make it to the end of the week with anything left in the tank that’s actually yours.
You cannot pour endlessly from a cup you keep insisting is barely full.

So I woke up from the shrinking trance.

And now I’m going the other way.

Fuel My Change With Coffee!

I’m done shrinking. Done apologizing. Done making myself small enough to fit a definition I never agreed to in the first place.

I’m going to take up space. More than I need, actually, to make up for all the years I took up less.

I don’t “just” stay home. I raise humans. I run an entire household. I hold the emotional weather of a whole family on a regular Tuesday. I am not making “just” dinner. I AM MAKING A DINNER.

And the next time someone asks me what I do, I won’t reach for the apology. I’ll tell them I’m a stay-at-home mom. Full stop. No softening. No sorry face. No bracing for their reaction.

Because their reaction was never mine to manage.

I let a faceless jury decide what my life was worth for far too long. I’m taking that power back by banning one motherf***ing word.

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Let me know if you are also thinking about banning the same word or any other word from your vocabulary. I would love to connect!

It’s gone. And it will be gone more as time goes by.

Your mother lives in another state. Your sister has her own kids. Your neighbors don’t know your name. Your friends are drowning in their own chaos.
Yet, we keep waiting. Waiting for someone to show up. Waiting for help that’s never coming.

And that’s a problem.

The Lie We Keep Telling Ourselves

“It takes a village to raise a child.”

We say it like it’s still true. Like the village is just temporarily delayed. Like if we wait long enough, it’ll arrive.
But the village isn’t late.

It’s gone.

My grandmother lived in a small town where her six sisters lived within walking distance. Kids ran between houses. Meals were shared. Nobody parented alone. If she needed a break, ten women would step in without being asked.
That’s not my reality. That’s not your reality either.
We’re the first generation parenting without a village. And nobody handed us a manual for it.

The Shock

Here’s what nobody warns you about:

When you become a mother, you expect it to be hard. You expect the exhaustion. You expect the sleepless nights.

What you don’t expect is how alone you’ll feel doing it.

You think someone will show up. Your mom will come to help. A friend will drop off a meal. A neighbor will offer to watch the baby for an hour.
And sometimes, they do. But mostly, they don’t.
Because everyone else is just as alone, just as overwhelmed, just as drowning in their own version of this impossible job.
The shock of solo parenting hits like a truck. And we keep being surprised by it.

That’s the part we have to stop.

There’s no need to keep ruminating on it. The village is gone, and we are on our own, with no other choice than to figure it out for our own sake, and especially for our kids’ sake.

Now that this is out of the way, let’s talk about what comes next.

The Mindset Shift

You’re not going to get rescued.

Read that again.

No one is coming to take 50% off your plate, not even 20%. No grandmother is moving in. No village is forming. No one is going to suddenly notice how hard you’re working and step in.

Once you accept this, really, truly accept it, something shifts.

You stop waiting.
You stop hoping someone will show up.
You stop being shocked every time you’re left to handle everything alone.

And you start preparing. You start emptying space in your head to actually figure this conundrum out.

That’s where you get to be creative. That’s where you start solving your own problem, and believe me, it is solvable. And you can do it! Just put your phone down and use your brain. It is craving thinking, analyzing, creating, and fixing. You’d be surprised by its power. By your power.

The Downside

Let’s be honest about what this means.
It means you’ll be tired. More tired than you thought possible.
But aren’t we all anyway?

Instead of being tired of doing it all alone with the grief of the lost village, you’ll be tired of the mission to find a substitute for the village. At least in this kind of tired, you’re solving a genuinely serious problem.

Help Me Be Less Tired

It means you’ll do things alone that humans were never meant to do alone, raising children, managing households, holding it all together.
It means you’ll feel invisible. Underappreciated. Stretched too thin.
It means there will be days you wonder how you’re supposed to do this, and there’s no good answer.

This is the real cost of a missing village. And we have to name it. Stop pretending it’s “just motherhood.” It’s motherhood without the support that motherhood was designed for.

It’s harder than it was supposed to be.

The Upside (Yes, There Is One)

Here’s where it gets interesting.
When you stop waiting for the village, you stop being a victim of its absence.
You start asking better questions:

• What can I build instead?

• What systems can I create?

• What tools can I use?

• How can I make my life easier without help?

• What do I actually need to survive, not just survive, but be okay?

The village is gone. But your resourcefulness isn’t.

I’ve watched mothers do incredible things once they stop expecting rescue. They build routines that work. They find tools that save them hours. They create pockets of independence for their kids. They learn to ask for very specific help instead of vague hope.

They stop being shocked by their reality.
They start designing for it.

What To Do Instead

Here’s what I’ve learned (the hard way):

1. Stop expecting help that isn’t coming.
Be prepared to do it alone. Plan your days, your meals, your weeks, assuming no one will step in. Anything else is a bonus.

2. Build systems, not hopes.
Hope is exhausting. Systems are repeatable. Find what works: a meal rotation, a quiet time routine, a screen-time strategy, and stick to it.

3. Replace what the village used to provide.
Independent play replaces “the cousins watching the kids.”
Meal kits replace “Grandma brought soup.”
A consistent routine replaces “everyone pitched in.”

4. Find micro-village moments.
A friend you text during the witching hour. A neighbor you wave to. A community online that gets it. The full village is gone, but pieces of it can still exist if you build them yourself.

5. Stop apologizing for needing breaks.
You’re doing the work of 4-6 people. Of course, you need to rest. Of course, you need to step away.

Let breaks look like a step back from structure. Order a meal once a week. Let the house be messy. Plan rest, and with it adjust your expectations.
That’s not selfish, that’s survival.

