Today is our first day back at daycare after seven weeks of sun, smiles and very little writing or rest. What better way to ease back in than to tackle a topic that’s everywhere right now and still not properly worked through.

Fair warning, this one leans more toolkit than story. Send it to your partner, or to the friend who’s about to have the same argument you did.

Invisible labour is no longer (as) invisible.

Women are talking about the mental load more often than ever. We have the books, the data, the reels, the perfectly worded post you send your partner at 11pm while your busy brain keeps you awake in bed. You might get a thumbs up emoji or a sincere “I had no idea. Just tell me what you need me to do” back. Now what?

For a lot of women, discovering the term mental load was the first time the exhaustion made sense. They were not failing at ordinary life. They were doing an extraordinary amount of work that nobody was counting.

But knowing the term does not tell us what to do with it.

You can recognise invisible labour in your relationship and still have the same argument on Sunday night.

You can make a beautiful list of everything you carry and accidentally become the person responsible for allocating it all too.

The work has finally become visible. But it still lives in the same head.

So what actually helps?

Here are some of the things I’ve learnt through my work with Village of Two and my months of research. Sharing so you don’t have to find them the hard way, one argument at a time.

The problem is not only how much you do

When we talk about household and family tasks, we tend to count the visible part.

Who cooked dinner? Who did the nursery pick-up? Who booked the dentist?

But every task has a life before and after the moment it gets done.

Someone noticed the toothpaste was nearly finished. Remembered which kind the child would tolerate. Added it to a list. Checked whether it was on offer. Bought it before it ran out. Put it where everyone could find it.

Someone realised the child had outgrown their shoes. Worked out what size came next. Checked the weather. Found something suitable. Remembered that the nursery needs spare shoes too. Returned the pair that did not fit.

Researchers describe this cognitive work as anticipating needs, identifying options, making decisions and monitoring what happens next.

And this is where the load can become particularly unequal. A partner may participate in the decision or complete the visible task while somebody else continues to anticipate, initiate and follow up.

That is why “my partner does a lot” and “I still feel responsible for everything” can both be true.

It is also why asking for more help often fails.

Help can change who completes a task. It does not necessarily change who carries responsibility for it.

We don’t need better assistants

Don’t get me wrong. Asking for help is a good and necessary part of any partnership.

If you are ill, overwhelmed or facing an unusually difficult week, you want to be able to say, “I cannot carry this right now. Can you take it?”

Similarly, if your partner usually owns an area but needs support with it temporarily, helping is exactly what partnership should look like.

Help works when the responsibility already has a clear home, and one person needs additional capacity. It allows families to respond when life becomes temporarily uneven or too much.

The problem is when asking for help becomes the permanent operating system of the household.

If one person must continually notice what needs doing, decide what would help, turn it into an instruction, explain the relevant details and check that it happened… then asking is not a neutral act. It is another stage of the work.

The distinction is not whether anybody ever asks for or receives help. It is what happens if nobody asks.

Would both adults still notice what the family needs? Would they know what they are responsible for? Would the necessary work still happen?

If yes, asking is probably helping the family adapt to a difficult moment.

If no, the family may still have one manager and one assistant. The task can move while the responsibility stays exactly where it was.

Where to start

Most women carrying the mental load do not need their partner to perform a few more instructions. They need to stop being the default owner of the majority of family life.

That requires something more structural than a longer chore list or a promise to “communicate better.”

It requires a different way of running the household.

Here are my three places to begin.

1. See the whole job

Before redistributing anything, choose one recurring area of family life and map the work surrounding it.

You don’t need to start with the entire household. Nor with every invisible task you have completed since becoming a mother. Just one area.

Take children’s clothes.

Who notices what no longer fits? Who knows what is stored away? Who checks what the next season requires? Who sorts, buys, washes, labels, returns, donates and replaces? Who remembers the waterproof trousers before the rainy week rather than during it?

Or take medical care.

Who notices a symptom, decides whether it needs attention, finds the right doctor, books the appointment, rearranges work, remembers the insurance card, explains the history and follows the treatment afterwards?

The aim is not to build evidence for the prosecution.

It is to see the system clearly enough to assess it and to change it.

This is what I call the default owner. That person probably owns more than the visible list suggests.

2. Transfer ownership, not errands

Once the whole job is visible, and if you decide this is an area that needs recalibrating, stop redistributing it one instruction at a time.

Transfer a complete, clearly defined area.

If one partner owns routine dental care, for example, that might include knowing when check-ups are due, finding and booking the dentist, putting appointments in the shared calendar, taking the child and arranging any follow-up.

Ownership includes all areas: noticing, planning, deciding, doing or arranging, communicating what affects everyone else and following through.

It also requires authority. You cannot give someone responsibility while retaining control over every ordinary decision they make.

This does not mean standards do not matter. You may need to agree with your partner what “done” means, what constraints matter and which decisions should still be made together.

But once that is clear, the owner needs room to own it.

Otherwise one partner remains the manager, and the other becomes a frustrated employee who can never complete the job correctly without supervision.

This is often the uncomfortable part for both people.

One partner has to step forward before being asked. The other has to step back without quietly monitoring from the sidelines.

Shared ownership requires both.

3. Reset before resentment does it for you

I guarantee you: No division of responsibility will remain fair forever.

Work gets busy. Children start school. Somebody becomes ill. One partner has a deadline. A grandparent needs support. One of you gets a promotion...

A system that worked six months ago quietly stops working.

That does not mean the conversation failed. It means family life changes.

Ask:

1. What is coming up?

2. Where is responsibility unclear or becoming too heavy?

3. What needs to change before our next check-in?

This is not a performance review of your partner. It is not the place to inventory every historical disappointment.

It is routine maintenance for the family system.

Fairness is not a division you negotiate once. It is something you keep responsive to the reality of your lives.

The goal is not perfect equality

Even I get the occasional (*cough* male) commenter on Substack who assumes domestic fairness is a 50/50 split and rebels against the idea. They miss the larger and truer point.

I am not advocating every family divide every task 50/50.

Families have different working hours, health needs, skills, finances, seasons and preferences. One partner may carry more in one area or for a period of time.

But there is a difference between an imbalance you have consciously agreed to and one that has accumulated through assumptions.

There is a difference between carrying more because your partner currently cannot, or because it’s the right thing to do for your family, and carrying more because there is no one else to do it, or because nobody else noticed it needed doing.

The goal is not identical task lists.

It is an arrangement both people can see, influence and trust. One in which neither partner is automatically responsible for noticing and holding everything together.

That is the shift from invisible work to shared ownership.

Start smaller than the problem

If you recognise your family in this, please do not begin by producing a spreadsheet of your entire life and attempting to renegotiate it after the children go to bed.

Choose one area that is frequent enough to matter but safe enough to practise with. Something that will make an emotional difference for you (or a time difference). It doesn’t have to make ‘sense’. Follow your heart (or your resentment), and you will come up with a few examples.

Map the whole job. Agree what ownership includes. Let one person carry the full cycle. Then review what happened.

You are not trying to perfect the household in one conversation.

You are testing a different way for it to work.

See it. Own it. Reset it.

Naming invisible labour was an important beginning.

But women do not only deserve better language for why they are exhausted.

They deserve families that do not require one permanent manager.

Thanks so much for reading! Village of Two helps mothers move from invisible work and recurring arguments to intentional shared ownership. Take the free Diagnostic to see where your family’s system is holding, and where it’s experiencing pressure.

Subscribe if you are interested in honest reflections and practical tools for the no-village parenting life, or share with anyone else who might benefit.

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This is the fourth article in the Village of Two series. If you’re new here, two pieces worth reading first: ‘What it actually costs to be a Village of Two’ and ‘Breaking the generational cycle cost me my village’

Most businesses start with a gap in the market. Mine started with pasta and an argument…

The dinner that turned bitter

My son was sixteen months old and hanging off my trouser leg while my husband and I made dinner.

