Last night Jessie Buckley won the Oscar for Best Actress. She was crying before she even reached the microphone. She has an eight-month-old at home. And she dedicated the award to "the beautiful chaos of a mother's heart."
On Mother's Day in the UK and Ireland. While playing the most overlooked woman in literary history.
I mean...
The woman nobody wrote about
Hamnet is Maggie O'Farrell's novel, now a film directed by Chloé Zhao, about Agnes Shakespeare. Wife of you-know-who. Mother of the boy whose death probably inspired Hamlet. She was considered odd by her community, too knowing, too feeling, not quite manageable.
Here is the thing O'Farrell does that no Shakespeare biographer ever bothered to do. She asks what was happening inside Agnes while her husband was in London becoming famous. While she was raising three children, running a household, tending bees, and eventually burying her son.
Shakespeare is never named once in the novel. That is not an accident.
This is not just a historical story
Agnes is one of those women who holds everything together so completely that nobody thinks to ask how she is doing. She reads the emotional temperature of every room before she walks into it. She knows things. She feels things at a volume that makes other people uncomfortable.
If you are a high-achieving woman, you probably know a version of this from the inside.
The career is managed. The children are loved. The mental load is carried. And somewhere underneath all of that is a part of you that is bone tired, and maybe grieving something you cannot quite name, and definitely not saying any of this out loud because there is no time and also who would even understand.
What Internal Family Systems (IFS) would say about the chaos
Buckley called it beautiful chaos. I think that is actually a pretty good description of what I see with my clients.
Because what looks like chaos, the part that wants to do everything perfectly, the part that is quietly furious, the part that misses who you were before children, the part that feels guilty for missing it, these are not signs that something is wrong with you. In Internal Family Systems (IFS), every single one of those parts has a job. They developed for a reason. They are trying to protect something tender underneath.
Self-led motherhood is not about being calm all the time. It is about having enough of a relationship with your own inner world that you are not constantly hijacked by it. It is about being able to say to the exhausted part, I see you, rather than pushing it down until it comes out sideways at your partner or your kid.
Agnes never had that. She had grief, instinct, and a husband who processed his pain into the greatest play ever written while she stood at the grave.
What she needed was someone to actually sit with her.
That is still the work
Buckley said last night: we come from a lineage of women who create against all odds.
For a lot of mothers I work with, the odds are not just out there. Yes, the external ones are real. Women still carry more, are seen less, and are expected to do both without complaint. But there is also a whole other battle happening inside. The parts that say you are too much. The ones that say you are not enough. The ones that have been quietly running the show since long before the children arrived.
Hamnet is set in the 1590s. But what I see with my clients every week tells me Agnes never left.
If any of this landed somewhere in you, I work with high-achieving mothers who are ready to stop holding it all together alone and start being truly seen. Reach out at shabnamlee.com