The Truth Nobody Says

We were sold a version of motherhood that doesn’t exist anymore.

The cultural script still says “it takes a village.” But the village left a long time ago, and no one updated the script.
We’re parenting in a system designed for support that no longer exists. And we’re being told to act like everything is fine.

It’s not fine.

But it can be okay if we stop being surprised by it.
If we stop waiting for rescue and start building the tools, systems, and pockets of peace that make this doable.
If we accept that we’re the village now. For ourselves. For our kids. For each other, in whatever small ways we can.

The village isn’t coming back.

So what are we going to do about it?

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Get a degree. Build a career. Climb the ladder. Make something of yourself.
Oh, and have kids somewhere in there. It’ll all work out.

Here’s what they didn’t tell us:

That having kids while maintaining a high-powered career would require superhuman energy we don’t have and would compromise some of our strongest traits for it.

That “having it all” actually means doing everything poorly and feeling guilty about all of it while burning ourselves to the ground.

That kids aren’t just another box to check on the timeline between promotion and retirement.

We were sold a lie. And some of us are only realizing it now, and in most cases, it’s even too late to rewind.

The Setup

From the time we were teenagers, the message was clear: education first, career second, kids... whenever, a husband…whatever.

Go to college. Get the degree. Secure the job. Prove yourself. Move up. Make your mark.
Kids? They were presented as something you could slot in later. Like a hobby. Or a vacation. Something that would just... fit into the life you’d already built.
No one told us that kids don’t fit into your life.

They become your life.

And everything else, the career, the ambition, the identity you spent 20+ years building, has to be renegotiated. Very painfully.

The Bait and Switch

Here’s the thing: the culture pushed us toward careers and independence. And that wasn’t wrong.

Women should have careers. We should pursue ambition. We should be financially independent.

But somewhere along the way, motherhood got reframed as optional. Secondary. Even trivial.

Kids became the “and also” part of a woman’s résumé.
“She’s a VP at Goldman Sachs... and also a mother of three.”

As if motherhood is the footnote. The side gig. The thing you do in your spare time between board meetings.
We were told we could do both, career and kids, without being told what that actually requires.

Spoiler: It requires everything. And then some.

The Reality No One Warned Us About

When I had my first child, I was shocked by how much space motherhood demanded.
Not just physical space. Mental space. Emotional space. Identity space.
I thought I could keep my pre-kid life intact and just... add a baby to it.

I was wrong.

Because here’s what they don’t tell you:

• Kids don’t care about your meeting schedule.

• Toddlers don’t understand “Mommy’s on deadline.”

• Sleep deprivation doesn’t pause for performance reviews.

• Guilt doesn’t take vacations.

• And, YOU ARE NOT THE SAME. YOU ARE CHANGED AND FOREVER.

The corporate world operates as if mothers don’t exist. Or as if the ones who do exist have figured out some magical system where kids raise themselves while you’re crushing quarterly targets.

And if you can’t keep up? Well, clearly you’re not trying hard enough.

Fuel My Words With Coffee

The Stuck Women

Here’s the part that breaks my heart:

So many women are too far in to turn back.

They’ve built careers. They’ve invested years. They’ve climbed the ladder, earned the title, secured the salary.
And now they have kids.
And they’re drowning.

They’re stressed, on edge, constantly torn between two worlds that both demand 100% of them.

They can’t quit because they need the income. Or because they’ve worked too hard to walk away. Or because stepping back feels like failure.

But staying feels like slow-motion burnout.
They’re trapped in a life the culture promised would work. And it doesn’t.

What We Were Never Told

The culture failed us by framing motherhood as:

1. Something you can “balance”: You can’t balance two full-time jobs. One always suffers.

2. A personal choice with no structural barriers: As if childcare, maternity leave, and flexible work are luxuries, not necessities.

3. A phase you power through: Motherhood isn’t a phase. It’s a permanent identity shift that changes everything.

4. Compatible with corporate ambition: The corporate ladder wasn’t built for mothers. It was built for people with wives at home.

We were told we could have it all.

What we got was exhaustion, guilt, and the nagging feeling that we’re failing at everything.

The Alternative No One Talks About

Here’s what I’ve realized after trying to make the “career + kids” formula work:

It doesn’t have to be this way.

The culture pushed us toward corporate ladders. But corporate ladders weren’t designed for mothers.
So what if we stopped climbing them?

What if instead of trying to fit motherhood into a career designed for childless men, we built something different
Something flexible. Something we control. Something that doesn’t require us to sacrifice presence with our kids. I’m not saying quit your job and become a full-time stay-at-home mom (unless that’s what you want).

I’m saying: What if there’s a third option?
One where you don’t have to choose between ambition and motherhood.
One where you can build something meaningful without sacrificing the people who matter most.

We don't have to give up on ambition. There is nothing wrong with an ambitious woman. In fact, a mother who dedicates her life to raising her children to the best of her ability is the most ambitious one. No one would be more eager than her, and it is a long-term project that requires dedication, obsession, creativity, introspection, skills, and ongoing evolution.

What Does That Look Like?

Practically speaking, this means different things for different women.

For some, it’s stepping back from the corporate ladder entirely and choosing full-time motherhood as their primary work.
For others, it’s freelancing, consulting, or building something flexible that doesn’t demand 60-hour weeks.
For some, it’s staying in their career but redefining what success looks like, saying no to promotions that require constant travel, setting boundaries around work hours, and choosing presence over advancement.

And for others, it's creating something new. Something that lets them contribute, build, and grow without sacrificing the people who need them most.
There’s no single path. But the common thread is this: you stop letting someone else dictate your time, your energy, and your priorities.