It was the kind of cooking that isn’t really cooking. Whatever was in the fridge plus salt and chubritsa (if you’ve met any Bulgarians, you know of this ever-present herb). The kind of cooking you do when the day has already used you up entirely.

My husband was talking about his friends. The ones back home, in the city where he grew up. All with kids. All close to their families, close to each other. Apparently, managing the gym twice a week and still having a social life.

He used the word “should” a lot.

He should be able to do sports consistently. He should have time to himself without feeling guilty. His friends had these things. Why couldn’t he? We should cope differently.

No suggestions. Just what felt, at the end of a long day, like demands dressed as complaints.

I was feeling torn. On one hand, I celebrated him naming his needs (an area we are both working to improve in). I wished those things for him, too. Hell, I wished them for myself most of all.

On the other hand, I was already doing everything I physically and mentally could. And so was he. We weren’t holding back. We were just completely, structurally, out of gas and on the side of the road. Physically pushing the car was never going to get us moving like everyone else on the highway.

So why did it feel like we were on opposite sides of the same argument? Why did I feel so misunderstood?

Two adults, two different blueprints

He was looking at his friends and seeing dads with time and freedom. Dads whose wives were less demanding. Dads with more balanced lives.

He wasn’t seeing the kids who weren’t prone to the same chronic problems as ours. The grandmothers who took the kids on Saturday morning. The aunts who appeared without being asked. The childhood friends who could step in at short notice. The thirty-plus years of social infrastructure that made a guilt-free guys’ trip possible.

He saw the output and assumed the input was the same as ours.

So when the output didn’t match, he felt we were not doing enough of the right things.

But the input was not the same.

We didn’t have a village. We had built everything from scratch, in a country that wasn’t mine, in a language I was still inhabiting rather than owning.

We were working harder and coming up shorter.

Not always on the things that show externally, but on the things that matter. Rest. Margin. The ability to actually enjoy what we’d built.

For a long time, we kept having versions of the same conversation. Not always in the kitchen. Not always about sport. But the shape was consistent.

He was comparing our life to one built on resources we didn’t have, and arriving at conclusions about fairness that often had me as the variable.

He was making a structural problem into a “we should do more” problem.

He thought we needed a push. I thought we needed a break.

We were each working from a different blueprint. And neither of us had seen the other’s.

When the map became the mission

See a problem, solve a problem. It’s the motto of every self-reliant woman, including myself.

We started at the usual places. Individual therapy, couples therapy (if you read this, you know why that wasn’t enough). They were sized for a different problem. They asked more of us without understanding the limitations we were actually working with.

So I put my coaching brain, my trauma-informed pattern recognition and my years working in organisational systems to work. Not to fix our relationship, but to understand the structure fueling its tension.

I came up with an approach and put it to work. One made for our situation, our struggles, our specific constraints. And soon enough, it became a diagnostic and a coaching programme that started helping others. Women who didn’t have solutions because the standard ones weren’t built for them.

And just like that… An argument became a passion that turned into Village of Two.

Created for mothers who need a functioning setup that works for them, instead of burning out in the one they landed in. All within six structured weeks.

It is, without question, the most important thing I have built.

From our kitchen to a first cohort

Any good trial starts close to home. My husband didn’t volunteer so much as get recruited as my first test case. What truer guinea pig than someone living inside the problem who had never before seen it as structural?

Village of Two helped us more than anything else we’d tried. Not because it fixed either of us. Because it gave us a language for what we were actually dealing with, and tools to navigate it, even on the tougher days. Or especially then.

Starting by clearly naming the structure, before trying to fix anything, changed how we talked about our situation, our needs, and what we chose to internalise.

That’s when I started looking outward. A group of amazing women became my first clients before Village of Two was anywhere public. I am grateful for each one of them.

Seeing them go through the program gave me the push to share Village of Two on Substack. I won’t lie, it feels oddly intimate. As if I am introducing my two best friends and worrying about whether they’ll get along… I have a feeling they will.

Different families, same pressure

Seeing others benefit from Village of Two confirmed what I’d suspected from the beginning. This wasn’t just my household. It was a structural, legible, and changeable pattern.

The details differed. Different countries, different partners, different social setups. But the shape of the pressure was the same.

The misdiagnosis (structural tension looking like a relationship problem) and the resulting resentment are not a personal failure. It’s a pattern. I’ve seen it in us, in my friends, in the women I coach. I see it in the messages I get here. I see it in the research.

Women are not struggling because they’re doing it wrong. We are operating under unrealistic demands and with no support. And we deserve so much better.

That realisation didn’t feel like a business opportunity. It felt like a calling.

Village of Two is the work I show up for every single day. I build it in the gaps between everything else. I pitch it to organisations. I think about it at daycare drop-offs. And now I’m bringing it to you.

Map your household. Pass it on.

Not everyone reading this will be in the thick of parenting right now. Maybe your kids are older, maybe you had a stronger support system or you got lucky with your village. But I bet most of you know a few women who still are.

The first two steps in the programme are free and accessible to all. That’s not a promotion. It’s a commitment I’ve made because help should be available to all women, independent of their financial situation.

Take it yourself or spread the word and help it reach someone who’d benefit.

It takes ten minutes. Your results are visible right away. And then a session where we look at what you can actually do with them.

[Take the free Diagnostic →]

Over the coming months, I’ll share more about the tools, the stories of the women who have been through the programme, and my own journey through all of this.
Subscribe if you are interested in honest reflections and practical tools for the no-village parenting life.

PS. To the people in this Substack community who gave feedback on early versions, challenged my thinking, and quietly helped shape what Village of Two became: you know who you are. Thank you!

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This is the third piece in the Village of Two series. The first, on why some of us chose the distance from family, is here. The second, on what it actually costs to be a Village of 2, is here.

Nobody tells you that resentment will be part of it. That it might even be necessary.

They tell you about the sleep deprivation. The identity shift. The mental load.
People are more honest about those now. (And even in this space, we still have a long way to go.)

But the resentment? That one still lives in the gap between what you feel and what you’re allowed to say out loud.

It arrives quietly, and usually sideways. Often at the small things.

At the way he can fall asleep anywhere, instantly, without apparent guilt about what isn’t done yet. The way he can’t see what’s right in front of him or put his plate away after dinner.

At your friend whose mother shows up every Tuesday without being asked, and takes the kids for the day.

At yourself, for being angry about something you can’t even fully explain.

For not being the easy-going mother you told yourself you would be.

That last one is the worst.

Here is what I have come to understand about resentment, after years of sitting with my own:

Resentment is not a personal flaw. It is an early signal begging for intervention. And when you listen to it, it becomes one of the most useful tools you have.

Left ignored long enough, it hardens into the poisonous version we tend to associate with the word.

I call these Signal resentment and Poison resentment. This piece is about the first one.

Signal resentment is not necessarily a sign that you love the wrong person, or that you are the wrong person.

It is information.

Specific, uncomfortable, useful information about a system that doesn’t acknowledge effort and sacrifice, or distribute weight fairly.

The question is not how to squash it. The question is what it is telling you, and where it actually belongs.

If you are reading this, you are likely part of what I call the Transition Generation - the ones who changed the patterns, but did not inherit the support to sustain them.

You questioned how you were raised. You did the therapy. You built the emotional vocabulary. You decided, consciously, that things would be different in the relationship, the parenting, the patterns.

And then you had a child.

And you discovered that conscious parenting, in the absence of a village, is one of the most structurally isolating positions a person can occupy.

Previous generations had more support and less awareness.
The grandmother was in the kitchen. The neighbour knew your child’s name. The village was ambient. Not always healthy, not always welcome, but structurally present.

