The most expensive thing she owns is the belief that she should be able to handle all of it

Nobody warned her that the promotion and the second child would arrive in the same year and quietly replace her personality with a logistics operation. That the woman who used to read novels and have opinions about architecture and laugh at things that weren't efficient would be slowly, methodically compressed into someone whose entire interior life consists of what needs to happen next.

I have started calling it compression, because the existing vocabulary fails here. Burnout implies a crisis, something acute that arrives and demands a response. Exhaustion implies a weekend in bed would fix it. Compression is quieter than both and worse than either, because it doesn't announce itself. It just slowly replaces you with someone more efficient and less alive.

The arithmetic

A household with children requires roughly forty hours a week, a senior career requires fifty or more, sleep takes fifty-six, and the week's 168 hours contain no configuration of those numbers that produces a life with room in it.

That's not a planning failure. It's a mathematical fact, and no morning routine fixes math.

So you solve it the only way available: you flatten yourself into the space, trim every activity, every conversation, every private thought down to whatever fits between obligations, stop reading, stop thinking about things that aren't actionable, stop having preferences because preferences require bandwidth you no longer have.