I Keep Waiting for My Life to Calm Down

A few weeks ago, my phone rang at 6:30 in the morning while I was asleep in a hotel room in Denver. It was Jimmy, who was back home in Florida and currently sitting in the preschool drop-off line with our three-year-old, who had just thrown up all over herself. He did not know what to do.

For context, I was approximately 1,800 miles away. There was quite literally nothing I could do. I could not clean the child, retrieve a change of clothes, determine whether she was actually sick or had just worked herself up, or even get them out of the preschool parking lot. And yet, somehow, from a hotel room in Denver, I was still mission control.

This is my life now.

For what feels like years, I have been waiting for it to calm down. After this business trip. After the quarter ends. After preschool settles down. After we figure out the dance class situation. After this fertility cycle. After the next doctor's appointment. After this renewal gets signed. There is always some imaginary point a few weeks in the future when I am convinced I will finally wake up, look at my calendar and think, Ahhh. There it is. Nothing.

I'm beginning to suspect that day is not coming.

In fairness, we have gotten remarkably good at managing the chaos. Our lives now run on a complex network of calendars, reminders, routines, grandparents, text chains and people who know where Haisley is supposed to be at any given moment. My parents pick her up from school every Wednesday, which gives her an afternoon with Nina and Pop-Pop and gives us one more little pocket of predictability during the week. Jimmy handles the overwhelming majority of the day-to-day when I'm traveling. Family fills gaps. Friends fill gaps. We coordinate school, ballet, work travel, medical appointments, fertility appointments and whatever other random obligation has entered the chat that week.

Recently, I volunteered to create a shared calendar for the moms in Haisley's class because our existing system of sending every school event, reminder and date into one very active group text had become entirely too much for me to track. We call ourselves the Willow Moms, and apparently my response to preschool-related chaos is to implement centralized scheduling infrastructure. Honestly, I'm not sure how our mothers raised us without shared calendars and group texts. They must have simply missed things.

I've also added a slightly less traditional member to my village: artificial intelligence.

I don't mean I occasionally ask ChatGPT to help me write an email, although God knows I do plenty of that. I mean I have reached the point where I will open it while placing a grocery order and say, "What else do we need?" with the expectation that it will piece together the answer based on everything I've talked about all week. It knows what we've been eating, what household problem we're currently trying to solve, what I'm packing for a work trip, what Haisley is currently obsessed with and, for reasons I can't believe are necessary, the two different sizes of air filters in our house.

I'll send it a picture of dinner and ask how many carbs are on my plate so I can give myself a bolus of insulin. While packing for a business trip, I'll send pictures of three different pairs of shoes and ask which ones actually work with the outfits I'm bringing, then ask whether my outfit choices even make sense for the weather in the city I'm traveling to. Between meetings, I'll dump six completely unrelated problems into it because I have eight minutes and need somebody else to organize my brain.

Maybe I have become incredibly efficient. Or maybe I have built an elaborate network of humans, technology and calendar notifications that allows me to continue adding things to my life at a rate that would otherwise be medically inadvisable. I suspect both are true.

The funny thing is that somewhere in all of this, I've realized I may actually function better when I'm busy. This is an irritating discovery for someone who spends a significant amount of time complaining about how busy she is, but I've seen it both personally and professionally. I am an overthinker by nature. Give me unlimited time to make a decision and I will happily use all of it. I'll analyze the options, analyze my analysis of the options, ask someone else what they think, decide, reconsider, and then wonder whether the fact that I'm reconsidering is evidence that I made the wrong decision in the first place.

My current life simply does not have time for that level of nonsense. There is another meeting in ten minutes. Someone on my team needs an answer. A client needs a decision. Haisley needs to be picked up. The fertility clinic wants to know what we're doing next. Somebody needs something signed. There is always another thing coming, and the calendar does not particularly care that I'd prefer another 48 hours to emotionally workshop my decision.

So I've learned to make the call and move on. Not recklessly and not without thinking, but with the information I have, the priorities I know and a growing acceptance that very few decisions come with the certainty I once thought I needed before making them. If I'm wrong, I'll adjust. If something changes, we'll figure it out. Professionally, I think this has made me a better leader. Personally, I think it has made me slightly less likely to spend an entire evening obsessing over something that probably deserved fifteen minutes.

Maybe that's what all these systems are actually doing for me. They're not eliminating the chaos or giving me control over everything. They're just giving me enough structure to operate inside of it. You can have every calendar perfectly synced, every responsibility assigned and every bag packed the night before, and your kid can still throw up on herself in the preschool drop-off line while you're asleep in Denver. At some point, somebody just has to figure out what to do next.

