Summary

Being a busy entrepreneur and a special needs parent is its own kind of impossible. Here’s how we found a middle ground — and why asking for help was the first step.

By Incluo · Parenting & Wellbeing · 7 min read

Let’s be honest: marriage is hard. Not impossible, not bad — just genuinely hard. Add kids and everything that was already difficult gets turned up. Then add a child with special needs, and you’re suddenly navigating something that doesn’t come with a manual, can’t be optimized away, and has a way of making every other challenge feel heavier.

And if you’re also building a business — trying to create something, show up for clients or customers, think strategically while your nervous system is already in a constant low-grade state of alert — well. You figure out pretty quickly that something has to give, or you do.

We’re not going to pretend we solved this. We didn’t. But we did find a few things that helped, and the most important one was surprisingly simple: we stopped trying to do everything ourselves.

The Invisible Tally Sheet

Anyone in a long-term partnership knows what I’m talking about. The mental tally. Who got up last. Who drove to therapy. Who missed the call because they were dealing with a meltdown. Who had thirty minutes of quiet in the car and who had Bluey on repeat.

When you’re stressed and stretched thin, that tally becomes a kind of internal ledger you never asked to keep. And the problem isn’t just the imbalance — it’s that the ledger itself is exhausting. The act of tracking is another weight.

What we eventually learned is that the tally doesn’t go away when you fight about it. It goes away — or at least quiets — when there’s less to tally. When some of the load gets genuinely redistributed, not just reshuffled between the two of you.

Getting an Au Pair Changed Things

I never thought I’d be someone who paid for help in the home. I think a lot of us carry an idea — maybe inherited, maybe cultural — that doing it all ourselves is proof of something. That needing help is a gap in our capability, not just a gap in our bandwidth.

Getting an au pair was the first time I really let that idea go.

It started practical: someone to help with the kids, with homework, with the logistics that pile up. But what it became was something we didn’t fully anticipate. She didn’t just help with tasks — she became part of our family. The kids don’t think of her as hired help. They think of her as family. She’s been on road trips with us. She’s been at birthday parties. She knows our rhythms, our kids’ triggers, the right way to handle a hard moment.

It doesn’t make you less of a parent to ask for help. In a lot of ways, it makes you a better one.

When I’m with my kids now, I’m actually with them. I’m not mentally triaging the list of things I’m behind on. I’m not half-present because I’m managing seventeen other things. That presence — that’s what my kids actually need from me. Not a version of me that’s technically there but emotionally somewhere else.

The Same Logic Applies to Housekeeping

I’ll say it plainly: if getting a housekeeper twice a month would reduce your stress meaningfully and you can find a way to afford it, it might be one of the most valuable investments you make in your family’s wellbeing.

We carry so much guilt around this. Like cleaning our own home is a moral virtue and outsourcing it is a character flaw. But if you’re a special needs parent running a business and trying to be present for your kids, the mental and physical cost of managing your home on top of everything else is real. And the cost of not managing it — the low-grade stress of living in a space that feels out of control — is also real.

This is not about wealth. It’s about making intentional choices about where your limited energy goes.

Weekly Therapies, Financial Pressure, and the Fear You Don’t Say Out Loud

Here’s the part most people skip. The therapies — ABA, OT, speech, whatever combination your child needs — are often a second job just to coordinate, never mind afford. Insurance fights. Waitlists. The mental labor of knowing which therapist works best on which day, what your child is working on, how to reinforce it at home.

And underneath all of it, for a lot of special needs parents, is a fear that doesn’t always get named: what does their future look like? What does ours? How do we build a business that gives us flexibility without sacrificing the stability our child needs?

We don’t have clean answers to those questions. We’re still in them. But what we’ve learned is that the couples and families who navigate this best tend to have one thing in common: they’ve gotten honest about what they actually need, and they’ve stopped pretending that asking for it is weakness.

What’s the one thing, if you had support with it, that would change your day the most? It might be worth sitting with that question.