You stop climbing a ladder that was never designed for you in the first place. And you start building something that actually works for the life you have, not the life you were told to want.

The Truth They Should Have Told Us

The culture failed us.

They told us kids were just another item on the checklist.

They lied.

Kids aren’t a side project. They’re not something you squeeze into the margins of a busy life.

They’re the life.

And once you accept that, you stop trying to make them fit into a system that was never designed for them.
You start asking: What if I built a life that actually worked for me?
Not the life I was told to want.

The one I actually want. And guess what? YOU CAN!

Are you stuck in the career-plus-kids trap? Or have you already started building something different?

I want to hear your story.

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Not in the dramatic, abandoned-in-the-woods way. But in the way that actually matters: No one else is going to raise your kids for you.

When I first became a mother, I believed in the village. I thought if I just found the right preschool, the right activities, the right community, they’d help me raise this tiny human. I thought parenting was supposed to be a team sport.

I was wrong.

The Village Myth

We’ve all heard it: “It takes a village to raise a child.”

And yeah, you need support. You need people who will watch your kids for an afternoon, bring you a meal when you’re drowning, and listen when you need to vent about the fourth meltdown before 9 AM.

But the village isn’t there to raise your kids for you.
They’re there to support you while you do the raising.

Big difference.

Somewhere along the way, we started treating support systems like delegation systems. Schools became co-parents. Extracurriculars became value installers. The “village” became a tag team we could tap out to when things got hard.

And I get it. We’re all exhausted. The idea that someone else could handle even 20% of this impossible job is tempting as hell.

But here’s the truth: It’s 100% on you.

You and your partner (if you have one).

That’s it.

The School Trap

This is where I see it most clearly: parents who treat school like it’s supposed to do half the work.

They expect teachers to instill values.
They expect schools to teach their kids how to be kind, how to handle conflict, how to think critically, how to navigate the world.
They hand off a six-year-old in the morning and somehow expect them to come home as a fully formed human by 3 PM.

Schools aren’t there to raise your kids. They’re there to educate them. There’s a difference.

Think of it this way: You're a surgeon. The school is the nurse. You'd never expect the nurse to do 50% of the heart surgery you're solely responsible for.
So why do we expect schools to do 50% of the parenting we're solely responsible for?

Fuel My Reflections With Coffee

What This Means

Once you accept that you’re on your own, something shifts.

At first, it feels heavy. Like the weight just doubled. Like you’ll never get a break.

But then you realize: with full responsibility comes full control.

The kind of control where you actually get to decide what your kids learn, what values they absorb, and what kind of humans they become.

When you stop outsourcing, you stop hoping someone else will fix what’s broken. You stop waiting for the school to teach them to read, for the coach to teach them resilience, for the village to raise them into good people.

You do it yourself. Or it doesn’t get done.

And I know! I know it sounds terrifying. But you can’t deny how liberating it is.

Because once you know it’s on you, you can stop pretending. You can stop blaming the school for not choosing the right books, the teacher for not understanding your kid, and the village for not showing up.

You can just... do the work. And no one is more equipped than you.

The Hard Part

The hardest part isn’t the work itself. It’s accepting that no one else cares about your kids the way you do.

The teacher has 25 other students. probably overworked and underpaid.
The coach has a whole team and a knee problem.
The village has its own lives, own kids, own chaos.

No one is thinking about your child’s future the way you are. No one is lying awake at night wondering if they’re doing enough. No one is questioning every decision, every word, every moment.

Just you.

And maybe your partner, if you’re lucky.

That’s it. That’s the team.

So What Now?

Stop expecting schools to spot what your kid lacks academically and accommodate them.
Stop expecting extracurriculars to fix their confidence issue.
Stop expecting anyone else to care as much as you do.

Because they won’t. They can’t. It’s not their job.

It’s yours.

And once you accept that, once you stop waiting for someone else to save you, you might just realize you never needed saving in the first place.

You needed permission to stop outsourcing.
Permission to take full control.
Permission to accept that this enormous, impossible, exhausting job is 100% yours.

So here it is: You’re on your own.
And that’s exactly how it should be.

What about you? Have you been outsourcing parts of parenting you should be owning? Tell me in the comments.

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Humans love structure, routine, and predictability. We thrive in it.
And our kids? They need that order even more than we do.
But every now and then, the rhythm starts to feel like a cage.
You feel the call of chaos.
You feel the pull toward a completely unstructured day.

So we do it!
For seven full days, we drop the curriculum, the deadlines, the homework, the to-do lists. We hand them free time, boredom, space, and infinite possibilities, with almost no rules.

We call them Mayhem Days. (Just kidding, I needed a landing there. We don’t actually call them anything.)

Why do we do this?

Because kids need room to chase their own interests without someone turning it into a lesson.
Because boredom has to be scheduled in today’s world, and it’s the soil where creativity grows.
Because sometimes the best way to reset is to stop everything.
Because stepping away from the schedule makes you miss it again, and you come back valuing it instead of resenting it.
And most of all, because creativity doesn’t bloom on a timetable.

How we got here:

A few weeks after we settle back into our nice, tidy routine, my children start to whine. Getting them to sit down for anything feels like pulling teeth. I catch myself getting impatient. The work gets rushed. I make them redo sloppy writing and half-hearted research. The motivation evaporates. The big picture disappears. And suddenly, none of us remembers why we’re doing any of this in the first place.