What I've been thinking about lately, though, is how completely different this life must look from Haisley's side of it.

She doesn't see any of the infrastructure. She doesn't know that Wednesday afternoons with Nina and Pop-Pop happen because adults compared schedules and made them happen. She doesn't know when I move something around so I can be somewhere for her, or when Jimmy rearranges his day, or when another family member steps in. She doesn't know that sometimes I'm solving a preschool problem from an airport or talking to Jimmy about something happening at home between meetings in another state.

And lately, I've had to remind myself that the point of all this infrastructure isn't just to make our complicated life fit on a calendar. Sometimes the calendar itself needs to change.

Haisley recently started a new season of dance, and it was not going well. The class was bigger, the studio was busier, and instead of the little girl who normally loves singing and dancing, we were getting meltdowns. She was overwhelmed. Going to dance was becoming a whole ordeal, and it became pretty obvious that whatever worked on paper wasn't working for the actual three-year-old we were putting into the situation.

So I reached out to the studio and we changed it. Different day. Different time. A calmer class when the studio isn't nearly as busy. Problem solved, except for one small detail: Haisley has also decided that I am the person she wants taking her to dance.

This is not particularly convenient.

Monday afternoons are work afternoons. They are meetings and calls and the part of the day when people are still very much expecting me to be a functioning Senior Director rather than a chauffeur carrying a tiny ballet bag. But I also spend a lot of time traveling for work. And even when I'm home, there are plenty of times when Haisley comes looking for me and I have to say, "Sorry, baby. Mama has to work. Go play with Daddy until I'm done."

I know that's normal. I know it's good for her to see that I have work that matters to me, and I don't believe being a good mother requires making myself available to her every second of every day. But I'd be lying if I said I never feel guilty about it. There are moments when I look at how often she hears "Mama has to work" or watches me leave with a suitcase and wonder what those things look like from her side.

So when she made it very clear that she wanted Mama to take her to dance, I looked at my Monday afternoons and figured it out. I moved meetings. I blocked the time. I reworked a part of my schedule that was already complicated because, in this particular instance, I could.

There are going to be plenty of times when the answer has to be, "Mama has to work." There are going to be flights I have to take, calls I can't move and things I will miss. I can't make myself available for everything, and I don't think I should. But I can pay attention to the things that seem to matter most to her and, when I have the ability to make room for them, make the room.

She doesn't know any of that, of course. She doesn't know Mama moved meetings around on Monday afternoons. She doesn't know we changed dance classes because I could see that the first one was overwhelming her. She doesn't know that any adult had to negotiate anything at all.

She just knows Mama takes her to dance.

The same is true of what has somehow become another major pillar of Haisley's social calendar: Spirit Halloween.

A few weeks ago, I was leaving for another business trip when I happened to notice from the backseat of my Uber that Spirit Halloween had opened in one of our local shopping centers. Haisley loves Halloween, so I shot Jimmy a quick text suggesting that he take her there after school. I was going to be gone, and I thought it would give the two of them something fun to do that afternoon.

It was maybe a thirty-second thought. I had absolutely no idea what I had unleashed.

She now begs to go constantly. Jimmy has taken her more times than either of us can count. When I got home from traveling, she was beside herself with excitement to finally take me there and show me everything. She has since recruited my parents and other family members to go with her too, proudly leading them through a seasonal retail store full of animatronic monsters as though she's giving a private tour of a property she personally owns.

And she has no idea that the whole thing started because her mom was in the backseat of an Uber, leaving town again, thinking about her.

That's the part I keep coming back to. Haisley doesn't know how any of this gets arranged. She doesn't know about the texts, calendars, backup plans or logistical gymnastics happening behind the scenes. She doesn't know how often the adults in her life are asking each other who has her, where she needs to be, what she needs for school, whether someone remembered the thing she left behind or who can take her somewhere when Plan A falls apart.

She just knows somebody comes.

She knows Nina and Pop-Pop pick her up on Wednesday. She knows Daddy takes her to Spirit Halloween for the 900th time because apparently there may have been significant developments since yesterday. She knows Mama takes her to dance on Monday. She knows Mom goes on airplanes and comes home again. She knows there are grandparents, aunts, uncles, teachers, friends and an entire little community of people who are genuinely excited to see her.