You built the awareness. You did not inherit the infrastructure to support it.
Or you did, and you chose to walk away from it.

Nobody handed you a replacement household template to run this life. So you are building one in real time, under pressure, while trying to stay a decent partner, a present parent, and still a person.

That is not a parenting problem. That is a structural problem with a personal cost.

And the resentment is part of that cost. Before you can decide where to direct it, you have to get past the shame of feeling it at all. And to get real honest about where it comes from.

Start here: not all Signal resentment comes from the same place, and the distinction matters.

Some of it is real misalignment.

The relationship itself may be part of the problem, not just the structure around it.

Values are out of sync. Effort is genuinely unequal. One person is carrying significantly more, and the other is not stepping up.
Not because of a blind spot, but because of a different understanding of what this life requires.

That resentment is valid. And it is different from the rest.

It does not resolve with a better system or a clearer map. It requires a direct conversation about what each person actually expects from this relationship (ideally with a professional in the room).

Trying to fix a values problem with a household tool is like rearranging furniture when the house is on fire. This is the territory of couples therapy, and there is no shortcut through it.

Some of it is a perception gap.

Research finds that fathers are more likely than mothers to believe the mental load is equally shared, even when it isn’t.
Mothers handle, on average, 71% of cognitive household labour. Fathers, on average, estimate they handle close to half. (Source: Weeks & Ruppanner, Journal of Marriage and Family, 2024)

This is not malice. It is a documented blind spot.

He is not pretending not to see it. He genuinely, often, does not see it.

The work is invisible by nature. It happens in your head, before anything appears on a to-do list. And invisible work does not register the same way for someone who is not the one carrying it.

The most effective move here is deceptively simple: stop describing how it feels and start showing what you carry.

Not as a complaint but as a map. Writing it down together, in full, changes the conversation. When both people are looking at the same picture rather than arguing from their own internal experience, something shifts. It does not solve everything. But it creates the shared visibility that makes a real conversation possible.

And some of it is structural.

Nobody is failing. The system simply has no margin. Both people are absorbing more than they should (and could), and the weight lands unevenly not because of intent, but because of how the default is set up.

A household template nobody designed and nobody questioned, running on two people who were never given the tools to do it differently.

This is the most common type I see in nuclear families with no support close by. And the least talked about.

Here is the trap.

Most people arrive at resentment and assume they are in the first category.

The relationship is the problem. He is the problem… Or you are the problem.

And so the resentment either gets aimed at the person closest to you, or it turns inward. Because you cannot justify being this angry at someone who is, by most measures, there and doing their best.

Neither direction helps. And neither is accurate.

A reader described a situation to me recently that I think about often:

Building furniture while heavily pregnant, telling herself it was strength.

A decade later, naming it as resentment in a therapist’s office.
Working on her limits, her patterns, her boundaries. Because those were the tools available, and because the actual cause felt too big and too diffuse to be a proper target.

Nowadays, she has a different view altogether: It was the system all along. She just didn’t have the language for it yet.

The misdiagnosis is not a personal failure either. It is what happens when the actual source of the problem (a structural gap, a perception blind spot) is too abstract and undefined to be a proper target. So it lands somewhere closer.

The other trap is suppression.

Resentment that is managed rather than acknowledged does not go away. It comes back as Poison resentment that is hard to shake.

A shorter fuse, more distance, a version of yourself you don’t recognise.

This is what I’d love more couples to understand:

We were handed a family template nobody designed and nobody taught us to question. We are paying for it in ways we are only beginning to name.

The resentment is not the problem. But it is often the most honest and urgent signal that something in your system needs attention.

And you can’t change what you can’t see. In the next piece, we’ll look at how to make that visible.



If this resonates, follow along with the Village of Two series

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This is the second piece in the Village of Two series. The first, on why some of us chose the distance, is here.


My son was two years old.

My husband had just left for London on an early flight. I had actually encouraged him to stay a few days, see the city, and catch up with friends. We used to live there after all, and still haven’t made it back even for a weekend. He decided to keep it short. Same-day return.

My son woke up completely fine. Jumping up and down in bed, full of energy.

Fifteen minutes later, he started throwing up.

By two o’clock, I was on the floor of his room, holding his small body against mine with one hand and calling the ambulance with the other.

The man who answered didn’t speak English. My German is functional, not medical. I was trying to describe “lethargic.” I didn’t know the word. I was trying to explain that he hadn’t kept down a spoonful of water in four hours and that I had never seen him like this.

I was scared.

The man on the phone could hear that, even if he couldn’t fully understand me.

My husband landed. I counted the hours. Then the minutes.

I needed that extra pair of hands so badly.

I’ve told that story a few times since. The response is almost always the same: “That sounds so hard. It happened to me too.”

What most of us don’t realised in these moments:

This is not a story about a bad day. It’s a story about a strained system.

We are a Village of Two.

No family nearby. No one has a key to our flat. No one I could have called at two in the afternoon who could’ve been there by three.

Not because we’re isolated. Not because we failed to build a community. We’re actually among the better-connected couples in our circle. And we worked hard to make this happen, consciously investing time and energy we barely had to begin with.

This is simply how many lives are structured nowadays.

Some of us chose it. Expats, who moved countries, built from scratch, wanted independence, space and something intentional.

Some of us had no real choice. The village was never safe to begin with. Proximity was never the same thing as support.

The reasons are different. The structure is the same.And in both cases: the village is not coming.

And what I find even more crucial:

We don’t always realise what this will mean (the good, the bad and the ugly). Not ahead of time. And not even in the moment.

At first, nothing looks broken.

Two adults. One child (or more if you’re brave). Life moves.

You organise, you plan, you cover each other. From the outside, it can even look calm. No family feud and generational trauma triggers on the weekly.

And for a while, from the inside, it feels manageable. Because you are managing it.

But there’s a difference between a system that holds and a system that is being held together. In a Village of Two, it’s almost always the second one.

The holding together is invisible. It looks like thinking ahead, compensating before things fall apart, absorbing small shocks before they become large ones.

It looks like competence, because it is.

But competence at that level has a cost. And the cost accumulates quietly.

Think of a small airline with one plane and two people crew. They fly the plane, and they serve the drinks and food. And they have a full 24/7 schedule.

It works until one of them gets sick. And eventually, both get sick at the same time. That is when you find out the system never had a margin.

You will never allow this to happen in a work setting, but at home it happens all the time.

A sick day. A work trip. Childcare that cancels with two hours’ notice. A child who doesn’t sleep for three weeks.

None of these are exceptional parenting events.

In a system with a buffer, they are inconveniences. In a system with no buffer, they are the whole thing.

In a Village of Two, there is nowhere for the extra load to go. So it goes into the people. And the people absorb it.

Because the child still needs to eat. And be picked up. And be put to bed. The world doesn’t pause for understaffing.

This is the part that took me the longest to understand.

The strain is not mainly emotional, even though it shows up that way.

It is a structural load with a personal cost.

Here is what that strain does, specifically.

It removes recovery. You rest, but you do not recover. Recovery requires someone else to hold the weight for long enough that your system actually resets, and that rarely happens in practice. There is always something pending, something fragile, something that depends on you. So even when you stop, you do not stop. And you definitely don’t do it guilt-free.

It turns the relationship into a negotiation. Not because you stop loving each other, but because without slack in the system, everything becomes a trade-off. Who works. Who rests. Who takes the sick day. Who travels. Who carries. Over time this shifts the texture of how you relate. You stop being two people who chose each other and become two people managing a household together. The love is still there. It is just running on the wrong fuel.

