I welcomed my fourth baby on June 29, 2026, six days after writing this. These words capture the week before, when I was 38 weeks pregnant, and the question that kept me awake still feels urgent now.
It was 11 p.m. I was 38 weeks pregnant with my fourth child, and instead of sleeping I was lying in the dark, silently running the list. Camp forms. The pediatrician follow-up. The board deck due to review. Who’s covering carpool the week I deliver? My body was begging me to rest, and my brain wouldn’t let it. By every external measure, I was doing it all. But lately, I could feel myself disappearing.
Four years ago, I wrote an article urging women to stop asking about work-life balance. My advice? You can never be truly balanced. The goal is to live unbalanced, to teeter back and forth, but with conviction about which way you’re leaning. I was pregnant with my third child then, a hustling venture capitalist. Today, I am a mother of four, a growing portfolio behind me, and over three-quarters of a billion dollars raised to deploy into healthcare companies. Now I find myself reflecting on the advice I gave back then. The question I keep asking: did we perfect the art of teetering so well that we forgot to live?
Four kids and a full career later, the list of to-dos is endless. Check one off, move on to the next. Whack-a-mole to the extreme. Focus on optimization. Prioritize. BE EFFICIENT. Get the to-do list done. Don’t worry if I’m the sacrifice.
The mental load has changed from our parents’ generation. Gone are the days when kids ran free until dinner. Unencumbered freedom has been exchanged for meticulous planning. Our kids are overscheduled, and we bear the brunt. And it’s not just the kids. It’s our jobs. The expectation of how much to produce, how high to climb. “How does she do it all?”
And the work never clocks out anymore. Hybrid and remote have blurred the line between the office and the kitchen table until there was no line at all. Now AI promises to make us faster, which somehow just means we’re expected to produce more, around the clock, forever.
But is this having it all? Countless working moms tell me stories of their day, collapsing into bed with just barely enough energy to make it to the following day. We figured out how to live in the unbalance yet it appears we teetered too much, too quickly, and we started losing ourselves in the process.
The trad wife movement has gained steam in part for this reason, a desire for simplicity. It’s not really about sourdough and aprons; it’s a referendum on a deal that stopped working. When “do it all” leaves you this depleted, opting out entirely starts to look like the only way to breathe.
My work as an investor in healthcare companies serving women makes it impossible to ignore: the mental load is exhausting, and it’s measurably hurting women’s health.
Without our health, we have nothing, and women are paying for it.
Mothers carry 71% of the household’s mental load, the invisible work of remembering, planning, anticipating, despite the fact that fathers are more involved than at any point in modern history. They’ve nearly tripled their childcare hours since the 1960s, yet it still isn’t enough.
And that load has a body count. There’s a name for what chronic stress does to a body: allostatic load, the cumulative wear and tear of a stress response that never fully switches off. It’s not a metaphor. It shows up as inflammation, hypertension, and disease, and it’s quietly accruing in women who are praised for how much they can carry.
Women spend 25% more of their lives in poor health than men, roughly nine years each. Nearly half of working women say their job has damaged their mental health in just the past six months. This isn’t fatigue. It’s a deterioration we’ve normalized.
The system that’s supposed to support us isn’t built to. Less than 9% of NIH research dollars over the last decade went to women’s health.
Humans were supposed to be raised in tribes, in community, yet somehow today we are expected to accomplish more than we ever have, in isolation. Please your spouse, take care of your kids, crush it at work, don’t ask for help. In fact, don’t even tell anyone you have help.
A friend of mine was on a panel and was asked how she had four kids. She replied honestly, “I have two nannies and lots of help.” Later she was scolded by the conference organizers, “shhh don’t tell the truth! We don’t want to scare people.”
But isn’t asking for help one of the most important things we can do for ourselves and each other? Somehow, we have lost the ability to be honest and say “I can’t do this alone. I need you.”
I felt that loss too. The optimization of my life was consuming me to the point I lost the greatest gift of all: time. So, I sought out help. First in small, confined ways, and later, more outwardly.
It’s still incredibly difficult. I’m a high-performing woman with local family and resources to pay for help; shouldn’t I be able to do it all?
In the pandemic, I found myself on a text chain with four other women. Half of us had never met in person. Six years later, we’ve texted every single day since, and I consider them some of my closest confidants.
You want to know what we named our chat? The Womb of Silence.
It’s where one of us admits she’s drowning before a board meeting. Where someone asks, with no shame, if anyone has a pediatrician they trust, a therapist taking new patients, a name for the thing they’re feeling or ailment they’re experiencing. Where “I can’t do this alone” is the price of entry, not a confession. Nothing you say there gets you exposed. Nothing gets you judged. You can always ask for help, and someone always answers.
I’ve since replicated this feeling with other groups, my Core of Core and Bad Ass VC Mamas, to name a few.
That chat taught me something the rest of my life kept trying to unteach me: asking isn’t the moment you fail. It’s the moment you actually start living and thriving.
Little by little, I am trying to reframe my brain to believe that doing it all myself doesn’t win me any awards. Deteriorating in plain sight won’t improve my health and happiness. Asking for help will.
The companies I’m drawn to as an investor are the ones giving women back the two things the world keeps taking: their time and their health. Every time I ask for help, I get a little of myself back.
The woman lying awake at 11 p.m., doing it all and quietly disappearing, is starting to reappear. Not because I’m carrying less, but because I’m finally not carrying it alone.
Maybe it’s okay ChatGPT wrote the tooth fairy poem or Instacart auto-ordered my groceries or, gasp, I got a babysitter to take a nap. And as I reflect four years later, with my fourth and final baby now here, I realize that maybe it’s okay to just rest on one side of the see-saw. It’s okay even to climb off of it for a bit to take a break.
Ask for help when you need it. And we all know, we need it.
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