This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Juno Threadborne
The morning is quiet. Suspiciously so.
You’re already up. The coffee’s cooling. One kid is curled up on the couch half awake, another is still asleep, the third already left for school an hour earlier. You head to Food Lion early. Make it back in time for a good breakfast, get lunch in a backpack, and still find the missing shoe on time for the bus.
Everything functions.
Everything flows.
And no one sees the tension in your jaw or the checklist running behind your eyes.
No one praises the pillar for not falling.
When you’re parenting alone, silence is what you earn for that work. And sometimes that’s nice.
But it’s easy to mistake silence for success.
When you parent together—when the structure includes more than one load-bearing wall—the silence means something different. It’s not the absence of failure. It’s the presence of shared effort.
And I miss that.
Here’s the myth we don’t say aloud: Stable people don’t need checking on.
We’re biased that way. Biologically. We respond to visible wounds. We reach for the limping, not the marching. The smoother the performance, the less people notice the skill it takes to hold it together.
That’s true in code, in classrooms, and in kitchens at 7AM.
When my wife is home, she doesn’t assume I’ve got it.
She checks. Gently, but intentionally.
And sometimes that check-in—the one question no one else thought to ask—is the only thing keeping me from cracking.
For years, it was just me. Now, even with her, when she’s away, the old muscle memory kicks in.
Stress finds the quietest route downhill.
And in every system—families, friend groups, even workplaces—it flows toward the person who looks like they can carry it.
In this house, that’s me.
Because I’m stable.
Because I don’t yell.
Because I’m able to bear the load.
But here’s the secret: The emotionally self-sufficient get trusted with everyone’s burdens—but rarely their care.
And now, with my better half gone, the architecture has no other path.
So it reroutes everything through me.
And I don’t always succeed.
Some mornings, I forget a permission slip.
Some nights, I realize too late I forgot to make that important phone call.
There are entire weeks where dinner is just triage.
But I keep going.
Because the illusion of stability is loud enough to quiet concern.
If she were here, she’d catch the things I miss.
Or catch me, when I start slipping.
That’s not backup. That’s ballast. And without ballast the ship rolls.
We don’t design anything to bear endless weight without maintenance.
Your car needs new shocks every 60,000 miles.
Your roof needs replacing every few decades.
People need regular check-ups. And without them, things go quietly unnoticed.
That dinner date with a friend.
That call you let go to voicemail.
That promise you made to make something specific for dinner.
That’s how cracks form. Quietly. Unnoticed.
Two parents can distribute that load. Sometimes you alternate—who carries, who coasts. Sometimes one catches the fall when the other can’t.
But right now, there’s no fallback.
Just wear. And grit. And the knowledge that cracks spread long before they show.
It’s not even about splitting the work evenly, really.
It’s about being seen.
I only understood this when I found someone who actually looked.
My wife is the first person since I became a parent who looked at the way I hold my own world together and said:
“I appreciate what you’re doing for us.”
And in that moment, the myth collapsed a little.
She doesn’t walk around measuring cracks.
She walks the perimeter with me.
If you’re lucky enough to be in a shared load-bearing system—don’t just lean on them.
Look up. Ask how the structure’s doing.
She always has.
And when she comes home again, I’ll do better at meeting her halfway.
Because even shared weight needs redistribution.
A pillar reinforced becomes part of a structure.
The house is quiet again tonight.
The kind of quiet I used to welcome.
Now it just sounds like echoes.
There’s still work to do. Dishes, deadlines, dramas waiting around corners.
But for now, just a breath.
If this essay does anything, let it be this:
Don’t wait for collapse.
Walk the perimeter.
Check the load.
Ask who’s holding it all up—and whether they’re doing it alone.
When she comes home, I’ll tell her this. But until then, I’m telling you.
Because if this pillar could speak, it wouldn’t ask for praise. It would ask you to help carry the next beam. Just for a while.
This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Juno Threadborne