It makes small things expensive. In a system with a buffer, a bad week is a bad week. In a Village of Two, it cascades. A sick child at the wrong moment becomes a work crisis. A sleepless night before a big day becomes a week of recovery. A disagreement without the bandwidth to repair it becomes resentment that sits in the walls.

Not because you are fragile. Because the system is.

I want to name the misdiagnosis, because it is almost universal.

When the pressure builds, it looks like a relationship problem. It looks like communication issues, emotional distance, and misalignment. So you address that. You try to be more patient. You go to therapy. Both are reasonable responses. Neither touches the actual problem.

We did all that. We’ve been to therapy. But no one named what was happening.

What was happening was not a relationship problem. It was a staffing crisis.

And almost all of the advice available to no-village families either points outward, at the structures that dismantled the village, or points back at you: build your community, ask for help, move closer to family. Both leave you in the same place. Holding the bag and being told it is your job to find a bigger pair of hands.

And yes, we chose this life. We moved. We built from scratch. We wanted something intentional.

What I didn’t understand at the time is that independence is not neutral. It removes friction in some places and adds it in others.

And still, there are so many of us living like this. Coping. Functioning. Holding it together.

The question is not whether it works. It does.

The question is at what cost. And whether you can see it clearly enough to change something structural, rather than just to try harder.

Because the nature of this particular pressure is that it hides inside competence. The more capable you are, the longer you can absorb it before it surfaces. And by the time it surfaces, it has usually already been sitting in the walls for years.

What changed for us was not better communication.

It was recognising that we were dealing with structural tension, not personal or relationship failure.

That shift alone changed how we saw each other. And then it changed the question.

Not “why aren’t we coping better?”

But “where exactly is our set-up under strain, and where could the pressure go instead?”

I have been building a map of where the weight actually sits in our household, which parts are compensating for which, and where the pressure is likely to surface next if nothing shifts. It has made such a difference for us. That is what the next piece is about.

If this resonates, subscribe to follow the Village of Two series.

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Dedication: For the mothers caught between the cost of a village that isn’t safe and the cost of not having one at all.

Five days. That’s all it took.

Last week we went back to my home country, and my parents came to visit us.

Within four days, I had let my guard down.

My heart had started to fill with something I hadn’t felt in a while: the small, quiet possibility of what could be. My four-year-old son fixing something around the house with my father. My mother’s face when he used a new Bulgarian word he’d just learnt. My son connecting with a language and a culture that is half of who he is, and all of where I came from.

These were moments I hadn’t seen in his four years of life, not like this.

I let myself want it.
I let myself grieve all the years we hadn’t had it.
I let myself hope that the next four years might be different.

But by day five, the old dynamics were fully back.

The fall from even that small height hurt more than I expected.

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Before I go further, there is something this piece won’t make sense without.

I grew up being responsible for the emotional weather of the adults around me.

The clinical term is emotional parentification: when a child becomes the family’s emotional regulator, the one responsible for managing her parents’ feelings, without ever being allowed to have her own, or learning how to recognise and tend to them.

You learn to read a room before you’ve learned to read.
You learn that your job is to anticipate, smooth, and contain.
To make others happy.

But parentification was only part of it. I won’t go into detail for the rest, but it suffices to say:

Love in my family was transactional. Conditional on performance, on compliance, on not taking up too much space with your own inconvenient inner life. The children were responsible for the happiness and suffering of the adults. That was simply the unspoken, unconscious contract.

I spent years in therapy learning that this was not the norm.
I am still, today, learning to trust my feelings and to give them wings.

So there we were on day five.

My parents in my house. My son watching, absorbing everything that was happening around him like the curious, magical sponge that he is.

I could feel it returning. The old comments, the gestures, the patterns.

Theirs returned, and mine came running right back.

Years of therapy meant my reactions were not the same. They were more measured, more contained, more protective. But the vigilance and the anticipation were there before I even noticed them.

My nervous system doesn’t forget. It spikes, it braces, it takes over before the choice even reaches my consciousness.

Experiencing the before and after in my body was shocking. It was troubling and draining and physically intense in a way close to nothing else is. And I only realised it because I had been outside of this environment for long enough to feel how unnatural it all was.

And here is what I saw with uncomfortable clarity:

If this were daily life, my son would be learning from it. Normalising it. Just like I did at his age.

Not because my parents would set out to harm him. They love him. And they love me.

But children don’t learn about love from intentions or words. They learn from what they witness. A child who watches his mother be spoken to without care, who grows up in an atmosphere where love is something you earn and can lose, who absorbs a template of closeness that looks like control … That child builds his relational world from that material.

Children who grow up around transactional love learn one thing above all else: that they are only as lovable as their last performance. And they carry that into every relationship they ever have.

That is what I am protecting him from. Not people. But patterns.

And there is a second cost, quieter but just as real.

The version of me that exists after five days in that dynamic is not the mother I have worked hard to become. The stress, the hypervigilance, the managed words and contained feelings. They all hold on the surface but leak underneath.

Studies confirm it: a mother under chronic stress becomes less emotionally available to her child. The child gets what leaks through.

I don’t need research to tell me this. I felt it on day five.

Here is the grief I wasn’t expecting.

Until this visit, my pain about the no-village life had a particular shape.

Before our son was born, my parents spoke about being there and helping out. They weren’t. For years, I grieved what felt like their choice – a door that might still open one day.

I was grieving the village that was withheld.

Now I grieve something different, and harder.

I grieve the village I would not choose, even if it were offered.

That shift carries its own particular weight. From “they took it from me” to “I would not take it even if I could”.

Grief, yes. Because choosing distance also means choosing against something that could have been available. Something I glimpsed in those four days. A warmth, a hope, a version of things I allowed myself to want. Something other people have without realising how rare it is.

Guilt, because I am the one closing the door now.

And pride, because I know what I am doing and why. And it is the most deliberate act of love I know how to make for my son.

All three, at the same time, not resolving neatly into each other.

This is not everyone’s story.

Some families are genuinely close and genuinely safe. If you have that, hold it. It is rarer than it looks.

But then there are those of us for whom proximity was never simply a question of distance. For whom the village was never neutral.

Who have had to weigh, quietly and sometimes alone, what closeness actually costs. Not in miles, but in who we become when we return to it.

If you are one of those women: proximity is not the same thing as support. And sometimes the distance is not just a loss. It is what makes breaking generational cycles possible. Sometimes it is the bravest thing you quietly keep choosing.

Only you know that. In your gut.

Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

That’s the trade-off. I choose it every year.

And I am learning, slowly, to see it for what it is instead of apologising for it.

Because the distance can be both the wound and the medicine.

One more thing, because it belongs here.

This piece is about the why. The next one will be about the cost: what the no-village life actually takes from your body, your capacity, and the relationship closest to you.
As well as what you can do about it in a two-person village set-up.

These conversations deserve their own space.

Subscribe if you are interested in honest reflections and practical tools for the no-village parenting life.

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If this resonated and you’d like to support the work behind it, you can do so here.

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I got the letter this week.

The biopsy was benign.

Benign.

Such a small word for something that can hold so much weight.

I was surprised by the degree of relief I felt.

Because even though, for a change, I wasn’t allowing myself to spiral into “what ifs” and worst-case scenarios,

for weeks of waiting, I knew something had shifted.

And there was the weight of something invisible sitting on my shoulders.

And here’s the part that keeps replaying in my head:

I almost didn’t go.

I told myself I wasn’t avoiding it.

But I kind of was.

Language barriers. Medical anxiety. Inconvenience.

All of it made it easy to delay.

It just felt a bit excessive and more so inconvenient.

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The doctor had initially told me to come in for an extra appointment between the regular two-year insurance-funded checks. Later, in the appointment, he seemed to have forgotten that and tried to send me back home.

