Life. It comes at you fast. Faster than five boys – wait, I mean three boys – running through a mud puddle. Faster than I can get them all cleaned up and into the car for the next adventure. Faster than I ever thought my own heart could be shattered into a million impossible, unfixable pieces.
I am a planner. I’m The Chaos Planner, for goodness sake. I built a business around bringing order to the beautiful, relentless, exhausting, rough-and-tumble mayhem of a large, active family. My boys—MJ, Matthew, Jasper, Mateo, and Jack—they were my why before they were my how. They were the living, breathing proof that you could be wildly successful in your career and still be 100% present for the biggest, muddiest moments of motherhood. Papi and I, we were a unit. A fortress. An unstoppable force fueled by love, coffee, and a shared, unwavering commitment to raising good humans who knew how to climb a tree, jump a wave, and always, always have each other’s backs.
We weren’t just a family; we were a vibe. Our home was loud, our calendar was packed, and our adventures were legendary. We didn’t do quiet. We did life at full volume, full throttle. And then, about a year ago, the engine seized up. Catastrophically.
I’ve shared the details of part 1 of our demise. Then there was a reconnection, promising for a moment, but that quickly died in a much quieter part 2 of said demise. We’ve spent the last year surviving. I’ve thrown myself into work, into school pickups, into a relentless drive to prove that I can be both Mom and Dad, both provider and nurturer. But there was always a flickering candle, a foolish, persistent hope: maybe we can fix it. Maybe, if we try hard enough, if we talk differently, if we remember the magic we once had, we can put the pieces back together. Not perfectly, but well enough. Enough for five boys to be under one roof, laughing, adventuring, and whole again.
That flicker, my friends, finally went out a few weeks ago. And the darkness that followed was less about shock and more about the agonizing, cold certainty that the dream is dead. There is no coming back. Not because we didn’t try, but because the healing needed for the foundation is simply not possible. What was broken was the truth of what we were. And you can’t glue a lie back together.
The Untying of the Knot
The realization didn’t come in one dramatic moment; it arrived in a series of quiet, painful untetherings. Glimpses into what is real, not what is hoped. Replaying actions not words. And it slowly faded away into awakening, an awakening where you wish you could close the curtains and try to unsee everything you saw. It’s not just the loss of the immediate family—the meals, the bedtime stories, the shared adventures. It’s the slow, meticulous, and heartbreaking process of unbraiding yourself from the extended family, the traditions, and from the life you so meticulously created.
We were an integrated whole. Holidays, birthdays, summers—they all involved trips, lake houses, cousins, and grandparents. People who, through absolutely no fault of their own, were simply living their own parallel lives. They loved us, they cheered for us, and they had absolutely no idea about the stifling temperature we were breathing inside our walls.
I had to tell them. Or, more accurately, I had to watch them slowly grasp the finality of it all. The kind, knowing look in my dad’s eyes when I confirmed Papi wouldn’t be at a family gathering. The awkward, hesitant calls from an Mimi trying to navigate the fractured landscape of five boys’ birthdays, or could she now only celebrate ?. It’s a secondary grief—a mourning of the communal memories that will now be asterisked with “before the split.” Then, worse than the family you have to face, it’s the family you don’t get the chance to really say goodbye to. Yes, you lose your partner, but you also lose your place in their ecosystem. It feels selfish, but you mourn the loss of your history with people who have done nothing wrong except be collateral damage in the explosion of your life. You have to untie that knot, strand by painful strand, knowing that those bonds of connection may never be as strong, as easy, or as natural again. And God forbid, what if those bones are never actually even there again, gone like they never existed.
The Disappointment of the Older Boys
The hardest realization wasn’t my own, it was watching it land in the eyes of my two older boys, MJ and Matthew. They’re old enough to remember the good, to understand the trauma, and to cling to the hope of reconciliation. They’ve watched me be strong, but they’ve also watched me try to fix it and end up broken in ways no one deserves.
When the last, definitive conversation happened—the one that sealed the deal—I had to tell them the truth. “I love you more than anything, but I can’t hold this together anymore. I can’t maintain relationships that continue to bring us pain, even if that means losing people that used to love us. That we still love. The chapter of being a family of 7, a squad, it’s over. It’s closed. For good.”
MJ, my almost-teenager, the one who carries so much of the weight of being the eldest, just nodded. But the light in his eyes, the tiny ember of hope that had been glowing fiercely for months, just went out. It was a physical deflation. A silent acceptance that his version of normal, the whole-family version, was a fairy tale that ended too soon. I could see him harden, take the burden that he should have never believed in Papi to begin with.
And Matthew, my nine-year-old middle child, who is already grappling with the loss of his brothers and friends Jasper and Matera, simply asked, “So, what about Christmas? Is it going to be like last year, Mom? Or do we just never see anyone again?”
Hearing those words, seeing that disappointed exhaustion in their young faces—that’s the moment the real pain hits. It’s not just my dream that died; it’s the dream of the family they deserved. My job now is not to fix it, but to re-write a new, beautiful, strong, and honest chapter that they can still be proud of.
The Cabin, The Trail, and The New Dream
I knew we needed a radical reset. So, I packed up MJ, Matthew, and Jack and drove us to Ellijay, Georgia. We rented a rustic cabin, the kind with a roaring fireplace and a porch swing, tucked deep in the Appalachian Mountains. This was it: our first holiday as a family of four.
We hiked. We scrambled over rocks. Jack, my three-year-old, was a mud-magnet menace, and my big boys had to shoulder the responsibility of carrying him when his little legs gave out. We saw a “real” Santa at a local holiday market, beard and all, and I watched their faces light up. We lived the dream. Alone.
