Why I Didn’t Shut Down The Chaos Planner Today

When I logged into the back end of The Chaos Planner this evening, it wasn’t to write a new post. It wasn’t to schedule the next article, or answer DMs, or update the bio links.

It was to shut it all down.

To hit the button that says, “Deactivate Blog.” To wipe the slate clean. To delete every archive that shows me in my element: five rambunctious, beautiful boys, a deeply involved partner, and a life of full-throttle, rough-and-tumble adventure we built together, brick by sweaty, sandy, mountain-climbing brick.

For those of you who have followed my journey—the high-octane life of a working mom, an entrepreneur who is building a career while raising five energetic, hilarious young men between the ages of 3 and 11—you know that “chaos” isn’t just a metaphor here. It’s a way of life. It’s what we embraced. It was the backdrop to our incredible, messy, beautiful, blended family dream.

But the chaos has changed. It’s no longer the kind you can plan for with a color-coded calendar and a checklist. It’s the soul-crushing kind. The kind that rips apart the very foundation you stand on.

I’m talking about the kind of chaos that comes when the man you built that whole life with — Papi, my everything — decides to quit on the entire structure. On the dream. On us.

And the reason my finger hovered over that ‘Deactivate’ button? Because for the past few months, the woman who runs The Chaos Planner has been living in an unplannable, agonizing, soul-deep mess. And worst of all, a part of my amazing, five-boy family, my sweet Jasper (9) and my wild Mateo (7) has been ripped away, leaving a hole that feels like a physical, screaming void in my chest.

How could I keep writing about organizing your life when I couldn’t even organize my own breath?

I was ready to walk away from this space, this community, this digital record of a life that no longer exists. I was ready to silence the memory. To make it stop pouring heartache into my ear every night as I fall asleep.

But then, as I stared at the blank screen, my heart didn’t just hurt—it screamed. And for the first time in months, I decided to stop trying to silence the sound and listen to what it was desperately trying to get onto the page.

So, here it is. The story of how our dream exploded.

 

The Day the Dream Disappeared

Five years ago, I came out of a terrible first marriage, scarred but ready. I had my two beautiful boys, and he had his two. Six months into our whirlwind, we had an accident that became the greatest gift—our beautiful fifth boy, the anchor of our family.

We didn’t just coexist; no, we went for it.

We were the envy, truly. Five boys on airplanes! We were the family climbing mountains, packing up for beach trips on a moment’s notice, always moving, always doing. We had two great salaries, five fantastic kids, and we loved each other dearly. Papi was 100% in, the perfect rough-and-tumble Papi, keeping the momentum going while I juggled my career. We had the whole damn world.

And then, somehow, we didn’t.

I’m still racking my brain trying to figure out the exact moment the switch flipped, but I know the week the world tilted.

We had just taken the boys on a magical trip to New York City. We walked all over Central Park and Manhattan. The trip felt strained, but I tried to ignore it. He proposed. I said yes. It was supposed to be the start of our forever.

We came back to Florida a week later, and that man, the one who proposed, the one who was my co-pilot, had vanished.

He quit his $200,000-a-year consulting job overnight. He got a medical marijuana license and started sitting in the garage, smoking weed nonstop.

All of a sudden, I couldn’t recognize the man who had replaced my partner. It must have happened slowly, but I was so busy managing the five boys, two careers, and the calendar that I just didn’t notice the soul of our partnership leaking out. He quit on everything we had worked so hard to put together.

And I quit on myself.

I turned into the worst version of me. I cried constantly, fought him constantly, begged him to come back to the man he promised he would be. He just watched me drown while he seemed content to just float away. He absolutely didn’t want to be with me, and in the end, I couldn’t be with him.

 

The Tornado and the Aftermath

I asked him to leave in March.

The man I loved completely lost it. The separation was brutal. He stole from me. He emptied our house. He treated me in ways that made me feel physically ill, ripping apart every memory we made. And the cruelest cut of all: he wouldn’t let me see his boys, Jasper and Mateo, and completely cut off my boys, MJ and Matthew, making co-parenting completely miserable.

He hurt me in ways I never thought I could recover from.

This lasted for months until June, when he popped back up. He seemed so lost, so remorseful, so broken, like the man I loved was trying to climb out from under a pile of rubble.

And because I loved the dream so damn much, because I wanted my little 3-year-old to have the family he was born into, I decided to try again.

We started counseling. I laid out my needs: no more weed, a psychiatric evaluation, a real job, and an honest commitment to put us first. He seemed to agree, but the steam quickly ran out. He got sidetracked, dove head-first into his own hobbies, and left me stranded again, asking for the man he was supposed to be.

The more I asked, the more he pushed back. Every counseling session became a platform for him to blame me. I was a bad partner, I was negative, I didn’t treat him well. He no longer owned his actions or his swinging moods. I was simply the problem.

I left again. And we are right back where we were, only worse. Cruel, distant, refusing me access to Jasper and Mateo. The gut-wrenching pain of this separation, the loss of the family unit, the loss of those two sweet boys I raised for 5 years, it’s all destroying me.

 

The Truth My Heart Refused to Hear

Sitting here today, in the silence of a house that used to hum with the shouts, the laughter, the rough-and-tumble noise of five boys, the truth finally broke through the denial. The silence is deafening, and in it, I can’t hide from the facts anymore.