Given that I don’t speak good German and can’t fully advocate for myself in medical situations, moments like this skyrocket my anxiety. I kept telling myself, if only I’d known there would be a discussion about it, I would not have come.

In reality, I dragged myself there while quietly listing all the reasons it was inconvenient, right up until I stepped into the office.

It was a cold, wintry day. I was tired. I had just recovered from a cold and didn’t want to catch something new.

The appointment was painfully early. Who knew how long I’d be stuck in the waiting room?

What if they were rude when they realised I couldn’t fully communicate in their language?
What if I was taking time away from someone who needed it more?
What if I was overreacting?
I’d already gone to another check-up that year. Wasn’t that enough?

All the tiny reasons that add up to not going.

If it wasn’t for my German husband, I don’t know if I would have been diligent enough to even book the appointment in the first place.
Or to show up for it.

Germans take appointments with a severity I am not sure I apply to any part of my life.
And I wasn’t up for a guilt trip. So I went.

So when I asked to be examined anyway, they agreed to a partial check-up.

I was as cool as I could be in an awkward social situation loaded with the additional language barrier.

The doctor’s face was calm.

And then… very much not calm.

Within five minutes, there was a clear before and after.

He said he had a bad feeling in his tummy (literal translation. I didn’t like hearing that) and referred me to a surgeon.

So here we are.

Weeks after surgery.

And it’s benign.

And I can’t be more grateful.

Suddenly, my brain and body urge me to rush back into “normal.”
To use that saved cognitive energy on travel plans, groceries, emails and Substack notes.

Productivity as anaesthesia. Self-prescribed.

So instead I am choosing to notice that instinct and defy it (oh, no, she didn’t just use the ‘d’ word).

I’m writing this piece for two reasons.

First, to slow myself down and notice what my brain is trying to outrun.

Second, to be your slightly naggy, German-adjacent friend and say:

Book that appointment you’ve been deprioritising.

Because I know I’m not the only mum who will do anything except take care of herself.

And you are not either.

There’s research behind this (if this doesn’t make you feel less alone, I don’t know what will).

Women carry the mental load of families, like appointments, school forms, dentist visits, and vaccinations. We become the administrators of everyone else’s health.

But studies show we delay our own preventive care.

Time feels scarce. Guilt feels loud. Symptoms feel minimisable.

And if we’ve ever felt dismissed in a medical setting, avoidance becomes self-protection.

It’s not irresponsibility as much as it’s conditioning.

For the brain-loving girlies out there, this might also resonate:

Negative results are hard for the brain to register as progress.

It feels like nothing happened. Like you went through stress, surgery, waiting, and the outcome is simply: no.

But a “no” is not the absence of an answer. It’s not a lack of outcome.

It’s information. It’s certainty. It’s prevention doing a quiet job.

The brain is just not very good at celebrating what didn’t happen.

We’re wired to equate progress with visible change. But sometimes progress is the thing that didn’t happen.

After all, routine checks feel excessive — until they don’t.

Even with that in mind, it’s so easy to dismiss what matters simply because it’s uncomfortable or statistically unlikely.

It is easier to say:

“I’m sure it’s nothing.”
“I’ll do it next month.”
“They will flag it if it becomes urgent.”

They won’t.

Don’t get me wrong.

Advocating for yourself in medical settings can feel brutal and so demotivating. I know this. It’s a deeply frustrating reality we live in, which we all learnt about the hard way.

Especially as women. Especially as mothers. (A lot to be said about gender bias in healthcare).

Especially when you’re used to minimising your own signals.

So I say this with love:

The system does not remember you.
You have to remember yourself.

Use whatever self-talk works for you; no one will know
(I put my people pleasing tendencies to good use here, you might use the ‘I need to be healthy for my kids’ slogan or maybe reward yourself with some kickass cake after).

Just make the appointment.

Even when you think it’s nothing.
Especially then.

This time, I did.

Next time, I hope I do again.

If this resonated and you’d like to support the work behind it, you can do so here.

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Sometimes the simplest and most intuitive framing ends up being the most helpful.

The Capacity Traffic Light came about almost by accident.
It stuck. And it’s been the language we’ve used in our family ever since.

I mentioned it recently in this article on Substack, and I got dozens of messages from people saying it helped them.

So I decided to write a focused piece on the why and the how, in case it gives you language for something you’ve been feeling too.

The idea is simple but effective:

I think of my days as a traffic light.

Green, yellow, or red, depending on how much capacity is actually available.

By capacity, I don’t mean free time. I mean the emotional, mental, and physical room I have in my system that day.

How the Capacity Traffic Light emerged

(Short on time? Feel free to skip straight to the “Green: capacity is available” section.)

If you’ve been following my Substack journey, you might know that our first few years of parenting weren’t easy.

Not only that, but it took us a while for our expectations and language to catch up with reality.

It all started with an argument at a (thankfully empty) children’s playground while visiting my home country.

Our context was difficult in a way that had become familiar, even if we hadn’t fully admitted it yet.

Our son was sick and hadn’t slept for a straight week, dealing with recurring pseudo-croup and nasty coughing and wheezing. (If you’ve been through that, I see you.)

This, and every other viral sickness under the sun, had tortured us nonstop for two years straight. Ever since my son started kindergarten. Oh, the joy of parenting COVID-era kids, whose immune systems were shaped by lockdowns rather than play dates.

I was trying to survive, take care of the little one, translate, work, keep the peace with the in-laws, and be there for everyone….

Then my husband expressed a grievance that opened Pandora’s box of an argument.

The essence of the tension was this: he was expressing a very real need for connection, and I was operating in survival mode.

Neither of us was wrong, but we were speaking from completely different capacities and prioritisation levels.

That moment made it painfully clear that we were in the same situation, but living in very different internal realities.

After many hard follow-up conversations, we got much better at recognising and naming capacity as a deciding factor.

The more we named it, the better we became at discussing invisible labour, aligning expectations, creating space, and practising self-compassion.

What capacity is and why it matters

I find that one of the most destabilising parts of parenting is not necessarily a single moment, or even a given period.

It’s how inconsistent it feels.

Some days you cope.
Now and then, you even think, dang, I’m not bad at this.
Other days, the same routine, the same child, the same life … and you’re suddenly at the edge of yourself.

Nothing necessarily “happened”.
Nothing obvious went wrong.
And yet everything feels heavier.

That inconsistency is where a lot of quiet shame and guilt live.

We tell ourselves:
“I thought I was past this.”
“I was doing better.”
“Why does it feel like I’m back here again?”

For a while, I kept asking myself the same questions.:

Why does this feel harder than it seems to be for others?
Why can I manage parenting, but not everything else alongside it, the way I expected?
And why does it feel like the ground keeps shifting just as I find my footing?

What finally helped wasn’t motivation or mindset.

It was learning to think in capacity, not progress.

By capacity, I mean the emotional, mental, and physical room you have available at any given moment.

It’s a state, not a personality trait. And it changes far more often than we expect.

(You can start a day in yellow and end it in red. Or move back toward green with the right conditions.)

The lie of linear recovery

We are taught to expect improvement to look like a line.
Upward. Gradual. Stable.

Parenting does not work like that.

Your nervous system is not on a straight path.

It’s responding to sleep, hormones, cognitive load, emotional labour, conflict, novelty, pressure, isolation and demand. Often all at once.

So instead of asking:
“Am I better or worse than last month?”, ask

“What is my capacity today?”

That’s where the Capacity Traffic Light comes in.

Green: capacity is available

Green doesn’t mean life is easy.
It means your system has room.

On green days:

• Planning and decision-making feel possible

• You have access to perspective & energy

• You can tolerate friction without spiralling

• You recover faster after a hard moment

You might still be tired.
You might still be juggling a lot.

But you’re not constantly bracing.

You have energy for change, action and movement.