And you know what? It was possible. It was enjoyable. We laughed so hard shooting at each other with Nerf guns that our sides ached, we huddled around the firepit sipping hot cocoa. I looked at my three boys, their faces smudged with chocolate and beaming in the firelight, and a fierce, protective love surged through me. We are resilient. We are strong. We are survivors.
But every single glorious moment was a shadow of what used to be. Every time I had to ask MJ to help with Jack because hiking 600 stairs up a waterfall with him on my shoulders felt impossible, I felt it. Every time I looked out at the stunning vista and reached for the hand that wasn’t there to share the silent awe, I felt it. It was the same but not the same. I was doing it, but I was doing it in place of our unit, not as our unit. The dream was beautiful, but it was a new dream, forged in loss.
Great Wolf Lodge: The Heart-Wrenching Hall of Mirrors
Since I was trying so hard to fill every single hole in their little lives, we stopped at the Great Wolf Lodge on our drive back home for some waterpark fun, Matthew and Jack’s favorite.
If the mountain cabin was a gentle, beautiful melancholy, Great Wolf Lodge was a psychological torture chamber designed by nothing short of evil.
It’s a kaleidoscope of happy, intact families. The smell of chlorine and pizza and the sound of pure, unadulterated, two-parent joy. Everywhere I looked, I saw what we had lost.
I watched a loving father hold his son up to the waterslide, his face creased with pride. I watched a mother and father standing together at the edge of the wave pool, laughing as their kids splashed them. And then it was the quiet moments that absolutely gutted me: Loving husbands holding hands and kissing their wives in a corner of the arcade. Loving wives leaning into their laughing husbands as they navigated the food line. Parents sneaking away for a quick, illicit kiss by the mini golf course.
It was a thousand tiny, flashing reminders of the intimacy, the partnership, and the shared burden of raising children that I no longer have. Our family will never be that family again. My boys will never have both of us standing side-by-side, sharing the joy and the exhaustion of a weekend getaway.
I took a deep breath, plastered on my Chaos Planner smile, and dove headfirst into the waterpark with my three boys, playing the role of the energetic, solo parent. I raced them up the stairs. I laughed with them down the slides. I was on for 10 straight hours for three days straight. And as I lay in the hotel bed at night, utterly spent, I stared at the ceiling, tears silent and hot, realizing I was just a tourist in the land of two-parent happiness. I didn’t belong here.
The Christmas Truth: I Am No One’s Priority
The sting of the Great Wolf Lodge faded, but the reality it reflected has only sharpened as the holidays approach. Christmas is coming, and with it, the quiet, painful realization that I am no one’s priority. Sadly, I haven’t been for a very long time.
This isn’t about self-pity; it’s about a cold, hard assessment of where I stand on the vast social ladder.
For a few years, I was Papi’s priority. Not in a demanding way, but in the shared-life, mutual-partner way. We planned our future, we prioritized our time, and we prioritized each other. That is completely gone, now. And as I look back, it only hurts more to realize how long ago it actually faded away without me even realizing it.
My friends are amazing, but they have their own chaotic, consuming lives. Their own husbands. Their own children. Their own Christmas lists, company parties, and family obligations. They don’t see me sitting alone on a Tuesday night when the boys are at their dads’, staring into the dark, crying for what could have been. They see the Instagram posts—the strong, smiling entrepreneur mom getting it done. And frankly, that’s what I let them see. They have their own priorities, and I am not one of them.
My parents and his parents—the grandparents—have their own lives. They’re dealing with aging, traveling, and their own schedules. I love them, but they’re not here to fill the void. And it’s not their season to hold that responsibility either.
The neighbors? They see a busy woman leaving early and coming home late. They don’t see the woman who collapses on the couch, the weight of a shattered dream pressing down on her.
The truth is, when you lose your partner, you lose the one person who, by default, had to put you at least near the top of their list. And standing here, on the cusp of a holiday season that is designed for two, I’ve never felt more alone, more unprioritized, or more utterly responsible for generating all the warmth in our little house of four.
The Fire is Out, And the House is Safer
This is the hardest part. The final, brutal self-truth that makes all the grief feel justified and, somehow, less painful.
The dream is dead. The fire is out. The loss of five boys, the cabin in Ellijay, the heart-wrenching agony of Great Wolf Lodge—it’s all a staggering amount of pain.
But here is the absolute, unshakeable reality:
This is still better than the hurt that was in our relationship, in our family, and in our home.
The atmosphere we were living in was a slow, invisible poison. It was cold wars, silent treatments, and a chilling tension that permeated the air. The five beautiful boys, even the three-year-old, felt it. They may be broken now, but they weren’t even breathing clean air then.
We traded a visibly whole, inwardly fractured family for a visibly broken, inwardly healing family. And as painful as that is, I know it’s right. It’s what my boys deserve, all five of them.
The fire is out, but the risk of the house burning down is gone. We are safe. We are calm. We are a family of four, navigating the grief, but we are doing it in an environment of honesty and peace.
I will never stop mourning the life we had and the family unit we created. The memory of the five boys, Papi and me, the unit of seven, will never die. MV4ever, right? In my heart, it will be. I want to remember the good. I want my boys to remember the good. But I also know, with a clarity I’ve never possessed before, that you can’t build a future on a rotten foundation, no matter how shiny the exterior looks.
My job now is to look forward. To focus on the decreasing the pain. To watch my three beautiful boys—MJ, Matthew, and Jack—move on and find new definitions of joy and family. We will honor the memory of the past while fiercely creating a bright, safe, and loved future. Together.