It Takes A Mom
What if motherhood is the training, not the obstacle?
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There’s a tattoo on the arch of my left foot that says: like a girl.
I got it the year I graduated from college. It was a reclamation, taking something that had been used as an insult and wearing it as a commitment. I was going to do life like a girl. Fully, on my own terms, without apology. And I was going to be proud of it.
I thought I understood what that meant then.
I understand it differently now.
Before I became a mom, I was good at my job. I could manage projects, hold complexity, stay calm under pressure. I had high capacity. I knew that about myself.
Then I had a daughter, and I discovered I had no idea.
Not because I fell apart. Because the constraints got real in a way they never had before.
Suddenly I had to make decisions in two-minute windows. I had to hold the logistics of a household and the emotional state of a small human and my own deadlines and the calendar, all simultaneously, with no buffer. I had to become a world-class triage machine, almost overnight, because the alternative was that everything burned.
(And, if I’m being honest, some days everything did burn. Some days it still does. But now I understand what’s happening when it does, and I don’t take it as evidence that I’m failing.)
There’s a principle in project management: work expands to fill available space. Parkinson’s Law. I knew it well, academically speaking.
As a mother, I’ve learned that work can also contract. Time gets compressed by necessity. And inside that compression, if you’re paying attention, something gets built.
I started doing more in forty-five minutes than I used to do in three hours. Not because I got more efficient on purpose, but because I had no choice.
I’d make a decision in thirty seconds that used to take me a meeting and a follow-up email. I’d pivot mid-morning without losing the thread. I’d hold three competing priorities (a sick kid, a board presentation, a dentist appointment I’d forgotten about) and somehow still deliver.
I honestly thought I was just coping. Surviving even.
But when I looked up, I realized: I was operating at a level I hadn’t been able to reach before. Not in spite of the constraints—because of them.
Here’s what I’ve come to believe: until you have the complexity of a life with children, you don’t have the constraints to truly problem-solve around. Not really.
And that’s not a dig at anyone without kids. It’s an observation about what tight margins do to capacity over time.
Motherhood creates a crucible. The mental load is constant. The default parent role falls mostly to moms, not because we asked for it, but because the system distributes it that way, and it starts before our children are even born. We carry it long before its ever truly acknowledged.
And in carrying it, we get very, very good at doing a lot with not much.
Compressing. Triaging. Making fast decisions with incomplete information and under real emotional stakes. Holding complexity without breaking. Pivoting without falling apart.
That is an elite professional skill set. And for most of my career, I was treating it like a liability. (Which, when I say it out loud now, sounds absurd. But at the time it felt like the only reasonable conclusion, because every system I was trying to use confirmed it.)
Here’s the thing: I never stopped climbing and striving. I actually climbed faster after I became a mom. My career accelerated. I took on more. I delivered more. But I did it by shrinking everything else. My world got very small, very fast. Just motherhood and career, and nothing else had room to exist.
You can read more about that in one of my earlier essays below:
I’d say things like “I have a lot on my plate right now” as an explanation for why my life looked the way it did. I’d cite the kids, the schedule, the competing demands. I framed the fullness of my life as the reason it had to be so narrow.
What I was actually describing was evidence of my capacity.
The fact that I could manage all of that, and still do good work, and still show up for my family, and still be accelerating professionally, wasn’t a limitation. It was a demonstration of exactly the skills that high-performance environments are looking for. Sustained execution under constraint. Adaptive decision-making. The ability to hold complexity without breaking.
I wasn’t managing around my capacity. I was building it. I just couldn’t see it because I was too busy apologizing for the life that was building it.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to see it that way. Partly because the story we tell about working moms is almost always about what we’re sacrificing or struggling with and so rarely about what the work of motherhood is actively developing in us.
Which is why I’m interested in changing that.
Side note: can you imagine if we talked about any other high-pressure training environment this way. “She spent four years in an incredibly demanding program that required her to perform under extreme constraint with limited resources and constant unpredictability.” That’s not exactly a story about struggle. That’s a line on a resume.
Anyway, the posts before this one were about the framework I built for myself. A way of seeing where my time and energy were actually going, understanding why some hours felt alive and others felt like grinding through cement, and making deliberate choices about how to invest differently.
What I didn’t say explicitly, until now, is where that framework came from.
It came from motherhood. From the years of having to do more with less. From learning to compress and triage and layer and protect the hours that mattered. From building, out of necessity, a different relationship with time. One that accounts for finite energy, competing demands, and the reality that the plan is always going to change.
I didn’t build those tools despite being a mom. I built them because of it.
So, that’s what It Takes A Mom is actually about.
The name was a deliberate choice, the same kind of reclamation as the tattoo on my foot. Not “you need a mom’s help.” But it takes a mom, as in, this level of operating, this capacity that got built under pressure, this way of holding a complex life without dropping it: it takes a mom to do it.
Not a superhero. Not someone who has it all figured out. A mom. Someone who has been sharpened by the specific, underestimated, underacknowledged work of holding everything together while building something at the same time.
The constraints didn’t limit us. They trained us.
And the world (the professional world, the leadership world, any world that demands sustained performance under pressure) needs people who have been trained that way. It just hasn’t figured out yet that it’s been overlooking them.
My tattoo is years old now. Sometimes I forget it’s there.
And then someone asks me how I manage to do everything I do. And I think about the answer, really think about it, and I realize the honest one isn’t “I’m organized” or “I have good systems” or even “I’ve learned to invest my time differently.”
The honest answer is: I’m a mom.
And it turns out that’s exactly what it takes.
If this landed, I’d love for you to share it with a mom you know who needs to hear it. And if you’ve been reading along and want to go deeper, there’s more coming. I do 1:1 Mom Brain sessions for women who can see the pattern but need someone to think alongside them. And I’m building something bigger for later this year. Stay close.
If you want to learn more about framework I’ve created to change your relationship to your time, energy, capacity and the math of motherhood, start here:
You’re Not Failing. You’re Grinding.
Before I had my daughter, I didn’t understand how relentless the labor of motherhood is.
oh i love this! I've wanted to get a tattoo on my foot of some words for years but could never decide what would be good. I love yours!!! My experience with motherhood has been the same. I thought it would change things, and it did, but not in the way I expected. It really taught me how damn tough, smart and organised women with kids are. But its hard to explain to someone who hasn't experienced it. But the ones who have they totally get it. Excited to hear more about your frameworks and what is working for you.