This is the tricky part. Many of us are led to expect green to be the default state of parenting, especially early on. When it isn’t, we assume something is wrong with us.

I’d argue this expectation itself is part of the problem.

Yellow: capacity is limited

Yellow is where most parents actually live on the day-to-day, though we often treat it like a failure state.

On yellow days:

• You’re functioning, but with less margin.

• Small things tend to take disproportionate effort

• Noise, interruptions, or emotional bids tend to land harder

• You can do things, but not endlessly
  

This is where many people make things worse for themselves.

They plan their days as if they’re green.
They add “just one more thing”.
They push because “nothing is technically wrong”.

Because other people managed, so they should too.

And then they’re surprised when the system tips into red.

Yellow requires pacing and prioritisation, not pushing.

Red: capacity is depleted

Red is survival mode.

It is not a weakness.
It’s a moment and a signal. A signal to slow down, be kinder, and plan accordingly.

On red days:

• Your nervous system is overloaded

• Logic, reassurance or ambition don’t land

• Everything feels urgent or impossible

• Rest doesn’t feel restorative, just physically necessary

• You feel stuck between “this can’t continue” and having no capacity to do anything about it.

Red is when people say things like:
“I’m not coping.”
“I can’t do this.”
“I need everything to stop.”
“I can’t wait for this day to end.”

The mistake is trying to reason yourself out of red, or pretending you or your partner aren’t there.
Or shaming yourself for being there.

Red doesn’t need fixing.
It needs containment, i.e. reducing input rather than demanding more output.

Less input. Fewer decisions. Lower expectations. Prioritising self-care moments.

And, crucially, no self-interrogation.

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What this looks like in my real life

Red days are survival days, where everyone is sick, and sleep is broken, and simply keeping things moving counts as success.

Yellow days are ordinary days, where routines mostly hold, and I can show up competently in a few important places. It’s not much, but it’s an honest life.

Green days are take-over-the-world days, when I’ve slept eight hours, and everything feels possible.

All three are valid and real.

Why this framework matters

Relationally

My husband and I gained a shared language and could name where we were without blame.

You and your partner can be in different colours at the same time. That doesn’t mean either of you is wrong.

Contextually

It also helped me understand why the last three years felt impossible to “thrive” in. We were spending most of our time in red. Over time, red gave way to more yellow, with green appearing in short but growing stretches.

That progression isn’t universal, and it doesn’t need to be. The framework works wherever you are.

Individually

I stopped judging myself so harshly.
I stopped planning my life around my best days.
I stopped making promises on green days that my red days couldn’t keep.

Instead, I started designing my weeks around capacity reality, not hope.

The traffic light doesn’t tell you what to do.
It tells you what’s possible.

And that distinction changes a lot for me.

How I use this now

Every Monday, I do a simple check-in.

What colour is my capacity today?

I’ve started sharing these as mini check-ins on Substack.

Just for that Monday. Not forward-looking. It can change throughout the day, but it’s enough to set the tone and reconnect with myself after a usually messy weekend.

The key is that it’s not aspirational.
It’s not based on how I want the week to go.
It’s just honest.

Some weeks are green.
Many winter days are still red.
Most are yellow.

I don’t publish this as a productivity ritual. Pretending I have more capacity than I do no longer serves me.

Join me in practising

Knowing your colour doesn’t automatically change how you act when you’re in it.

That’s the part most frameworks skip.

But naming is the first step that actually sticks.

If this language helps you make sense of your own reality, feel free to use it.
Or even better - Join me in the Monday check-ins (you don’t have to share the why, naming the colour is already a step).

Some days aren’t for pushing.
Some days aren’t for insight.
Some days are just red.

And that, too, is information.

If this resonated and you’d like to support the work behind it, you can do so here.

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I got laid off and became a parent at roughly the same time.

And let me tell you, it ended up being the hardest period of my life.

At the time, these felt like two completely separate events.

One professional. One personal.
One public. One deeply private.

I was navigating a colicky baby, recurring mastitis, debilitating sleep deprivation, and very little support, with all the physical and mental strain that this cocktail of circumstances brings.

Around the same time, my employer made a decision that effectively sidelined legal maternal protection, and a few of us new mothers were let go and left to fight our way through the legal system.

Back then, I didn’t even have the space to fully think about what was happening.

I was in survival mode. Surely this was an unlucky coincidence I simply had to push through.

What I didn’t know was that two major ruptures were landing on me at once.

Both dismantled an identity I had spent a lifetime building.

Both removed my structure and coping mechanisms overnight.
Both came with a quiet but persistent expectation: Adapt. Pronto.

No preparation.
No real support.

Just: Get better at coping. These things happen. That’s life.

Now that I’ve fought my way out of these trenches, I can look back and name what I couldn’t see then, and what too many people are left alone with, when multiple transitions hit at once.

Identity shock, not just a life change

We often talk about layoffs as economic events.
And about parenthood as a “natural transition.”

But both are identity shocks.

Suddenly, the version of you that knew how to operate in the world is gone.
Your routines and social circle are ripped away.
Your confidence and safety wobble.
Your sense of value and competence becomes unclear.

And yet, the outside world keeps moving as if nothing fundamental happened, while your internal world is going completely upside down. The mismatch is destabilising.

The pressure to recover quickly

After a layoff, you’re encouraged to reframe, stay positive, and move on quickly. You don’t want to damage your employability, after all.

After becoming a parent, the message is eerily similar. Not in the words used, but in the underlying pressure being built.

Breastfeeding is natural. So is motherhood.

Be grateful.
Don’t complain.
Enjoy every moment.
Get back to “normal.”

In both cases, struggle is subtly framed as a personal failure.
If you’re not coping, the assumption is that you’re doing it wrong.

Invisible labour and private grief

What both experiences also share is the amount of invisible work involved.

The emotional regulation.
The identity rebuilding.
The meaning-making.
The fear you don’t say out loud.
The grief you’re not really allowed to express.

Much of this happens alone, in the background, while you’re still expected to perform some version of competence.

That can be exhausting and deeply lonely.

The uncomfortable realisation

After experiencing how little structural protection and support there is for vulnerable people in the moments after a layoff, I later started teaching others how to navigate their emotional and structural aftermath.

In my work, I would coach people on:

• Understanding and naming the magnitude of the change

• Treating it as a transition process, not a problem or a personal failure. A process that needs naming, time and support.

• Separating identity from role, and exploring new values and needs

• Creating immediate support structures and new routines

• Adapting expectations to the new reality (what is versus what should be)

• Self-compassion, self-care and emotional grounding methods

And at some point, it hit me:

These are exactly the tools I wish I’d had in early motherhood.

Not because parenting is a job.
But because becoming a parent is a transition of even greater magnitude.

One that we systematically underestimate, underprepare for, and undersupport.

Systemic gaps, personal cost

What hits me hardest now is that we keep framing these external transitions as individual adjustment problems, instead of acknowledging the systemic gaps around them.

We expect resilience where support should exist.
We individualise what is clearly structural.

And particularly in the context of parenting, when women “lose it” under that pressure, we label it weakness instead of information.

Closing

This period broke me open and forced me to build myself back up, piece by piece.

Despite the disorientation, doubt, and personal toll, I had my baby’s back at 100%. That will forever make me proud.

But I didn’t have my own.

That’s the part I had to learn the hard way, and the part I now help others with.

I was moving through two identity-level transitions at once, with far less support and understanding than either deserved.

If I could do one thing differently, it wouldn’t be to cope better.

It would be to fall apart sooner. To ask for help louder.

That realisation changed how I see my past.
And how I work with people going through change now.

Maybe our responsibility as individuals isn’t to become better at coping.

Maybe it’s to recognise that it doesn’t have to be this hard, and to look for help earlier, before we lose ourselves trying to meet expectations that were never designed for reality.

