You need some help
"Care team? I AM the care team."
I was sitting in my office with my new work coach, tears streaming down my face.
“You need some help,” she said.
We had just moved from Hong Kong to New York with three kids under ten, left our extended family, and said goodbye to our two precious domestic helpers. My husband was overseeing the renovation of our home. And I had stepped into a new leadership role that was supposed to have an assistant principal (there wasn’t one).
“No, no, I don’t need help,” I insisted. “I’m fine.”
What was I thinking? I was not fine.
Once I accepted the fact that I couldn’t do it all, I got lots more help. My husband sold his company and took over managing our household. I signed the kids up for all the before- and after-school care that was offered. We hired a housekeeper. I gave my executive assistant access to my email and empowered an administrative assistant to be communications director. I hired a trusted assistant principal, and together, we built a leadership team.
Two years later, I was starting to see small patches of white space in my calendar. And then, just as I thought I might be surfacing, COVID hit.
We shifted into overdrive to keep the school running and to make it possible for kids to come back in person. We needed much more help. We were working 16-hour days, and it still wasn’t enough.
My boss took the reins this time and insisted we add two communications consultants to help us manage the unprecedented volume and tone of communications we were responsible for. In an era before ChatGPT, I relied on the school psychologist to help draft tricky parent emails and delicate internal communications. A teacher with expertise in organizing dance recitals helped us figure out how to safely escort 400 children in and out of the building each day. Somehow, we persuaded teachers to come in and teach.
And incredibly, after a few months, we reached a kind of equilibrium. We were exhausted, there was a cumulative toll being taken, and also, the ship wasn’t sinking. Children were learning.
Another few months passed, and then came my real lesson.
My own kids started to melt down.
One of our kids started hitting people at school. I remember getting the call. Feeling my stomach clench.
Another set off red flags at the annual physical by answering a question about suicidal ideation. The pediatrician’s response protocol said everything. Drop everything. This can’t wait.
It was one thing to accept that I needed help with house cleaning and emails, or that I couldn’t keep a school open single-handed during a pandemic, but it was another thing entirely to reach my breaking point as a parent. Parenting was the one thing I wouldn’t delegate.
At the core of my identity, I am a mother. And as a mother who is also an educator, it never occurred to me that I would (or could) ask for help tending to the emotional health of my children. Doctors to help with physical health? Of course. But mental health was my responsibility alone. It was my job to maintain a loving and supportive household, to teach my children the strategies they needed to navigate the demands of life.
I remember sitting in my office with my work coach (on Zoom this time), in tears once again, knowing I was at a breaking point. Just the way she looked at me helped me see myself through her eyes. What was I thinking? Help was available; I just needed to get unstuck on this idea that I wasn’t “allowed” to ask for it.
Once I did, help flowed in. We were fortunate to have a wonderful school psychologist who introduced us to therapists for first one of our kids and then a second. We arranged neuropsych evaluations for the older two and eventually all three. We found a psychiatrist who partnered with us to trial medications.
When I finally realized it wasn’t all on my shoulders, the relief was overwhelming.
Four years later, our care team still includes child therapists, an excellent pediatrician, a psychiatrist, and a neuropsych evaluator. Two of our kids are in boarding school (talk about expanding our care team!). We have a house cleaner and a yard crew. My husband cooks all of our meals and manages our household. I’ve started a business and hired a business coach, a lawyer, an accountant, and an executive assistant.
And still, I know I have blind spots where I insist on doing things that I could trust others to help with.
Which brings me to you.
Why is it so hard for mothers in leadership to build care teams? In one of my coaching groups last year, the mere mention of a “care team” moved one participant to tears. “Care team? I am the care team,” she said.
What might be possible if we could build more robust care teams? What might we be capable of? What greater impact might we have on our boards, in our workplaces, in our families, and in our communities?
Thinking only about yourself,
Who is on your care team?
Who else could you help if you had more help?
Are there any places you aren’t allowing yourself to ask for help?
Reply if you like, or don’t. Comment if you feel moved, or just take these questions with you today.
I’m so glad you’re here.
🕊️
SAM
When I became a mom I made a decision that was probably partly conscious and partly subconscious to try really hard not to feel bad asking for help. I think this is a response to watching mothers around me struggle in various capacities throughout my life and making the implicit calculation that more help would reduce my struggle. Being able to afford paid help as part of a care team is a huge part of the conversation too, and creates new struggles in different ways. Lately with a new baby we’ve been leaning a lot more on neighbors and local friends, which has become a two way street and actually feels really nice and has fortified our sense of community.
thank you for sharing and opening up this conversation, Sarah.
Adjacent to this whole conversation is the expectation that we, as working mothers, are *expected* to field it all, be the whole care team (let’s not forget here that we are all also daughters, which sometimes comes with caring for aging parents at this point in life). It’s not only an internal mindset shift, but a cultural one: we need to start expecting that we help each other and that others will ask for help, not put the ‘mom doing it all’ on a pedestal.