I’d like to tell you about a night at my kitchen table, because that’s where it happened.
Not in a boardroom. Not in some lightning-bolt moment of clarity.
At the kitchen table, in my pyjamas, at about 10pm.
The Bone-Tired Years
By then I’d left an eight-year career as a National Team Leader. I had a two-year-old, a baby, and a hobby embroidery machine my dad had bought me.
I was tired in the way only the first few years of motherhood can make you tired. Not just sleepy, but a bit vanished. Like I’d quietly disappeared into the logistics of everyone else’s needs, and nobody had noticed.
Including me.
I kept thinking about how fast it was all going. Offensively fast. One day you’re packing tiny shoes, the next they’re saying words you don’t remember teaching them, and you realise you didn’t get to feel half of it because you were too busy surviving it.
The Night Something Shifted
One night, I sat down and embroidered my daughter’s name onto her new kinder backpack. I’d seen a few personalised bags online I didn’t love, and thought I’d just give it a go myself.
Then I got curious.
What would it cost to have a backpack made exactly to my own specifications? The shape, the fabric, the pockets, all of it?
Next thing I knew, I’d ordered a sample. Then another. I spent hundreds of dollars refining exactly what I was picturing, gently leading manufacturers to believe there would be an order coming once I finally approved it.
Always late at night. Always in those strange, quiet hours only weary parents know about.
And somewhere in there, something shifted.
For months I’d treated weariness as something to push through, hide, or apologise for. But sitting there, stitching a name into fabric, I realised weariness and beauty aren’t opposites.
They live in the same house.
Usually at about 10pm, in pyjamas.
You can be exhausted and still make something that matters. For your kids. For yourself. Eventually, it turned out, for strangers.
What It Became
Friends noticed my daughter’s bag. So I placed what felt at the time like a monstrous first order: 300 units.
I was terrified.
Close to 5,000 bags later, I’m still convinced it was the right call.
That’s how Weary Theory started. I design every bag and stitch every name myself, from home in Melbourne, while raising two small kids 22 months apart.
Inside each bag, hidden where only the family will find it, I stitch the words “you are so loved.”
It’s what I say to my own children every day. I wanted every child carrying one of my bags to carry that too.
What I Actually Learned
The turning point wasn’t really the backpack.
The backpack was just where I put the feeling.
The real shift was deciding I didn’t want to disappear inside motherhood. I love my children fiercely, and I was also losing the thread of who I was outside of them.
I needed something that was mine. Not in a selfish way. In a please-let-me-still-be-a-person way.
So I built something that lets me be present for my kids, while reminding me I’m still here too. I can say “of course I can” when they want me at athletics day. I can do school drop-off and pickup. And at night, instead of doom-scrolling in the dark, I make one small, careful thing while everything else is loud and fast and messy.
I won’t pretend it has all worked out neatly. Some months are busy but not profitable. I’ve put a sewing needle clean through my own thumbnail more than once.
But I’d take this version of tired over the vanished version any day.
So if you’re in your own bone-tired season right now, here’s my question for you:
What’s one small thing you could make, choose, or hold onto — not to fix everything, but just to remind yourself you’re still in there?
By Steph Morrison
About the Author
Steph Morrison is the founder of Weary Theory, a Melbourne-based brand creating personalised embroidered backpacks, lunch bags and keepsakes for children. She started the business in December 2023 while primary-parenting two young children 22 months apart, and designs every bag and stitches every name herself from home. You can find her at wearytheory.com and on Instagram at @weary.theory.