One random Tuesday, in the middle of math, I was explaining exponent properties when I looked up and saw my son completely checked out, eyes glazed, body slumped. I dropped the marker on the table and said, “You don’t seem focused. I have no patience today. I’m tired. Let’s take the day off. We’ll figure this out tomorrow.”
He stared at me like I had grown a second head.“Can I do whatever I want today?”
“Yes,” I said, “as long as you don’t bother anyone in the house, do your thing.”
That day, he played piano for an hour, read three chapters of the book he’d been ignoring, made his own popsicles from scratch, and finally finished a small STEM project that had been sitting on his shelf for weeks.

That single unplanned day cracked something open in me.

I’m homeschooling for fuck’s sake! There is no principal, no report card deadline, and no one checking my attendance sheet. Why am I acting like we’re in a brick-and-mortar school with a rigid schedule I have to obey? I have total control. I can cancel, postpone, skip, linger on one subject for weeks, or throw the whole plan out the window.

I was creating my own cage because that’s what school looked like when I was a kid. It takes time to unlearn. It takes even longer to notice what you’re still doing out of habit.

We’ve all read the articles: structure your day, color-code the schedule, check every box. Productivity is the currency of success. But there is enormous value in stepping back. In being “productive” in ways that don’t look productive. In letting your brain rest so it can appreciate all the boxes it has already checked.

It’s even more important for our children. Their brains are still wiring themselves. If they only ever know rigid structure, they will grow up fearing anything unstructured. And life does get unstructured. Things happen. Plans fall apart. Jobs change. Moves happen. Illness hits. The ability to sit with uncertainty and still create meaning is a skill worth teaching.

Buy this tired mom a coffee?

So once every three months, we give ourselves and them permission to live inside the mess for a week. We come back calmer.
We come back hungrier for the routine we once took for granted.
And most importantly, we come back remembering why we’re doing any of this in the first place.

Try it.
Even if you only have weekends.
Even if you only steal one single unstructured day.
Drop the schedule, silence the guilt, and watch what your kids (and you) become when no one is telling them who to be.
You might be surprised by what grows in the space you finally leave empty.

What are your thoughts on our Mayhem Days? Do you have anything similar? I would love to hear from you.

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Life has been tough these past months.
The kind of tough that stops you in your tracks and forces you to question your whole identity.
The kind where you have to sit with yourself, really sit, and figure out who you are when you strip away every label, every role, every expectation.
No more “mother.” No more “wife.” No more “daughter,” “friend,” or any of the other titles I’ve worn like armor for so long. Just… me.
The raw, unfiltered person underneath it all.

Naturally, I had to pull away from Substack. I couldn’t keep writing while I was this confused. And truthfully, I’ve been thinking about you for the past month. I was about to give up. I didn’t see the point anymore.

Why am I even writing?
What do I have to say that’s important enough to be worth your time?
Am I for real?
Do I actually mean the shit I say?

With all honesty, I don’t have clear answers to all of these questions yet.
But one thing keeps coming back to me: I love writing. I love being honest. I love being real. First for myself, and even more so for anyone who is searching for something genuine, something that doesn’t pretend life is always figured out.

We often see people from the outside and make a quick judgment:
they either have it all together,
Or they have nothing at all.

Social media has fast-tracked this narrative.
People are eager to push the “have it all” version of themselves while their internal struggles are left unattended and quietly grow bigger.

I wonder if I was doing the same thing right here on Substack. Was I trying to push some sort of “have it all” version of myself?
Was I overselling it?
Making both myself and you believe in a polished, almost fantasized version of who I am, one I’m not even sure exists?

I wonder if I was doing the same thing in real life.
…and that’s exactly what I’m wrestling with right now.

So I’m hitting publish today, exactly as I am.
Still wrestling.
Still tired.
Still unsure.
But with integrity and honesty.

If this brought anything up for you, I’d genuinely love to hear what it is.

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Every morning, regardless of my state, my energy, or how well I slept. You will find me there in that kitchen, getting started to make the day easier for all parties involved.

Ideally, my kids and husband will wake up and find me dressed, breakfast ready, with a smile on my face, the kind of smile that says I am on top of everything, today will be a great day!! The truth is, these mornings are rare, but that’s what I am aiming for.

I don’t know how to describe this level of dedication. It’s beyond discipline. It’s not even up for debate. And it impresses me, I am impressed by my ability to ignore whatever feeling, drama, fatigue, or sickness I might have, and wake up every morning to do what only I can do. And that’s where I start to understand the meaning of unconditional mothering. I will wake up every day and give it my all: rain or shine.

I often think about this concept of unconditional mothering, which can’t be claimed until tested, until put into the right circumstances for it to manifest. It is so easy to assume we will always be there for our children, especially before we actually have them. So easy to assume we will never raise our voices, never get annoyed by their presence, never get irritated by their behaviour, never ignore their requests.

The truth is, we all will at a certain point. We will all treat our children in ways we would never have imagined. With or without reasons, after all, we can justify almost everything. We will put our heads on our pillows and replay that snappy answer they didn’t deserve or that tasteless comment they didn’t ask for. We will all feel like shitty parents now and then.

What you do about it is what makes the difference. It is one of the multiple ways the unconditionality of parenting is put to the test. Do you go back and apologize, let your children know about your own flaws, own up to them, give them a transparent access to your own humanity? Allowing them to see your true self, including your vulnerabilities, emotions, and imperfections?

Or do you bury your failures deep down? Not letting anyone even attempt to point them out. Because you think it will undermine your authority? Which will naturally lead them to slowly find out who you truly are, while making parenting conditional, DO NOT question my authority, otherwise, I will change the rules.

