I am not a mother. I have been reminded of this often enough, particularly when I have ventured an opinion about motherhood.
The reminder is not entirely unfair. There are dimensions of being a mother that I cannot claim to know. But I have been a daughter, sister, sister-in-law and aunt. I have watched the mothers closest to me love their children fiercely, take pride in raising them—and still become exhausted by everything they believe that choice requires them to carry.
In the past week, I watched two mothers struggle with two very different teenage daughters.
One daughter protects herself through silence. Conversations about her future are difficult. Her mother finally burst into tears. After seventeen years, she felt she had failed to create a relationship in which her daughter could talk to her.
The other daughter responds through anger, screaming and exhausting tantrums. Her mother is bringing her up largely alone because circumstances have required it. She, too, is tired—not of her daughter, but of the relentless emotional energy motherhood demands.
One daughter withdraws. The other erupts. Yet both mothers arrive at the same question: Where did I fail?
A mother is responsible for providing love, safety, guidance, boundaries and the possibility of conversation. But can she also be responsible for whether her child chooses to speak, how the child expresses anger, or what kind of person the child eventually becomes?
There are responsibilities attached to motherhood. Omnipotence cannot be one of them.
None of these women regrets motherhood. On the contrary, they take pride in it. The conflict is between motherhood and individuality—between the role they cherish and the person who must somehow keep existing within it.
Perhaps that is why exhaustion comes with guilt.
If I chose this, what right do I have to complain about its consequences?
But a choice is not a lifelong contract with every consequence that follows.
I wonder whether women carry this understanding of responsibility into the workplace.
I think many of us do.
The setting changes. Family relationships acquire corporate titles. The consequences appear in reports and spreadsheets. But the internal equation remains remarkably similar:
If something matters, I must protect it.
If someone depends upon me, I must not fail them.
If the system is inadequate, I must compensate.
Consider a senior woman who has spent decades building a business. She has established teams, entered new markets and grown into a global leadership role. Yet she continues without enough capable people beneath her. Attrition remains high. Knowledge sits with individuals rather than systems. Whenever someone leaves, she moves closer to the work to protect continuity.
Every time she rescues the system, she postpones the moment when the system must learn to function without her.
She becomes the bridge across every gap. Because the bridge still holds, nobody feels enough urgency to repair the road.
This is how we miss the forest for the trees.
The trees are urgent: the employee who may resign, the client who needs an answer NOW, the deadline that cannot move and the work that is not good enough.
The forest asks quieter questions. Why is the organisation dependent on one person? Why have successors not been developed? What is the organisation avoiding because she continues to compensate for it?
There is also the forest within her.
Who am I apart from the roles I perform? Am I still choosing this, or am I simply continuing it? What am I preserving by carrying everything—and what am I losing?
Many women have built their careers believing that they must work twice as hard for half the gain. Once a reputation for competence has been earned, it becomes something to protect.
An ordinary failure no longer feels ordinary. A man’s failure may be read as a failed decision. A woman often fears that hers will be read as evidence that appointing her was the failed decision.
And so she intervenes again. When the outcome is successful, the belief is reinforced:
It succeeded because I carried it. At one point, that sentence felt like proof of my strength; now it sounds like an account of everything that strength has cost me.
Organisations often benefit from this. They praise commitment and delay providing resources because the woman somehow keeps delivering.
Her reliability becomes the business model.
Having lived five decades without becoming a mother, I do not want to stand only beside the mothers. I want to stand in the same corner as my nieces and, together, look at the women we call our mothers.
Not to judge them. Not to excuse everything they do. And not to ask teenage girls to become responsible for their mothers’ happiness.
Your mother is not only your mother. She was a person before you arrived, with fears, ambitions, disappointments and unfinished dreams.
As you ask her to see the person you are becoming, can you also become curious about the person she has always been? Accepting your silence does not mean approving of it. Accepting your anger does not mean permitting every way in which it is expressed. Similarly, accepting a daughter’s silence or anger need not mean approving of it—or accepting blame for it.
I have not admired every choice my mother made. I have hated some of them. I resented decisions I did not understand and certainly did not enjoy the occasional whack. Today, I can hold two truths together: I disliked what she did, and I understand more of the woman who did it.
Acceptance does not require approval. It requires us to stop putting our mothers, our younger selves, our work and our teams permanently on trial.
Reflection is valuable. Accountability is necessary. But an inquiry intended to help us learn can quietly become a prosecution intended to establish guilt.
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold,” wrote Yeats. It is the line from which Chinua Achebe drew the title of his novel. But many of us gradually convince ourselves to believe a different version:
Things fall apart. The centre must hold. And we must be that centre.
The mother must hold. The daughter must understand. The leader must compensate. The reliable woman must somehow prevent the family, the team, the business, the revenue, and the organisation from coming apart.
But what happens to the woman who makes herself the centre of everything? Who holds her while she is holding it all? But perhaps “Who will hold her?” is the wrong question. No one else is responsible for rescuing the woman who has made herself responsible for everything. That acceptance is critical.
Her task is not to find someone else to carry her while she continues carrying it all. Perhaps maturity (perhaps even common sense) is not ensuring that nothing ever falls apart. It is recognising what is ours to hold, what others must learn to carry and what may need to fall apart before it can be built differently.