Important context

I live in Germany, where there is legal protection for mothers during maternity leave. But in practice, that protection is far more fragile than people assume. Layoffs can and do still happen during this legal protection period, as they did to me and dozens of other mothers I’ve met since. The burden of fighting back legally often falls on the individual, precisely at the moment they are most vulnerable. For expats unfamiliar with the system, this imbalance becomes even sharper.

The legal reality differs across countries. Sadly, the lived reality rarely does.

I was talking to a friend recently who is fascinated by space and astronauts.
And no, it wasn’t my toddler, who coincidentally expanded his list of interests this week to include astronauts alongside dragons, firefighters, dinosaurs, doctors, and builders named Bob.

Back to my friend.

We ended up talking about how much preparation goes into long space missions. Not just the technical training, but the anticipation of what the experience will demand mentally from the people onboard.

The isolation. The altered day-night cycles. The separation from family. The loss of privacy. The knowledge that people return changed, and need time to reintegrate.

What I can’t stop thinking about is how much I wish we treated the transition into parenting with even a fraction of that rightful seriousness.

We prepare intensely for birth (and as we should).

There are classes, checklists, books, and plans.

We learn how labour progresses, how pain might show up, how to breathe through it, how to push, how to stimulate oxytocin through smells and sounds, and how to advocate for ourselves in the room.

Then the baby arrives.

Done. You are a parent now. Good luck.

The launch is complete. Now it’s orbit time.

The unspoken assumption is that once birth is over, the rest will resolve itself through instinct, love, or mindset.

That the hardest part is behind us. And whatever comes next is simply a natural adjustment.

But for many parents, the shock is not (only) the birth itself.

It is how long the transition lasts.

Not weeks.
Not a few months.
But years.

Even if the birth was “unproblematic” in medical terms.
Even if you have a loving partner next to you.
Even if you wanted this and fought hard for it.

From one day to the next, your life changes irreversibly.

Time no longer stretches the way it used to. Energy has hard edges. Attention is pulled outward, again and again. Responsibility is no longer something you enter and exit, but something that hums constantly in the background, like a machine you cannot turn off.

What we rarely acknowledge is this:

Adjusting to parenthood is not a reaction to an internal change.
It is a reaction to a large and sudden external shift.

You do not slowly grow into the role from the inside (even though pregnancy initiates some of the adjustments).

There is no onboarding period, no protected learning phase, no clear margin for error. You are placed into a new reality and expected to operate while learning its rules.

We teach women how to give birth, but not how to live inside the after.
We prepare them for the launch, not for orbit.

The “fourth trimester” is about as far as we have come in extending the frame. And even that tends to focus on physical rec

overy, feeding the baby, and negotiating a few more weeks of maternity leave.

The bar is low.

What we leave largely unnamed is how much else has shifted.

• Identity, when there is no clear “before” to return to.

• Competence, when familiar skills no longer apply cleanly.

• Confidence, when recovery is repeatedly interrupted.

• Ambition, care, and fatigue are learning to coexist in the same limited space.

In that context, disorientation, sometimes even grief, is not a personal failure. It is a reasonable response to changed conditions.

And yet, when the difficulty stretches on, many parents assume something has gone wrong. They internalise the struggle. They reach for gratefulness, self-sacrifice, or ‘waiting it out’.

But what if the question itself is misplaced?

What if the issue is not coping or mindset, but systems and expectations? And the lack of tools and support to navigate a transition of this scale?

Naming this gap is not about lowering standards or dampening joy. It is about permission. And mental health.

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Because becoming a parent is not just something that happens to your body or your schedule. It happens to your identity, your assumptions, your sense of continuity.

And that kind of change does not resolve on a six-week timeline.

So I have started thinking of this period as the Long Postpartum.

Not a medical phase, but a life phase. The extended period of integrating a permanent external change while still having to function.

I am far enough past those early months now to have some altitude. There are fewer surprises up here. More clarity. And many lessons that did not need to be learned the hard way.

I don’t want to stand on the hill, take a picture of the view, and turn it into a poster saying, “Look at this. You’ll get here too. Just keep pushing.”

I’m less interested in analysing why the path was never treated as a viable infrastructure project than in making sure it exists.

I want to cut steps into the rock myself.

So fewer women have to slip on the way up.

Here I am, hammer in hand.

If this resonated and you’d like to support the work behind it, you can do so here.

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I want to keep exploring this topic in future essays.

I’ve started thinking about what a Long Postpartum kit might look like. If we treated the first three to four years after birth as a real transition, not an afterthought.

What do you wish you’d known earlier?

Once upon a time, I was a self-proclaimed gratefulness junkie.

I had just moved abroad, put myself through university, entered my early career years, met new people, travelled, tasted freedom. I discovered coaching, and with it, a language I hadn’t grown up with. One that talked about feelings, inner work, and self-development out loud. So I went all in.

Daily lists. Mindset work. Reframing exercises. A gratefulness dinner ritual with my now husband.

I was told, over and over again, that appreciation was the path to happiness. That if I could just focus on my mindset and direct it to what I had, everything else would fall into place.

And for a while, it seemed to work. Or at least, it felt like it did.

Fast forward quite a few years. I became a mother.

Some days I struggled. Other days, I felt deeply unhappy. And almost immediately, I felt the pressure to keep that to myself. To stay positive. To be grateful. To not complain.

It wasn’t only the circumstances that weighed on me.
It was the lack of permission to struggle with them.

When I did open up, I found that other women were often the least willing to let that discomfort exist. Including my own mother.

“You have no right to feel this way,” she said.
“You should be grateful. You have X, Y, Z.”

I will never forget hearing that otherwise well-intentioned sentence from the one person I thought would understand.

Suddenly, gratefulness started feeling like a prison and a way to shut down uncomfortable emotions and invalidate lived experience.

Coming to Substack reminded me how common this experience is.

Again and again, women commented on my writing with some version of the same confession:

“I feel guilty for not being grateful enough.”
“I know things are meant to be good, but I still feel overwhelmed.”
“Others have it worse, so I shouldn’t feel this way.”

My whole body tightens when I read these messages.

And I keep thinking: there has to be a kinder way to go through this.

One that allows unhappiness without cancelling appreciation. One that doesn’t require pain to be justified by comparison. One that understands that two things can be true at the same time.

You can love your life and still struggle in it.
You can appreciate what you have and still feel exhausted.
You can know it could be worse and still feel overwhelmed.

None of these cancel each other out.

What matters is not how things look on paper or what you are supposed to feel.
What matters is that feeling deep inside you are probably not telling others about.

And the sooner you allow that, the smaller the internal fight between expectation and reality becomes.

When gratefulness helps

Gratefulness is not inherently harmful. It can be grounding when it comes from choice rather than pressure.

I find it helps when:

• you already feel emotionally safe

• your nervous system is relatively regulated

• you are not using it to override or suppress emotions

• it is an option, not a moral requirement
  

In those moments, noticing what is good can widen our perspective and soften our edges.

When gratefulness backfires

When you are overwhelmed, depleted, sleep-deprived, or emotionally flooded, even well-intended gratefulness can do more harm than good.

Psychologically and neurologically, this makes sense.

When you are in survival mode, and the nervous system is in a threat state, the brain prioritises safety, not perspective. Asking yourself to “be grateful” in that moment is like asking a drowning person to admire the weather. The system is not receptive.

Instead of calming you, forced gratefulness can create:

• supressed emotions that grow with time

• shame and guilt for having the “wrong” feelings

• internal conflict between what you feel and what you think you ‘should’ feel

That doesn’t put the fire out, but it throws more wood on it.

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What to do instead

Check your basic needs first

Before working on your mindset, let’s check your basics.