Authority comes with accountability, and that’s what builds trust. Kids learn that it’s okay to mess up, as long as you make it right. It models resilience and empathy in a way no lecture ever could. It also shows them that we are ready to take responsibility and that, in the same way, we will always be there for them, no matter how they behave and disappoint us, which is bound to happen. And when they do, they will still come back to us because they can feel and trust the unconditional nature of our love and dedication.

Fuel My Mornings With Coffee

Tomorrow morning, I’ll probably wake up and head straight to the kitchen again.
Maybe with more energy, maybe with less.
Maybe smiling, maybe dragging my feet.

But I will show up.
And that, I think, is what unconditional love really looks like.

What about you? How does unconditional mothering feel to you?
Leave a comment, I’d love to hear your story.

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It is very common to find yourself hating your partner’s guts and not standing their presence, even though you’d be a completely lost soul without them.

And in most cases, these heavy negative feelings are shared by both parties. In fact, if you both sat down and put your egos aside, you might discover just how much you have in common in your mutual frustrations. But that’s not how it usually works.

Instead, the resentment keeps creeping up, gaining more weight and overshadowing all the good things you share, as if they don’t matter anymore.

Can You Spot It Before It Gets Unbearable?

We are extremely good at spotting our partner’s resentment compared to our own. It shows in the way they withdraw, their facial expressions, the decrease in physical touch, or the short, snappy answers. Suddenly, they would walk by you without reaching for you, sleep next to you but not cuddle you, or even talk to you by necessity.

We’re remarkably trained at noticing these shifts. We sense them. We smell them. They reveal themselves in the smallest changes in frequency, in the subtle ways the connection thins. And once you’ve noticed it, it’s impossible to unsee, it’s right there, staring back at you.

But it takes much longer to spot it in ourselves.

At first, it feels like a small frustration. A minor incident. A bad night of sleep. You’re a little more irritable than usual, a little sharper around the edges.

Meanwhile, frustration keeps accumulating in the background, quietly building until it eventually gives way to resentment, one that finally takes up enough space to be noticed.

By that point, you’re forced to sit down and really think about what it is that feels so heavy. And even then, it’s hard to name it. Resentment isn’t easily articulated. It has grown dense and layered, so much so that it needs to be broken down into smaller pieces before it can be understood, first by you, and only then, if you’re lucky, explained to your partner in a way they might understand it too.

So yes, you can spot it in your partner first, and in yourself second. But what comes after relies heavily on your communication skills, your ego, and your commitment to seeking the truth.

Then What?

Most of us are busy with our lives, exhausted, or simply unwilling to sit down and dissect every small malfunction, making sure we understand and are being understood by our partners.

So the beast keeps getting fed, and each unspoken frustration adds to the pile. Each avoided conversation, each moment of turning away instead of leaning in, makes it grow. By the time you realize it’s there, it’s no longer small, it’s massive, and it changes everything, from the tone of your voice to the way your bodies meet in bed, to the way your hearts ache in parallel silence.

At this point, resentment doesn’t just live inside you. It teaches you how to behave.

It teaches you to pull back rather than reach out. To withhold instead of offering. To protect yourself with silence, sarcasm, or emotional distance. You stop saying what you need because it feels pointless, or dangerous, or like too much work for too little return. You communicate less.

It teaches you to keep score. To replay old arguments in your head. To interpret neutral moments as personal slights. You assume intent where there may be none, because resentment has already written the story for you.

And slowly, you begin to treat the person you love less like a partner and more like an opponent, someone to defend against, someone to brace for, rather than someone you’re meant to move toward.

In the end, you find yourself in a bitter place, and so does your partner. And when you choose to sit in resentment, to believe it’s the right place to be, you lose. Every time.

Because resentment doesn’t punish the other person the way you think it does. It traps you. It keeps you stuck in a place that slowly rots everything it touches. And the hardest truth is this: only you can pull yourself out of that living hell.

Buy Me A Coffee To Control My Resentment

The Way Out

The good news is there is a way out. The bad news is that it’s neither easy nor comfortable.

It starts by turning inward. By being brutally honest about your part: Naming the ways you have hurt, withdrawn, avoided, or failed to show up. Not as an exercise in self-punishment, but in accountability.

And this matters: do not pad that honesty with justifications. Everyone has them. They may trace back to childhood, to old wounds, to survival. But they do not erase the hurt being caused in the present.

It’s fascinating how fluently we speak about our partner’s flaws and how clumsy we become when asked to name our own.

We become experts at mapping every wrong step they took, every moment they fucked up. We rarely extend the courtesy of wondering what might have pushed them to behave the way they did.

Meanwhile, when it comes to us, we start with context. With reasons. With explanations. We know exactly why we acted the way we did while remaining almost completely oblivious to how our actions might have hurt them.

We are equipped to recognize these patterns in ourselves, and that awareness is the starting point for doing something about the resentment festering within us.

Resentment is a choice, not a consequence. And as with every choice we make, we can choose to take responsibility and own up to our actions. It is work. It is hard. But it is absolutely rewarding. The alternative is a living hell.

If resentment is a choice, what would it take for you to choose responsibility, and what would that choice change for you and your partner?
Reply and share your thoughts, I’d love to hear your experiences.

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This mindset is dangerous, especially for our kids.

Framing parenting as heroic survival implies death is the default, and mere competence deserves a medal for averting it. But let’s be real: most of us aren’t navigating war zones or fending off polar bears and wolf packs in wilderness caves. We live in societies with built-in safeguards, flawed as they are, that handle a lot of the “not dying” basics.

