There’s a version of “busy” that looks impressive on LinkedIn, and there’s a version that sounds like static in your own head at 6am while you’re still in your pajamas, mentally running three timelines at once. If you’re a working mom carrying a title, you already know the second one. That’s the one nobody claps for.
When your internal volume is turned all the way up just to keep the ship afloat, it becomes nearly impossible to hear anything else; let alone the still, small voice of God trying to get a word in.
When the roles stop taking turns
Lately my life has felt like a high-stakes juggling act where none of the balls agree to wait their turn. As a COO, I’m paid to manage end-to-end supply chain. Nobody warned me that the hardest supply chain/ logistics I’d ever manage would be my own life; motherhood stacked on top of planning a major USA tour for October, stacked on top of the mounting paperwork for our migration to Spain, all bleeding into each other until I couldn’t tell where “work” ended and “home” began.
Then my helper called in sick, and something in me cracked that had nothing to do with one missed workday. When you’re the one holding every moving part together, even a small hiccup doesn’t feel small. It feels like the whole structure is about to come down, because in your head, it’s all resting on you.
Sound familiar, mom?
The morning the noise finally broke
I was frantically getting the kids ready for school, running my usual mental checklist, when I actually saw my husband, Allen, standing right there in the kitchen. Quiet. Steady. Already handling breakfast, already reaching for Adi’s bag to take him to school.
I hadn’t asked him to. He just did it.
And in that small, unremarkable moment, I felt the kind of hug that grounds you without anyone touching you. A reminder that I am not the only architect of this household, even though my nervous system had been operating like I was.
Listening to the rain outside, it hit me: my inability to hear the spiritual guidance I’d been praying for wasn’t a faith problem. It was a volume problem. I had been living in high-alert survival mode, treating my whole life like a project to manage instead of a season to actually live through.
Why “in control” was costing me peace
Here’s the confession under the confession: I’ve been gripping control out of pure habit, half-convinced that if I loosened my hands even slightly, the whole thing would collapse. But it doesn’t. The world keeps turning. My family doesn’t fall apart the moment I stop being the COO of every single breath we take at home too.
The most spiritual thing I did that morning wasn’t a devotional. It was letting myself receive help without immediately trying to earn it back.
We mistake busy for necessary constantly, especially those of us who were praised our whole careers for being the ones who could handle it all. But over-functioning creates its own fog, and that fog is exactly what’s hiding the guidance we keep saying we want. My need to stay in constant motion, I’m realizing, has quietly become a defense mechanism against sitting still long enough to feel the vulnerability of transition. Real transformation doesn’t happen inside a checklist. It happens the moment we finally stop managing and start receiving.
Letting go of some control hasn’t cost me anything. If anything, it handed me perspective I didn’t have room for before.
For me, that shift started somewhere unglamorous: the gym. One non-negotiable hour where I put the title down and just exist as a body, a person, someone allowed to breathe without an agenda. It’s in that hour that the static actually fades, and I can hear again.
What a pastor from Tacloban said that I haven’t stopped thinking about
A few weeks before this season hit its peak, I sat in a session at our church’s Kingdom Builders conference, listening to Pastor Ram Canes of New Life Tacloban talk about “Life Beyond The Limelight”. One line has stayed lodged in me since.
“It is not good that the man should be alone.” — Genesis 2:18
He described something every woman leading at the top already knows in her body, even if she’s never said it out loud: the higher you climb, the smaller your circle gets. You can’t just quit when it’s hard. You can’t open up to just anyone. And sometimes you’re quietly breaking on the inside while everyone around you assumes you’ve got it handled, because you always do.
What stayed with me most was how he broke down the people every leader needs, and I kept mentally checking off names as he spoke.
- People who are for you — genuinely wanting your growth without competing for it
- People who are with you — present in your darkest moments, not just your highlight reel
- People working on you — the mentors and coaches who’ll tell you what you need to hear instead of what’s comfortable
- People working around you — the family and loved ones who remind you that you were never built to do this alone
He also drew a line I keep coming back to: your career can change, but your calling doesn’t. Which meant the real question underneath my overwhelm wasn’t “how do I manage all of this better.” It was “who am I, underneath the title, when nobody’s watching me perform it.”
Allen quietly stepping into that kitchen without being asked was that lesson, lived out in real time, before I’d even finished processing the sermon. I wasn’t meant to carry the household, the move, the tour, and the title alone. None of us were built to.
If you’re the one everyone assumes has it handled
Find one task this week you’ve been holding onto purely out of habit, not necessity, and hand it off. Delegate it, pause it, or let it go entirely. Stop treating every transition, an international move, a career pivot, even just the morning rush, as a problem to solve, and start treating it as a season to actually walk through.
Find your own version of the gym. Some space, however small, where you’re allowed to turn your internal volume down and just exist without a title attached.
You don’t have to be the architect of every detail of your own life to deserve peace. Trust the people already standing quietly in your kitchen. You were never meant to carry it all solo, no matter how good you’ve gotten at pretending otherwise.
You’re doing enough. Today, that’s more than enough.
Who’s standing in your kitchen, the ones who are for you, with you, and around you, whether you’ve thanked them for it yet or not? 🌿
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