This week there is a version of me walking through my house with a sixteen-month-old attached to my hip, packing lunches in my head before I have finished breakfast.
I am thinking about my dad. About work. About fall baseball. About the dog. About the baby, who has an ear infection. About the older boys. About my marriage. About the new company I am launching.
And somehow, in the middle of all of it, I am also thinking about whether the refrigerator needs cleaning.
That is what this season feels like.
Not one giant crisis. Everything.
But do not read this as a woman falling apart. I am good at this. Give me a crisis, a deadline, five competing priorities and something nobody has figured out yet, and I am probably at my best. Stress has never scared me. I built a career moving through it.
This is the other thing. This is what happens when even the woman who thrives in the chaos reaches the season where the weight gets real.
I am in the sandwich generation now.
There is a father who needs more from me. A baby who still needs to be carried and held and fed and comforted and taken to the doctor. Older boys who need rides and schedules and baseball fields and lunches and, more than any of it, my presence. A marriage I want to be inside of, not just next to. A company I am building. A house full of life that somehow still needs to be maintained.
And then there is me.
Somewhere near the bottom of the list. If I make the list at all.
Here is the strange part. Summer is not over in my head, but fall has already started in real life. Back to school. Fall ball. Games. Schedules. Lunches. Shoes that vanish at the exact moment we need to leave. A sixteen-month-old who wants to be on my body while I am trying to start my day. I never got to finish one season before the next one asked me to begin.
My body noticed before I did.
I have been walking every morning with my husband, and it has become one of my favorite parts of the day. But I have not been lifting. The weights are just sitting there while I keep choosing the thing that feels possible over the thing that feels like one more ask.
I am tired.
Not broken. Not falling apart. Just tired.
And I think there is a difference we do not talk about enough, because women are so good at taking our own depletion and turning it into evidence that we simply need to try harder.
So I did what any completely rational woman would do.
I rage-cleaned my entire house.
My husband has actually started calling it that. Rage cleaning. Every closet. Both refrigerators. The whole place baby-proofed. Three enormous lawn bags of clothes donated. Two rooms rearranged. A storage unit emptied practically emptied, the contents handed to another divorced mom who had just bought a house and could use them.
I wanted everything out. The old clothes. The clutter. The things we were not using. The heaviness that had quietly collected in the corners of our life.
I wanted warmth. Cleanliness. Space.
I wanted the house to feel like the life I am trying to build.
Maybe that is what I was actually doing.
Not cleaning. Clearing.
There is something about being needed in every direction that makes you quietly wonder when someone is going to ask what you need. The baby needs you. The boys need you. Your parent needs you. Your work needs you. Your marriage needs you. And because you are capable, you keep saying yes.
Not because anyone is forcing you. Because you can.
That is the complicated part, the part that does not fit on a coffee mug. I do not resent this life. I love it. I love the noise and the boys and the baby on my hip and building things and my husband and our loud, blended, wonderful family. I do not want less life.
I want to be able to actually be inside the life I have. That is a different thing.
So lately I am trying to notice the small doors back to myself. Walking with my husband. Music in the car, loud. An ice cream in the afternoon. A quiet drive with nowhere to be. And at the end of the day, sitting next to him on the couch, rubbing his head, watching something completely unimportant, while for a few minutes nobody needs a single thing from me.
Nothing is being solved. Nothing is being built.
I am just there.
And maybe that is enough for one night.
I think we underestimate how much of motherhood is carrying what no one can see. The appointment you remembered. The schedule you rearranged. The emotion you absorbed so no one else had to. The lunch you packed. The birthday you did not forget. The work you did after everyone was asleep. The thing you did not say because there was already enough in the room.
It all counts. Even when no one sees it. Especially then.
So if you are carrying your own invisible pile right now, hear the thing I am also saying to myself. This is a season. You can do it. But you do not have to prove that you can do it by suffering beautifully.
You are allowed to be tired. You are allowed to put something down.You are allowed to change the way you are doing it. To want help. To want more room. To want your life to feel good while you are living it, and not only on the far side of a finished list.
Women are fucking incredible. We hold entire ecosystems inside our heads and then wonder why we cannot find the car keys.
But incredible has never meant infinite.
And maybe that is what I am carrying into this fall. Not how much more I can hold. What I can release. What gets to stay. What gets to go. And who I want to be when the house finally goes quiet.
So tonight, I am going to sit on the couch with my husband. I am going to rub his head. I am going to watch something that does not matter at all. And for a little while, I am going to let the world be someone else’s problem.
Fuck them.
Not because I do not care.
Because tonight, I care about me too.
You are not too much. You are not falling apart. You are a woman clearing space for the life she actually wants to live inside.
You are becoming MOMumental.
MOMumentally,
Erika Hanafin Austria
Erika Hanafin Austria · Creator, MOMumental Reinvention
Co-Founder, NeonID · Former CEO, HeyMama · 2x Top 50 Women Leaders, Virginia
This essay was free. Every MOMumental Letter is paid. Paid subscribers get the MOMumental Letters (every other Tuesday), full Community Chat where I respond personally, Behind the Essay exclusives, and early podcast access.