Of course, for families facing genuine hardships like poverty, illness, war, or isolation, survival mode is no joke, and they deserve compassion and resources, not critique. But when the phrase pops up with a smug grin as a badge of honor, I see the subtext: it’s often a shield against guilt, burnout, or scrutiny. Worse, it can excuse disengagement, shortcuts, or straight-up laziness by dropping the bar to rock bottom.

I reject that entirely.

We’re not caged with wild beasts, and basic existence isn’t the pinnacle of raising humans. Parenting goes far beyond preventing catastrophe. It’s not just about a heartbeat and a full belly. If that’s our benchmark in 2026, we’ve let our children down profoundly.

Time to raise the damn bar.

Why “Survival” Sells, But at What Cost?

Let’s unpack why this “kept ‘em alive” mantra is everywhere. Simply because it’s relatable, funny, self-deprecating, and it bonds exhausted parents together in a culture that pretends parenting is a constant battlefield. In a world of curated perfection, admitting chaos feels honest.

But honesty should not require surrender.

On top of that, our culture glorifies grind. Parenting books, podcasts, and influencers peddle the idea that modern life is a warzone: endless schedules and economic precarity. But using survival as a punchline normalizes it.

And here’s where it gets harmful: kids pay the price. When we frame our role as mere lifeguards, we skim the surface. Sure, they’re fed and clothed, but what about the rest? Emotional intelligence, connection, curiosity, conflict resolution, and critical thinking. These aren’t luxuries! They’re essentials for raising resilient humans.

It is not wild to notice that kids in “survival mode” households often mirror that stress, leading to anxiety, poor self-regulation, or disengagement. I’ve seen it in my own circle: friends who pat themselves on the back for microwave dinners and iPad babysitters, while their kids crave real connection. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a tired mother too. There are days when “alive” feels like a win after juggling cooking, meltdowns, and that endless laundry pile. But excusing it as the norm? That’s a cop-out. It lets us off the hook from the hard work of presence.

Fuel My Writing With Coffee

Now what?

Probably not a one-size-fits-all blueprint, because kids aren’t widgets on an assembly line. Hell, what works for my chaos crew might flop for yours, and that’s okay. But if we’re ditching the “kept ‘em alive” BS, let’s at least sketch a better map. “Best” isn’t some shiny Instagram ideal, it’s gritty, daily work toward kids who don’t just exist but actually give a damn about their world.

Start with connection, because without it, the rest crumbles. I’m talking real eye-contact moments, not scrolling TikTok while nodding at their stories. Kids crave being seen, not scheduled. Remember those late-night thirst traps from your toddler? Yeah, that’s code for “pay attention to me.” Ignore it long enough, and you get teens who ghost you emotionally.
In short, Put your phone down and talk to your kids.

Next, curiosity over compliance. School systems drill obedience like it’s a virtue, but newsflash: the world needs thinkers, not robots. Encourage questions, even the annoying “why” loops that make you want to hide in the bathroom. My kid once asked why the sky isn’t purple, led to a rabbit hole on light waves that beat any worksheet.

If we’re in 2026 and still settling for rote learning, we’re failing. Homeschool vibes or not, push for wonder. It’s not extra, it’s essential.

Then resilience, the kind that says, “Life sucks sometimes, but you can handle it.” Not by bubble-wrapping them, but by letting them flop and get up. Poverty, illness, or just a bad day? Model grit without the martyr act.

This isn’t perfection, it’s intention. “Best” evolves neurodivergent needs, cultural twists, whatever. But it’s always more than survival.

Reflect: What’s one area you’re phoning in? Fix it, one exhausted step at a time.

Lastly

“Keeping them alive” is not a philosophy of parenting.
It’s an emergency protocol.

And emergencies are not meant to last entire childhoods.

If we want better outcomes for our children, we need better language, better standards, and more honest expectations of ourselves. Survival can be the floor, but it cannot be the goal.

So the real question isn’t whether our kids survived us. It’s whether they were seen, shaped, and prepared by us.

That’s what “best” demands.
And it’s worth more than a tired joke and a low bar.

So, what’s “best” look like for you? Let’s ditch the low bar together.

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I don’t like it, and here is why.

If we have to wait for another turn around the sun to make the changes that would enhance our lives, then we more or less get about 50 chances (not counting childhood or our senior years) instead of 50 × 365 opportunities to do so. In other words, we trade daily opportunities for a yearly event.

Don’t get me wrong. I truly understand how the new year brings a sense of hope, a chance to be more than the previous one. Kids are out of school, most jobs are slowing down, and routines are different. It’s a pretty good environment for introspection. But why do we have to wait for these conditions to evaluate our lives?

And because I tend to spend a lot of time in my head, I was curious to see what the science says about New Year’s resolutions. Are there any studies that would prove me wrong? Are New Year’s resolutions really a fallacy?

So I did a little digging. And what I found confirmed much of what I suspected. For instance, a University of Scranton study, often cited in resolution research, found that only about 8% of people actually achieve their goals by the end of the year. If you like to read studies, here is a link.

On the other hand, a 2020 study showed that approach-oriented goals, such as “start exercising,” fare better than avoidance-oriented ones, like “stop eating junk,” with success rates of around 59% versus 47% after a year. Link to the study.

Basically, the reason many resolutions still fizzle out after just a few months is: vague goals, lack of concrete planning, and tying motivation to a symbolic date rather than daily effort. That said, resolutions are not entirely a fallacy. When they’re executed properly, with clear, specific, and actionable goals and some accountability throughout the year, they can be effective. The problem is that waiting for a New Year’s reset often makes us trade 365 opportunities for just one.

