I Thought I Had It All…TIL I Found Myself Carrying It All.

There was a season of my life where, from the outside, it looked like I had everything.
A beautiful family. Healthy kids. Pregnant with twins. A home full of life. A beautiful apartment in a trendy neighborhood in Brooklyn. A partner I loved deeply and believed I was building a forever life with. A promising career I built from nothing. Community. Friends. A future that looked full, stable, and certain.

From the outside, it probably looked like I was thriving.

But behind closed doors, I was unraveling in ways no one could fully see.
I was exhausted. Overwhelmed. Emotionally starving. Working constantly—at work, at home, and desperately trying to hold my marriage together. Trying to feel seen. Trying to feel loved. Trying to feel like I still had a partner beside me in all of it.

But instead, I increasingly felt like I was moving through life alone.

I was carrying the mental, emotional, and physical load while trying to keep everything from falling apart.

There was a loneliness that felt hard to explain—the kind that comes from needing support while realizing I had become the one holding everyone else up. I missed being seen. I missed being held. I missed feeling like I wasn’t doing all of this alone.

👩🏻‍🍳 Building Something From Nothing

Around the eighth month of my pregnancy with the twins, I made the heartbreaking decision to shut down my once-promising catering company.

It was something I built completely from the ground up. Something I loved deeply. A part of me that existed outside of motherhood and marriage. I didn’t even know how to cook when I started—but through determination and grit, I built a successful business anyway.

On paper, it looked like success.

But behind the scenes, my body was breaking down.

I was on my feet 12+ hours a day, seven days a week, cooking for 100+ people while carrying twins to full term. Lifting heavy equipment. Feeding the masses. Setting everything up and breaking it down on location. Constant output with no recovery.

It was survival disguised as productivity.

And eventually, my body made it clear I couldn’t sustain it anymore.

Closing my business brought relief to my body, but grief to my identity—the part of me that felt capable, creative, and alive.

I remember feeling like a failure.

Unseen. Unvalued. Unloved. Disconnected from myself. Lost—no longer sure who I was beyond surviving the next day.

😩 Postpartum and Survival Mode

After my twins were born, I struggled deeply with postpartum for a long time while recovering from a C-section, severe diastasis recti, and chronic back pain. I wasn’t used to being incapacitated like this.

But there was no space to rest, recover, or heal.

My husband was increasingly emotionally distant and often physically absent, and I moved through pregnancy, postpartum recovery, parenting, and daily life without the support I thought would be there.

Beneath it all was the quiet heartbreak of a marriage that no longer felt like a partnership. So much of what should have been shared became mine alone.

I was responsible for twin infants, a busy toddler, and two teenage girls on my own.

Most days, I was just trying to make it from morning to night without falling apart in front of my kids.

I lived in exhaustion sleep couldn’t touch—emotions I couldn’t name, and questions of whether it was postpartum depression, hormones, burnout, early perimenopause… or all of it at once.

I would often cry in the shower—the only place I could fully let go. The only place I could cry without trying to hold it together.

Two infants in car seats in the bathroom with me, while a potty-training toddler called for me on the other side of the curtain as I stood under running water, trying to steady myself long enough to keep going.

I was holding everyone.

And all I wanted was someone to hold me.

🌪 The Collapse Into Isolation

Just when I thought I had reached the limit of what I could carry, COVID hit.

My husband was across the country and stayed there throughout lockdown. I found myself solo in New York with five kids, moving through a level of fear and isolation I had never experienced before.

The support systems disappeared overnight. The rhythm of life stopped. Everything that was already heavy became heavier in the silence.

That was the moment I stopped pretending I was okay.

It doesn’t begin with divorce papers, and it doesn’t happen all at once. It starts quietly—long before anything is named.

There is still a sense of “we,” until slowly that balance shifts and you realize you are holding what used to be shared.

The invisible labor expands. The mental load. The remembering. The scheduling. The planning. The comforting. The finances. The constant anticipating of everyone else’s needs.

And all the while, you are still showing up—while quietly coming apart where no one can see it.

All of it happened in plain sight, while from the outside life still looked normal.

💔 The Grief Beneath It All

The grief is complicated because you’re not only grieving a relationship—you’re grieving the life you thought you were building.

Some days I felt hurt and angry.
Some days I felt numb.
Some days I felt ashamed I couldn’t handle it better.
Some days I felt worthless.
Some days the silence felt so heavy I almost welcomed the weight of my depression just to drown it out.
And some days I wondered how other parents were surviving when I could barely make it to bedtime.

💡 What I Know Now

But here’s what I know now: I wasn’t the only one carrying this.

So many parents are silently carrying the same weight—single or not.

The overstimulation that never shuts off.
The loneliness of being needed by everyone while feeling held by no one.
The guilt for wanting rest.
The shame of needing care without earning it.
The identity loss of disappearing into everyone else’s needs.
The pressure of holding everything together while no one sees how close you are to breaking.

For a long time, I thought strength meant carrying it all without breaking.

But that wasn’t strength. That was depletion.

Real strength is honesty.
It’s saying, This is too much for one person.
It’s letting yourself be supported before you reach the edge.
It’s no longer pretending you’re okay when you’re not.

And I think about the parents reading this in quiet in-between moments—

You are not weak.
You are not failing.
You are not “too much.”

And if you’re the one holding everything together while disappearing inside yourself… of course you’re exhausted.

🤍 The Life I Choose Now

These days, I think less about “having it all” and more about having the right people beside me while I move through life.

Not because I expect less from life—but because I understand more clearly what it cost to get here.

The years of rebuilding. The slow, often invisible work of healing. Learning how to return to myself after losing myself in everyone else’s needs. Learning how to love myself again—not in theory, but in practice.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped questioning my strength and started recognizing it.

I did that.
I got through that.
I am still here.

And I am worthy of the same love, care, and tenderness I’ve spent so much of my life giving to everyone else.

I also became more intentional about who I allow close to me.

People who understand that strength and softness can exist in the same body.
That exhaustion is not failure.
That being cared for is part of being human.
That connection doesn’t require perfection.
That someone can sit beside you in chaos without trying to fix you or it.

People who meet me with compassion instead of judgment.
People who see me clearly when I’m overwhelmed and don’t ask me to become smaller to be loved.
People who help me breathe again.
People who let me be fully myself—and still stay.

Because I don’t need a life that looks impressive from the outside anymore.
I need a life where I don’t disappear inside it.

🌱 The Village

Healing doesn’t begin with fixing everything on your own.
It begins with telling the truth:

“This is hard.”
“I am overwhelmed.”
“I cannot carry this alone anymore.”

And something shifts in the moment someone finally answers:

“You don’t have to.”

Because we were never meant to carry a life like this alone.

Not motherhood.
Not grief.
Not burnout.
Not the invisible weight of holding everything together while slowly disappearing inside yourself.

We were never meant to be everything for everyone while having nowhere to fall apart.

A village is not people who fix your life.
It is people who step in when your arms give out.
People who take the baby when you’ve reached your limit.
People who sit beside you in the mess of it.
People who hold you while you cry and remind you that you don’t have to be strong all the time.
People who stay.

Because it takes a village not only to raise children—
it takes a village to hold the people raising them, too.

❤️ Super Siobhán