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I had a baby. A few months later, my children and I left our home and never returned.

Sometimes I still say that sentence and can't believe it was my life.

My baby was four months old when everything we knew changed.

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I had been so excited to bring my fourth child into the world. This was my second marriage and I wanted us to feel like one big happy family.

But very quickly after her birth, reality looked very different.

I was on my own most of the time. My husband worked away, and when he came home he was exhausted and stressed and distant. I was holding everything together with a newborn and three other children, and I started to wonder if this was all life was going to be.

So I made a suggestion. Buy a caravan and travel.

I thought it would take the pressure off him. I thought I could be outdoors more, seeing things, moving. I thought it might be fun, a fresh start, a way to put our distance back together.

We agreed the older two would live with their dad so they could finish high school, and come to us every school holidays. A year, maximum. He could fly out to work from anywhere.

We packed up our home. We sold all our furniture. I imagined it as an adventure, like a long holiday with the children. And so when my baby was four months old, we left our home.

Things changed very quickly after that. My husband started doing more overtime. More time away. Less time back.

The caravan didn't become the fresh start I had imagined.

It became hard and exhausting. I was the one packing up and moving every two weeks on my own, winding up the legs, hitching it to the car, making sure I parked it right, with a baby and a toddler to strap into their seats and everything to organise and no choice but to hope for the best.

There were repairs I couldn't keep up with. Four new windows. A light. Painting. I did all of it myself.

I knew I had to sell it before it buried me. It was taking time away from my babies. When it finally sold, we stayed on a friend's couch in her tiny one-bedroom flat for a few nights. Then there was nowhere left.

That was how I ended up in a tent. With my two youngest children.

My husband was still working away. He would come back and treat it like a holiday, because he always had somewhere to fly back to. A room. All his meals provided. The tent was my life. Sometimes he was gone for up to ten weeks at a time.

So I was on my own. Completely on my own.

I remember the first night in the tent. I remember trying to make it feel normal for the children, trying to be calm, trying to be strong, even though inside I felt like everything had fallen apart.

At night, I would lie there listening to my children breathe.

Those nights were long and heavy.

I would stare into the dark and think about everything at once. Food. Money. Safety. Where we would go next. How I was supposed to keep everything together when I had nothing stable to stand on.

I didn't have a safety net. I didn't have someone coming to fix it. I just had my children. And they needed me.

So I kept going.

My life became pure survival.

I learned how to stretch everything. How to make very little work. How to keep things as normal as possible for the children even when nothing about our life was normal.

There were days I was so exhausted I didn't know how I would get through the next hour, let alone the next day. But then I would look at my children, and I would get up anyway. Things needed to be done. Carrying the kids and the bags somewhere I could cook.

For eight months I didn't see my two older children. I missed my daughter's formal, a milestone every mother dreams of sharing. Those are moments you never get back.

I wore the same clothes for almost two years, because buying new ones was never the priority. Feeding my children always came first. We had been in the tent for a year when my husband and I broke up. It wasn't safe for me to keep going. He was emotionally unavailable. It was like having an extra child.

Then the storm came.

It rained for a week. The tent flooded. Water went through everything we owned, and I had to throw it out, and we started sleeping in the car.

Christmas came and went, and I was crying most days. That was when I knew I had to reach out for help.

There were times we had almost nothing. There were times I didn't know where we would end up next. And through all of it, I became very good at pretending I was okay. Because when you are a mother in survival mode, you don't always get the space to fall apart.

Your children still need breakfast. They still need comfort. They still need you to smile and tell them everything will be okay, even when you are not sure yourself.

So I became what I thought strength was.

Keep going. Don't stop. Don't break. Don't let anyone see how hard it is.

But slowly, I started to disappear inside myself.

I stopped laughing properly. I stopped doing things for me. The version of me that used to feel like a person outside of motherhood faded away.

I was just Mum. The one who held everything together.

And when the children were asleep, I would lie there and wonder where I had gone.

People assume losing the house was the hardest part. It wasn't. The hardest part was watching myself disappear.

I never imagined motherhood like this. I never imagined a tent. I never imagined having no home to go back to after bringing a baby into the world. I never imagined becoming someone who had to fit her entire life into what she could carry.

But that was my reality. And I was ashamed of it.

I didn't want people to know how bad things had become. I didn't want to be seen as someone who had lost everything. I wanted to hide.

So I kept it inside. And I kept going.

Eventually, I reached out to a homelessness service, and they took me under their wing. They put us up for two weeks and then straight into temporary accommodation.

Then we had no car for three months. We caught buses and walked five kilometres to the local church for a bag of food, because every dollar I had went on rent. My baby in my arms, my toddler beside me.

There wasn't one moment when everything changed. There wasn't a miracle.

There were hundreds of tiny decisions.

Getting up when I wanted to stay in bed. Choosing hope when fear felt easier. Believing, even if only for a moment, that this wouldn't be the rest of our story.

And then something in me started to shift.

It wasn't my situation at first. It was a question.

Who am I now?

I had spent so long surviving that I didn't recognise myself anymore.

I knew how to be a mother. I knew how to cope. I knew how to get through each day. But I didn't know what I liked anymore. I didn't know what I wanted. I didn't know what I dreamed about. I had become completely disconnected from myself.

So I started to look for her again. Very slowly, in small ways.

I started doing little things for myself. I started moving my body again. I started laughing again, even if it felt strange at first.

At first, it felt almost impossible to think beyond getting through the day. When you have spent so long worrying about basic things like safety and stability, thinking about yourself feels unfamiliar.

But I kept going.

And I started to realise I wasn't broken.

I was buried.

There was still a version of me underneath everything I had been carrying. She hadn't disappeared. She had just been waiting.

When I look back now at that time in the tent, I don't see a failure.

I see a mother who was doing everything she could in impossible circumstances. I see a woman who kept her children going when she had nothing left to give.

She didn't have answers. She didn't have certainty. She didn't know how it would end.

She just kept going. One day at a time.

And somehow, that was enough to carry us through.

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If I could go back, I would sit beside myself. I would tell her to stop blaming herself. I would tell her that her children would remember her love far more than they would remember where they slept. And I would tell her something she couldn't believe yet.

You are not gone.

You are still in there.

And you will find your way back to yourself.

Because sometimes life takes everything away from you. And in that emptiness, you slowly begin to find out who you really are.

I am now working on buying my own home, which I am really excited about. After everything we've been through, creating a stable home for my kids is the most important thing to me.

I've also been building my business working with women who are ready to move from survival into self-leadership.

And I'm lucky to have a very close bond with my older children and their wonderful father.

That woman in the tent was not the end of my story.

She was the beginning of finding my way back.

Amy Schuch is a mother of four from the Sunshine Coast. She writes about identity and rebuilding after survival at theneohuman.com .

Feature Image: Supplied.