At three years old, she doesn't experience our life as complicated. Her life is preschool and ballet and dresses and dogs. It's singing to herself while she works at school and discovering that the older kids in her classroom will happily dote on her if she plays her cards right. It's grandparents on Wednesdays and family members who can apparently be convinced to make recreational trips to Spirit Halloween.

The complexity belongs to the adults. The magic belongs to her.

And I think that, more than anything, is why I keep building all of these ridiculous systems. I don't want to pretend that everything I do is some grand sacrifice for my child. It isn't. I love my career. I'm ambitious. I care about the work I do and the people I work with. I travel because there are opportunities I want to pursue, and there are parts of my life that matter deeply to me simply because I am a person outside of being someone's mother.

But so much of what Jimmy and I have built around our increasingly complicated life is designed to make sure that the complexity doesn't become the defining feature of her childhood. We absorb the calendars and the logistics and the last-minute changes so that, as often as possible, what reaches her is the fun part. The people who show up. The places she gets to go. The traditions that accidentally begin in the backseat of an Uber.

Of course, there are days when I genuinely do want less. There are days when I want everyone to stop needing something from me for approximately four consecutive hours. I want a hotel room where nobody calls before sunrise. I want a Saturday with absolutely nothing on the calendar. I would happily eliminate a few meetings, a delayed flight, a preschool virus and several hundred emails without feeling even slightly sentimental about their contribution to my beautifully full life.

But I wouldn't trade the whole thing.

And that's the distinction I think I've been missing every time I say I want life to calm down. There is a difference between an overwhelmed life and a full one, even though from the outside they can look remarkably similar. A lot of what makes my life difficult to manage is there because I wanted it there. A career I care about. A marriage. A little girl with an increasingly elaborate life of her own. Parents who live close enough to pick her up from school. Family we want her to know. Friends. Travel. Opportunities. A village big enough that we now apparently require scheduling software.

And then there is perhaps the funniest part of all of this.

In the middle of managing this already absurd operation, Jimmy and I are actively trying to have another baby.

We have looked at a life that already requires multiple calendars, grandparents, group texts, artificial intelligence and the occasional early-morning interstate vomit consultation and thought, You know what would really round this out? A newborn.

Trying to grow our family has added its own enormous layer of appointments, decisions, uncertainty and logistics. We also know the odds aren't necessarily in our favor. I'm 42. There are no guarantees here, and we've had to make decisions about how much we're willing to put our hearts, our time and our resources into something that may not happen.

And yet, we're trying.

Part of that is faith. Not the kind that promises me everything will work out exactly the way I want it to, but the kind that tells me I don't need to know the ending before I'm willing to take the next step. I can hope for something deeply, do everything I reasonably can to pursue it, and still understand that the outcome isn't entirely mine to control.

And part of it, strangely enough, comes back to Haisley.

Someday she's going to want something that feels very difficult. Maybe someone will tell her the odds aren't good. Maybe she'll fail the first time, or the second. Maybe she'll have to decide whether something matters enough to keep trying when there is absolutely no guarantee that trying harder will change the ending.

I don't want to teach her that wanting something badly enough guarantees you'll get it, because life doesn't work that way. But I do want her to grow up knowing that very difficult and unlikely are not the same thing as impossible. Sometimes the brave thing is allowing yourself to hope anyway. Sometimes it's doing the next thing you can do, even when you can't control what happens after that.

Maybe someday we'll get to tell her that this is how her little brother or sister came to be. And maybe we won't. That's the part I have to hold loosely. But either way, I hope she sees parents who were willing to try for something they loved before they knew whether they could have it.

And maybe that's part of what all of this has been teaching me too. It would be reasonable for everything else happening in our lives to make me question whether we really have room for more. Instead, it has made me realize that maybe room is exactly what we've been creating.

For a long time, I thought becoming more organized and more efficient would eventually buy me calm. If I could just build the right systems, delegate better, stop overthinking every decision and get enough help, surely I'd eventually arrive at this mythical version of adulthood where everything felt manageable and there was finally some white space on the calendar.

But maybe calm was never the goal.

Maybe capacity was.

Maybe I've spent all this time learning how to carry a bigger life.

And if we're lucky enough to add another little person to this circus someday, it will undoubtedly become even more complicated. There will be another schedule, another set of appointments, another tiny person needing something at precisely the moment someone else also needs something. The calendars will get worse. The logistics will get harder. I'm sure Jimmy will call me from somewhere at an ungodly hour with a situation I am geographically incapable of fixing.

And we'll figure it out.

Because at the end of all this, I don't actually want an empty calendar.

I think I just want a bigger one.