What she protects. What she delegates. How a life actually runs.
You're always coming from somewhere. Always arriving with the last place still on you. There's another woman. She walks in with nothing trailing behind her. She's just there. The difference is in the transitions.
You have help, maybe a lot of help, but no one is running it. I spent years in this exact place. Plenty of help, still exhausted. Still the one who held the whole picture in my head. It took me longer than I'd like to admit to realize what I was missing wasn't more help. It was governance.
We stood in the kitchen at 6 AM, both half-dressed, both doing the math on whose thing could be rescheduled with the least damage. Neither of us said it aloud. We were both calculating: whose career takes the hit this time?
You see the irony: managing teams, running organizations, making decisions that affect hundreds of people. And yet you cannot stop rewriting your assistant's emails. You check behind the housekeeper. You redo the school form because it's faster than explaining. It's not easier. It's just yours.