So, what does “daily effort” look like in practice? Instead of a grand January overhaul, try micro-habits, like committing to a 5-minute walk today rather than vowing to run a marathon by summer. Or set up weekly check-ins with your spouse, friend, sibling, or even yourself for accountability, turning introspection into a routine rather than a once-a-year event.
Research backs this up too: Building small, consistent actions leads to higher long-term success than big, date-tied promises. What if we treated every Monday like January 1st?

Speaking of daily effort, this article itself is a perfect example. When December came, I started to think about resolutions for my Substack for the next year. I felt the need to pause and reflect, to consider where I wanted to take it, what worked, and what didn’t. On top of that, I kept waiting for the “right moment” to write, the perfect day, the perfect setup, the perfect weather, the perfect vibe, the perfect subject, enough quiet, enough energy, and so on.

I treated writing like a New Year’s resolution: something that only truly counts when it’s ceremonial. But of course, that just delayed progress. It reminded me that change, or creation, or improvement, doesn’t have to wait for a big symbolic moment. Every day we sit down, even for five minutes, counts.

So yes, I will be scribbling from the bathroom, on my phone, or even on the back of one of my toddler’s crappy coloring pages, different subjects, whatever feels right to me. I will keep writing, no matter the year, treating every day as a mini-reset for resolutions, change, and a bit of soul-searching.

Fuel My Resolutions With Coffee

I guess, one way or another, I did end up making resolutions after all... What about you? What’s one “resolution” you’re rethinking right now, or have you already ditched the January drama for something daily and doable? Share in the comments

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I’d love to hear your hacks for turning everyday chaos into quiet progress.

That’s the mother in the ads, the magazines, the framed stock photos at the pediatrician’s office.
She glows. She never yells. She certainly never locks herself in the bathroom to cry.

The truth is: She doesn’t exist.

The moment you become a mother, the curtain rips back, and you meet the other side, the one no one warned you about.
The one we all pretend isn’t there.
I call it: The dark side of motherhood.

It’s not a phase. It’s not “the baby blues.” It’s not something you outgrow once the baby sleeps through the night or starts kindergarten or turns eighteen.

It’s the rage that flares out of nowhere when you step on the same dinosaur for the forty-seventh time.
It’s the guilt that claws at you for feeling that rage.
It’s the bone-deep exhaustion that makes you fantasize about driving away and never coming back, even for a second.

It’s smiling while serving dinner, while quietly calculating how many hours until bedtime.
It’s loving your children so violently it hurts, and simultaneously grieving the self you buried the day they were born.

We don’t talk about that side, because we might be perceived as ungrateful. Dramatic. A bad mother.
So we stay silent.
We post the curated photos.
We say “I’m fine” through clenched teeth.

But it’s there, as a shadow always is, in every single one of us.
The dark side of motherhood.
And the silence is killing us.

Things would probably be a lot better if we simply acknowledged its existence, talked about it openly, and admitted it’s normal, not shameful.
Maybe motherhood might finally stop feeling like a secret war we’re all fighting alone.
Maybe it’s time to face the collective taboo surrounding motherhood.

When I first became a mom, a decade ago, I was ecstatic.
I had always wanted to be a mother. I was fascinated by the bond between babies and their moms.
How they melt into you when you hold them, how they find comfort while breastfeeding, how their little faces light up the moment they see you in the morning.

But after I gave birth, I wasn’t prepared for the fear that came with it.
I had no idea I would lie awake at night, staring at the rise and fall of his tiny chest, terrified it might stop.
I didn’t expect to jolt awake at the slightest sound, or sometimes at no sound at all, to check that he was still breathing.
I had no idea that caring for a tiny human being would come with a level of anxiety that felt like a second heartbeat, constant, fast, impossible to ignore.

And I also didn’t know there would be resentment.
The resentment that comes from the fiftieth diaper of the day.
From cooking a meal, only for it to be pushed away.
From missing date nights because the baby is breastfed and only wants you.
From realizing that everyone else’s life seems to continue, while yours suddenly revolves around feedings, nap schedules, and unpredictable storms.

I didn’t know that motherhood could make you feel like the center of someone’s universe and invisible at the same time.

And that’s when the real dark side kicks in.
The taboo part no one talks about.
The part where you actually imagine a life without kids.
Where you question your choices.
Where you consider that, maybe, you made the wrong decision for yourself.
Where you ask yourself, with a sick sort of clarity, if you might be better off.

I also didn’t know that becoming a mother would make me confront my own mortality in a way I never had before.
I became haunted by the idea of dying and leaving him.
I would imagine my own absence: my son calling for me, needing me, looking for me, and I wasn’t there anymore.
These weren’t random thoughts; they were intrusive shadows that followed me everywhere, especially at night.

Eventually, these fears began to take a toll on my mental health.
The emotions were so heavy, so unfamiliar, so enormous that I had nothing to compare them to.
I had never experienced anxiety that felt physical, the tightness in my chest, the buzzing under my skin, the sense of danger, even when everything was perfectly fine.

It felt like my mind had split into two people:
the mother who loved her baby with every cell in her body,
and the woman quietly drowning under dark emotions she didn’t understand.

And then, slowly, the baby stage started to fade.
The nights weren’t as terrifying.
The panic softened.
I kinda found a way to navigate it, mostly by pretending, ignoring, bottling up, but always showing up for my baby.

When the fog of early motherhood lifted, I found myself standing at a crossroads I had never considered before.
The choice so many mothers quietly struggle with:

Do I go back to work and leave him during the day?
Or do I stay home and let go of the part of me I spent years building?

I had gone to college.
I had earned two master’s degrees.
I had been ambitious, hungry, and willing to climb my way up.
That future felt like a given, a narrative I never thought I’d need to question.
It was part of who I was.

