Just 21 days after my third child was born, I was taking VC calls. We were mid-Series A, and a fundraise does not pause for a newborn. The investor I pitched that day ended up leading our round.
I’m not telling you this to inspire you. I tell you this so you know I’m speaking from experience when I say: work-life balance is fake.
My husband Roy and I are the co-founders of BodySpec, a 125-person healthcare company that makes DEXA scans affordable. If you’re on a GLP-1 and want to know whether you’re losing fat or muscle, that’s what we track.
We’ve been busy these last couple of years. We’re also raising three children: ages 7, 5, and 3. This is not the life I expected.
As a millennial, I thought my marraige would be 50/50
I went to a blue-stocking all-girls private school in Manhattan that raised us on feminist ideas. Senior year, as we prepared for college, alumni came back to tell us what it was like to take classes with insufferable boys who loved to hear themselves talk.
Six months later, at Harvard, I was dating one.
As we approached adulthood together, I was certain our marriage would be 50/50. I had read “Lean In.” I knew that doing your boyfriend’s laundry in college was a gateway drug to doing everything, forever. But that wouldn’t happen to me, I thought. I would have my own career, supported by an aligned partner who was equally competent at changing diapers, making lunches, and getting children through bedtime.
For the record, Roy is that partner. He moves the kids through their schedules faster than I can.
But as co-founders, our lives are not 50/50. We discovered years ago that 50/50 is a lie.
My husband and I threw ‘work-life balance’ out the window
The reality is that we take turns covering 90%. When I am fundraising, traveling, or attending evening events, Roy carries the family. When he is deep in a product sprint or an expansion problem, I do. Some weekends that means a three-on-one Mama marathon, or months when I’m the one doing both mornings and bedtimes.
Beyond that, there was no 50/50 option available when the children were babies. Pregnancy, breastfeeding, and postpartum recovery were patently unfair. Roy was the one who set up my breast pump and showed me how to use it, but he still did not have to spend hours attached to it. Biology effectively gave him another 20 or 30 hours a week to think about the company. I could not compete.
Did I resent it? Yes. But at some point, I realized that keeping score was useless. Resentment didn’t actually put dinner on the table or finish the pitch deck. At worst, left to fester, it could end a marriage.
Courtesy of Frances Hizon
So I became the external founder, doing work that mostly happens during business hours. Roy took on product and technical work that could happen at night.
Work-life balance also assumes that work is the draining part and “life” is where you recover. Anyone who has cared for multiple children knows this is not true. Childcare is many wonderful things. Restorative is usually not one of them.
Comparatively, solo work trips feel like self-care. I can have pad thai all to myself, enjoy stimulating intellectual conversations with other adults, and even sneak in a massage on a lighter day.
We use ‘radical prioritization’ instead
We genuinely like working on Saturdays. The team isn’t in, so the office is quiet and we’re more productive. One of our older children comes along, usually our son. He is the middle child, bossed around by both his older and younger sisters. At the office, he can build LEGO sets without anyone destroying them and enjoy a peaceful one-on-one lunch with Mama.
This is what we call radical reprioritization: we cut out everything else in our lives and blend the two most important facets to succeed in both. It’s accepting a lopsided, demanding life to be both a successful leader and a deeply involved parent. Not everything will be 50/50. There will be sacrifices along the way — and you’ll often have to blur the lines between work and life.
Radical reprioritization does not feel like work stealing from family life.
We do not talk about the company as the thing Dada or Mama is always choosing over the family. It is our family’s company. Our children have grown up alongside it, and they beam with pride when they see our vans or stores.
Finally, this life comes with sacrifices. Neither of us has personal hobbies. Whatever marginal free time we can find usually goes toward chasing our own wellness: lifting, walking, sleeping. There is not a lot of slack in the system, and I do not want to pretend otherwise. We are, in a traditional sense, wildly unbalanced.
But both of us get to be serious founders and deeply involved parents.
This is not the life I pictured at 17. It’s lopsided, it’s ours, and it’s better than the one I was promised.
