The Woman Who Could Do It All

A pub in Ghent

I was 23 when I met my husband. Coffee that turned into an entire night, spaghetti bolognaise in a pub that stayed open into the early hours, and a sentence that quietly rearranged something in me. He wanted a wife to take care of, a family, someone to grow old with.

I hadn’t fallen head over heels. But the words landed somewhere deep. Coming home. Stability. Someone to call mine.

We moved in together within the year, into an apartment so small you could touch both living room walls at once, furnished with his five garbage bags of belongings and my second hand furniture. We had nothing, and it felt like plenty. Sunday mornings at the flea market, never buying anything, then home with coffee and pastry. I was studying to become a midwife. Life was simple because we never expected it to be anything else.

Then life happened

We moved abroad because I wanted to practise as an independent midwife, doing home births, carrying the particular weight of being responsible for people’s lives. Four years into the relationship, we got married, because it felt like the honest next step and because we wanted to start a family. We bought our first house, and not long after, I got pregnant.

At eighteen weeks, at a routine appointment, there was no heartbeat. The world genuinely stopped for a while after that. We grieved, and eventually we tried again, and our first daughter was born healthy.

When she was about two and a half, we moved back home, bought our second house, and had our second daughter. I applied to university, studying and working while renovating a house with no working kitchen, doing the dishes in the bathtub. Our third daughter was born not long after, and I wrote and defended my masters thesis while still breastfeeding my youngest. I built my career, and we bought a third house.

Three daughters in seven years. Three and a half years of breastfeeding. A masters degree. Three houses in ten years, across two countries. A renovation. A career. All of it, at once.

Two people, two very different trainings

My husband’s career grew at the same pace our family did. He came from a guest worker family, part of the labour recruitment programmes Belgium ran through the 1960s, and he had watched his own father provide relentlessly for five children, making sure the fridge was always full. So he did the same for us. Longer hours with every child born, then a posting abroad that meant four days away most weeks, hotels, a new office to build from nothing. I ran everything at home, and I was, genuinely, very good at it.

Good, until I wasn’t

My mother passed away suddenly in 2019. She had quietly become my entire support system while my husband worked away, and I hadn’t fully realised how much I depended on her until she was gone. A year later I left my job, thinking working from home would give me more flexibility for sick children and school pickups. I built a small business of my own instead. I didn’t want to stop working, I liked it, and I wanted to feel useful.

A few years in, I had to close that business. It never became financially viable, and letting it go felt like proof I wasn’t who I thought I was. It was during those years, somewhere in the weight of grief and a business slowly failing under me, that life started to feel unbearably heavy. That winter I sat down on the couch. Not in visible collapse, I still did what needed doing. Doing the things mothers do, taking care of my family. But in the quiet hours of the day I sat under a blanket and stared, and that stillness is where an honest conversation with myself finally started.

What I want to share with you

The turn didn’t happen on the couch itself. It happened slowly, in the months and years after, and it arrived in pieces rather than all at once. These are the pieces I want to pass on to you.

On being kind to myself

I stopped treating my own limits as a personal failure. Being human, not a superwoman, meant I was allowed to say a sentence I had never once let myself say out loud. “I can’t do this all.” I started doing small, ordinary, kind things for myself, not because I needed them, but because I had started to genuinely like the woman looking back at me in the mirror.

On resting without guilt

I stopped jumping up the moment someone entered the room. I started taking real breaks throughout the day, coffee in the sun, an article that inspired me before the day began, a short walk, without the guilt that used to come attached. I understand now that this isn’t indulgence. It’s what actually lets me show up for everyone else.

On asking for help

I learned that carrying everything alone was never proof of independence. It was a slow, quiet way of disappearing. Asking for help, and saying plainly what I needed, stopped feeling like weakness and started feeling like the only sustainable way forward.

On becoming a team, not two roles

My husband and I had spent twenty years running parallel, not together. Neither of us had failed on purpose. We had both simply followed what we’d been shown, him by a father who provided relentlessly, me by a world that told women they could do it all. What changed wasn’t an even split, our days were never going to allow for that, but an honest one. He washes my car now. He cooks on the weekends we’re both home. Our daughters, teenagers now, rotate the kitchen cleanup and bathroom every three weeks. I take the rest of the house and the laundry.

On investing in each other again

After twenty five years, more than half my life beside this one person, I’ve learned it is never too late to pay real attention to each other again. Not just living alongside someone, but noticing what they need, what they dream of, what’s wearing them down, and doing something about it.

The bench

I still think about where this is heading. The dream I had when I was twenty three never changed. Two people, much older, sitting on a bench somewhere, watching the birds, saying “it was good, wasn’t it.“ Not a life without weight. Not fireworks on a daily basis. A life carried together, without losing yourself.

If any part of this is your week too, I’d love to have you in this space. And if you want to look honestly at how the load is actually distributed in your own home, the Invisible Load Audit on my website is a good place to start.