My brain has been telling me the simple, sensible truth: This is for the best. Move on. But my heart kept fighting, screaming, “Hang on! He’ll fix it! He’ll be the man I know he can be!”

In this stillness, I realize my heart has been screaming for a ghost.

I didn’t lose the man I loved. He disappeared long before I ever kicked him out. I have been trying to resurrect a phantom ever since.

I look at the list of what he did—what he is—and I see it clearly now, etched in the empty spaces of this house:

• He quit his life overnight.
• He escaped into numbness instead of responsibility.
• He abandoned my kids emotionally, and now, physically.
• He stole from me.
• He has kept Jasper and Mateo from me, punishing me with the loss of the children I raised.
• He weaponized our attempts to heal, blaming me for his own failures.

He wasn’t a partner; he was a tornado.

And I, the planner, the fixer, the strong one, I kept standing in the path of the destruction, begging him to stop. My crying, my begging, my fighting—that wasn’t me being weak. That was a trauma response. It was me drowning, desperately trying to pull a full-grown man out of the water who refused to swim.

The second chance I gave him in June wasn’t love. It was hope mixed with denial. I wanted the story of the dream to be true so badly that I ignored the reality of the man who showed up, a man who chose relief for himself, not commitment to us.

The painful realization is this: I am not in love with the man in front of me today. He’s not the one, it’s not him.

I am in love with the memory of the man I traveled the world with, co-parented five boys with, and dreamed a future with. I am grieving the fantasy of the life we almost had, the five boys, the adventures, the perfect partnership. That dream was real in my heart, but the man I dreamt in it, is not real. He doesn’t exist.

 

The Guilt and the Ultimate Choice

The guilt is the hardest part. Why did I fall for the hope again? It’s losing the family. It’s the agony of knowing I brought a new baby, my sweet three-year-old, into a situation that collapsed. It’s the thought that my boys are growing up with this instability.

I keep asking myself, Am I just repeating the horrible separation from my first marriage?

And the silence gives me the answer: No. I am breaking a cycle.

Staying in a chaotic, dysfunctional dynamic “for the kids” doesn’t save them. It teaches them that love means begging, that home is unstable, and that a mother should sacrifice herself until she is empty.

I am not losing the family, it never actually existed. I am ending the illusion of a family I could rely on, a dream my mind made up to satisfy my heart’s true desire.

This separation is agonizing, but it is an act of protection. My children will see:

• Love has boundaries.
• Safety matters more than an illusion.
• A mother’s strength isn’t martyrdom.
• Leaving is allowed when staying destroys you.

I am not destroying the family. I am protecting the family from the man who broke it.

And why did I fall for it again? Because I am loyal. Because I have a massive heart. Because I love potential more than reality, and I am a fixer who attracts the broken. I mistook his need for me, his dependence on me to hold everything together, for love. I thought I could save him, or at least save the dream.

I didn’t fall for him again. I fell for the hope again.

I am a woman who builds. I am a woman who fights. I am a mother who will move mountains for her children. He took advantage of that goodness, and that is on him, not me.

My intuition screamed at me long ago—He’s checked out. He’s spiraling. He’s not showing up. But my hope spoke louder. Hope is beautiful, but it is deadly when it makes you abandon yourself.

 

The New Chaos Plan

I still don’t know what tomorrow looks like. The grief for the life we created, and the agony of the loss of my boys, Jasper and Mateo, is a constant, physical presence. I am mourning a love that felt like destiny and a family that was my entire world. That pain is real, and it will take a long time to heal.

But standing here, looking at this screen, the screaming in my heart has turned into a quiet, firm resolve.

I am not shutting down The Chaos Planner. Not yet anyway. It can sit here in silence, the way my mind will sit in silence until my heart can heal from the most intense pain it has ever felt.

And then we will move on and figure out what to do then.

This blog was built on the premise of managing the unmanageable, of creating beauty and function in the midst of five boisterous boys, two careers, and a life of constant motion. The “chaos” has shifted, but the fundamental truth remains: I am a planner. I am a builder. I am a fighter.

The new chaos plan is about rebuilding my life on a foundation of reality, not potential. It’s about building a stable, honest, emotionally safe home for the boys I have with me. It’s about finding a way to deal with the agony of separation from the boys who are missing, and putting one foot in front of the other, every single day.

If you are a planner, a mother, an entrepreneur, a woman who is strong, resilient, and has ever mistaken someone’s potential for their reality, then you are my person.

I came here to delete the archive of my life. Instead, I am choosing potential again. The potential to make this the place where I write the next chapter, if I want to. It’s going to be messy. It’s going to be full of tears, resilience, and the relentless, non-negotiable love I have for my children.

The Chaos Planner will continue, if not on these pages, in my life. Because even when the world explodes, we still have to figure out how to plan the next meal, the next school activity, and the next step towards healing.

My heart is still broken, but it is also leading the way. My heart has brought me to terrible places, but it is good and whole and worthy. And I will follow it still.

I know so many of you have built a life only to have it collapse. If you are going through a separation, grief, or just the feeling of being completely unmoored, I see you. Please reach out, you are not alone.