Many motherhood struggles are not a lack of gratitude or resilience. They are the result of unmet needs (often physical ones).

Sleep. Food. Water. Hygiene. Rest. Being held or helped.

When these are missing, no amount of reframing will land. Care comes before insight.

Start with truth, not appreciation. Even if saying the truth feels uncomfortable. Especially then.

Before asking “What am I grateful for?”, ask:

• What am I actually feeling right now?

(Writing it down often helps more than saying it out loud. There is less self-editing.)

• Where do I feel it in my body?

(This often makes the feeling less overwhelming.)

• What is hard, without justification or comparison?
  

Write it down plainly and factually.
Tired. Lonely. Overstimulated. Trapped. Angry. Sad. Afraid. Regretful.

Only once the feeling is acknowledged can the system settle. And only then does appreciation have a chance to arise naturally, if it wants to.

Replace gratefulness with permission

Allow the negative feeling to be there.

“I give myself permission to…

(feel unhappy / struggle / feel like I am failing / feel bad without immediately fixing or reframing.)

And remember: when others struggle to sit with your pain, it is often because they don’t yet know how to sit with their own.

Try neutral noticing instead of positive reframing

Instead of “I should be grateful for…”, try writing down:

• One thing that was slightly less hard today

• One moment that didn’t require effort

• One thing that supported me, even briefly

No emotion required. Just noticing.

Let appreciation be a byproduct, not a task

You cannot fake or rush appreciation. You will know when you’re ready for it.

When gratefulness comes from safety, it feels warm.
When it comes from obligation, it feels tight.

Please remember - You do not owe the world your gratefulness.
You owe yourself honesty.

And paradoxically, when honesty is allowed, recovery and appreciation often find their way back on their own.

If gratefulness has stopped working for you, you are not failing, and you are not alone. You are listening to yourself more closely now.

And that is both hard and deeply inspiring.

If this resonated and you’d like to support the work behind it, you can do so here.

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Those who know me well know this about me:
I am a perfectionist in recovery. And a lifelong patron of high

expectations.

I won’t go into the full origin story here, but growing up around emotionally immature parents probably had something to do with it. I learned early that being capable, composed, and high-functioning was not just useful. It was safe.

Before becoming a parent, I genuinely believed I could juggle while sprinting.
I was good at breaking glass ceilings, managing complexity, delivering under pressure, and staying composed when things got messy. Control was my comfort zone. It made me feel competent. Valued. And, most importantly, safe.

So when I became a parent, I expected I would adapt quickly.

I brought the same Eastern European hard-worker mentality I’d always relied on. The same standards. The same belief that if I just tried hard enough, planned well enough, cared deeply enough, I’d figure it out.

Instead, I lost control.

Over and over again.

I lost control of my sleep.
Of my priorities.
Of my plans.
Of my mental and physical health.

And I found that far more unsettling than I expected, in the existential kind of way only a tiny human’s finger can find and press.

Parenting has a particular way of dismantling identities built on performance. Especially for those of us who’ve learned to derive safety from competence and approval.
There are no clean feedback loops. No applause. No “well done” for surviving another night on two hours of sleep or holding it together during a meltdown that makes no sense to anyone involved.

There’s also no room to negotiate with a colicky baby or a sick toddler using logic, experience, or reputation. None of the things that used to work worked anymore.

Instead of feeling fulfilled or glowing, I was confronted with parts of myself I’d carefully avoided for years: my inability to rest without guilt, my tendency to override my own limits, my discomfort with dependency, my resistance to being gentle with myself.

My burnout deepened.
My depression followed.

Not dramatically. Quietly.
In the way that makes it harder to name, and easier to doubt yourself.

And yet… I did it.

Not gracefully.
Not impressively.
But honestly.

And definitely not quickly.

Somewhere along the way, I realised that I was falling apart, and that something else was slowly taking shape underneath.

I think of it now as version 2.0 of myself. More complex. Higher stakes. Less polished. But also more grounded. More real. More alive to what actually matters.

The turning point came when I stopped trying to regain control and started learning how to live with less of it.

That sounds abstract, but for me it became very practical.

I stopped planning my life around the “ideal day” and started understanding my days like a traffic light.

There are:

• Red days: survival days, where everyone is sick, sleep is broken, and simply keeping things moving counts as success.

• Yellow days: ordinary days, where routines hold, and I can show up competently in a few important places. It’s not much, but it’s an honest life.

• Green days: take-over-the-world days, when I’ve slept eight hours, and everything feels possible.

All three are valid.
All three are real.

The mix has slowly been shifting over the last three years, for the better.

Once I stopped hoping every day would be green, something changed. I wasted less energy fighting reality. I felt lighter. Yes, I was in survival mode for a long time, but admitting that turned out to be more liberating than depressing.

The most painful part wasn’t being floored by the experience.
It was not allowing myself to be.

I also had to put two long-standing habits on hold. Temporarily, but deliberately:

• Comparing myself to others as a source of motivation.

• Caring quite so much about how I’m perceived.

Both had served me once.
Neither was helping anymore.

Why do I have the burning urge to share my story?

Because we talk endlessly about growth, resilience, leadership, and ambition. But we talk far less about what it actually costs to become someone new. Many life transitions don’t add layers — they strip them away.

Parenthood is one of those transitions. But it’s not the only one. Burnout, career change, illness, loss, relocation, rebuilding after disruption — they all do something similar. They remove familiar structures and ask us to find stability without them.

Losing control didn’t make me weaker.

It made me more realistic.
More compassionate with myself.
More intentional.

And paradoxically, that’s where I found a different kind of strength — one that doesn’t depend on everything going according to plan.

If you’re in a season where things feel harder than they “should”, or where the version of you that used to work no longer does, you’re not broken.

You’re likely growing in areas you didn’t know existed.

And that process is rarely tidy or comfortable.

If this resonated, you can leave a note or just know you’re not alone in it.

If this resonated and you’d like to support the work behind it, you can do so here.

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From your brain’s perspective, failing your New Year’s resolutions is success.

Hear me out.

At a time when everyone is talking about New Year’s resolutions -
most of which will be quietly abandoned by mid-February - it helps to understand this:

The brain’s main goal isn’t happiness.
It’s safety and efficiency.

Safety, as in familiarity.
→ The berry that didn’t kill you yesterday probably won’t kill you today.

Efficiency, as in established patterns.
→ Your existing coping mechanisms and habits cost less energy than building new ones.

From your brain’s perspective, this is working as intended.

This becomes very obvious once you’re responsible for more than just yourself.

Anyone who’s parented a small child has seen this up close:
how quickly unfamiliar situations trigger resistance, how much safety lives in routine, how repetition builds trust — not boredom.

Adults aren’t that different.

So when we try to change our habits, our work patterns, the way we show up, we’re often asking the brain to do the opposite of what it’s designed to do.

From your brain’s perspective, failing your New Year’s resolutions is success.

Change requires convincing your brain that uncertainty and change aren’t the same as danger.

That applies just as much to daily habits as it does to career moves, identity shifts, or big life transitions.

It’s why motivation alone rarely works.
And why willpower gets blamed when the system fails.

What actually helps change stick isn’t pressure — it’s safety cues.

• Start narrow.
Pick one goal. Extract the habits from it.

• Start small.
Have a version of the habits that works on high-energy and low-energy days.
Showing up consistently matters more than going all out occasionally.

• Attach change to something familiar.
Borrow safety from routines that already exist. Habit stacking saves energy on planning and remembering.

• Change the story.
If you get 5% better at this, is that failure — or progress?

Lasting change rarely looks impressive at the start.
It looks boring. Repetitive. Slightly underwhelming.

But that’s often the version your brain will support —
instead of pushing against.

I’m curious what change you’re trying to make feel safer right now.

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