The Tears That Come With Working and Mothering

There’s a particular kind of tears that come when you’re working with a baby. Not the dramatic kind. The quieter kind that arrive when you realise how much you’re trying to hold together at once.

I’ve long been inspired by Katherine Ryan. Her podcast, Telling Everybody Everything, is an honest and often very funny portrait of life as a working mother. Her job may not be ordinary, but her experience feels incredibly familiar: a millennial mum deeply committed to her children, ambitious about her career, and often caught somewhere in between the two.

Comedian Katherine Ryan, whose podcast Telling Everybody Everything captures the messy, funny and often exhausting reality of working motherhood.

In one episode, she shares a story about missing a flight while travelling with her baby — and the tears that followed. Not because of the flight itself, but because she knew exactly what the next few days would look like.

She had caught a virus from her children.

She still had to breastfeed and comfort a baby on an eleven-hour flight.

She would land and go straight into work.

She knew she wouldn’t sleep properly.

She knew she wouldn’t really recover.

And she knew there wasn’t really another option.

That feeling is so familiar. The frustration of knowing you need rest, but you also have to work. Of being unwell while still caring for your children. Of recognising that the combination of responsibilities simply asks more of you than feels reasonable.

I’ve felt that exact mix of exhaustion and anger, the quiet sense that it’s all just a bit too much.

Hearing Katherine articulate that reality so clearly is oddly comforting. It reminds you that this tension isn’t personal failure. It’s something many working mothers experience, in every line of work — even show business.

And sometimes the tears are simply the body acknowledging how much you’re carrying.

If you’re navigating work and motherhood, I can’t recommend Telling Everybody Everything enough. Katherine Ryan has a rare ability to name the moments many of us recognise but rarely describe.