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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s covering carpool the week I deliver? My body was begging me to rest, and my brain wouldn\u2019t let it. By every external measure, I was doing it all. But lately, I could feel myself disappearing.<\/p>\n
Four years ago, I wrote an article<\/a> 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\u2019re 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?<\/p>\n 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\u2019t worry if I\u2019m the sacrifice.<\/p>\n The mental load has changed from our parents\u2019 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\u2019s not just the kids. It\u2019s our jobs. The expectation of how much to produce, how high to climb. \u201cHow does she do it all?\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019re expected to produce more, around the clock, forever.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n The trad wife movement has gained steam in part for this reason, a desire for simplicity. It\u2019s not really about sourdough and aprons; it\u2019s a referendum on a deal that stopped working. When \u201cdo it all\u201d leaves you this depleted, opting out entirely starts to look like the only way to breathe.<\/p>\n My work as an investor in healthcare companies serving women makes it impossible to ignore: the mental load is exhausting, and it\u2019s measurably hurting women\u2019s health.<\/p>\n Without our health, we have nothing, and women are paying for it.<\/p>\n Mothers carry 71% of the household\u2019s mental load<\/a>, the invisible work of remembering, planning, anticipating, despite the fact that fathers are more involved than at any point in modern history. They\u2019ve nearly tripled their childcare hours<\/a> since the 1960s, yet it still isn\u2019t enough.<\/p>\n And that load has a body count. There\u2019s 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\u2019s not a metaphor. It shows up as inflammation, hypertension, and disease, and it\u2019s quietly accruing in women who are praised for how much they can carry.<\/p>\n