Suddenly, returning to work felt like abandoning him.
And staying home felt like abandoning myself.

I was suddenly faced with the grief for the version of me who once moved freely, dreamed freely, chose freely.

Another layer of the dark side of motherhood:
not just the sleepless nights and intrusive thoughts,
But the slow, aching realization that becoming a mother forces you to renegotiate your identity, sometimes painfully, and always irrevocably.

The hardest part was not knowing I’d have to go through all of this.
The sheer unexpectedness of it all.
Motherhood was supposed to be magical, right?
The thing that completes you.
The thing that makes you whole.

I thought having a baby would add to who I already was.
I didn’t know it would also require letting go of parts of myself to make space for this new life.
I didn’t know there would be trade-offs, resentment.
I didn’t know there would be grief mixed in with the love.

I didn’t know.
I truly didn’t.

And I could’ve prepared better.
Maybe I could’ve handled it with more grace, more awareness, more support…
If only I had known.
If only someone had told me the dark side existed.
If only the truth weren’t wrapped in silence and pretty pictures.
And I wish someone had told me that.

So here it is. I’m telling you now.
Something will be lost.
And that loss is not a betrayal of your love.
It’s the price of it.
And you will have to deal with deep, dark emotions.
You’re not ungrateful.
You’re not broken.
You’re not alone.
You are not failing.
You are becoming the mother they don’t put in the stock photos.
The one who survived the dark side and still got up to make breakfast.
The dark side is real. And it belongs to all of us.

Ten years later, I would still choose to be a mother, even if it meant going through the same thing. Because it is magical, just not in the same superficial way it was presented to us.

Fuel My Writing With Coffee

The idea comes from something I’ve observed in most children (including myself when I was a child). Once school ends, so does the desire to learn. And it makes sense. Traditional schooling rarely nurtures a love of learning. It focuses on memorizing, testing, and moving on.
I actually wrote a piece about school efficiency. You can read it here if you’re interested.

But the love of learning is one of the greatest gifts we can give our children. It’s what turns them into lifelong learners, a real superpower of our time.

Wanting to learn is the foundation for raising curious, intelligent, and capable children.
From there, all we have to do is give them a template, a way to approach any new skill or subject:

• How to find the information they need,

• What to expect from the learning curve,

• How to keep going when it feels hard.

So here’s what we’ve been doing these past two months:

Rubik Cube

We gave my son a Rubik’s Cube and one hour a day on the computer, not to play, but to figure out how to solve it.
No instructions from us, no shortcuts. Just him, the internet, and a problem he’d never faced before.

Through that one cube, he’s learning how to teach himself, how to search for the right information, how to test different approaches, and how to value the satisfaction that comes from persistence.
The goal: take something unfamiliar and master it, to the point of solving it under five minutes.

Fuel the writing & the homeschooling.

Once he understood the assignment and the importance of the skill he was actually building, it only took him one week to go from never solving a Rubik’s Cube to completing it in under five minutes. The confidence he gained from going through the process entirely on his own, from struggling to succeeding without giving up, is immeasurable and so well deserved.

Assembling

He also assembled our new pickleball net, a good lesson in problem-solving, following instructions, and coordination. We added pickleball to his weekly routine; it’s perfect for building speed, reflexes, and focus.

When we got a baby-foot table, he assembled that too.
Any handy work that needs doing around the house, he’s the one doing it. It’s how he learns patience, competence, and that deep satisfaction of seeing something work because of his own effort.

Cooking

He’s also responsible for cooking breakfast, lunch, and dinner once a week.
It’s not just about making TikTok recipes or chopping skills. It’s about planning, timing, cleaning up, and understanding what it takes to feed yourself and the people you care about properly.

Reading

For reading, he’s working his way through His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman out loud, strengthening his voice, focus, and comprehension while exploring complex storytelling.
He reads one chapter a day, with the simple assignment of writing a summary afterward. Turning what he’s read into his own words.

Math

For math, he’s using MathAcademy, working through lessons that challenge him enough to stay motivated, but let him experience success on his own terms.

Boredom

This is the star of the show. He needs to be bored and to learn how to deal with it.
And in this day and age, we have to make that happen on purpose. With all the endless ways to distract ourselves, it’s becoming harder to just be bored.

Boredom is uncomfortable, but it’s also necessary. It’s the space where creativity, curiosity, and imagination are born. When there’s nothing instantly entertaining or structured, he has to reach inward to find something that interests him, something worth doing. It’s the place where he starts to create for himself, not to please us, not to get his work done, not to check boxes.
It’s his own brain working inside of him, searching, connecting, experimenting.

That’s where a different important kind of learning begins, not from what we assign, but from what he chooses to do when no one is watching or asking.

It sounds pretty obvious, but let me tell you, this is the dilemma this generation of children is facing. The lack of opportunities to be bored.

Therefore, the lack of space to think for themselves, to wonder, to explore without direction. When every moment can be filled with noise or entertainment, they lose the quiet time needed to hear their own thoughts.

That’s why boredom has to be part of our homeschool, not as punishment, but as permission.
Permission to pause. To listen inward. To discover what their own mind can do when it’s not being told what to do.

At the end of the day, I don’t just want him to know things or recreate school at home… Because what’s the point? might as well send him to school.

I want him to want to know things. To trust his own ability to figure things out, to fail, to try again, and to enjoy the process.

That’s the real education I’m after, the never-ending thirst for knowledge and the confidence to pursue it, no matter how hard it gets.

I would love to hear from you. How do you approach education with your children?

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