Choosing What Matters Before the World Chooses for You

For a long time I thought life happened in chapters that replaced one another. There would be the career chapter, then the marriage chapter, then the motherhood chapter, and somehow each new season would quietly close the door on the last one. I think a lot of women believe this because we are taught to think in categories. We are asked who we are as though there is supposed to be one clean answer. Are you career focused or family focused? Ambitious or present? Building a business or building a home?

Lately I have started wondering whether women are exhausted because we have been trying to answer the wrong question.

I think about this often because I have lived several versions of myself already. There was a period of my life where I was in San Francisco working in finance and I loved it. I loved the pace of it, the intensity, the feeling that everyone around me was thinking about ideas and markets and growth and possibility. There is something energizing about being surrounded by people who are building things and trying to understand the world through strategy and risk and opportunity. You feel connected to movement itself and close to where things are happening.

Then life evolved and I found myself building something entirely different. Vamigas was born and suddenly my days looked nothing like they had before. Instead of thinking about markets I was thinking about products and customers and retail relationships and packaging and growth. We eventually grew into more than a thousand retail locations and I loved that chapter too. I loved creating something from nothing and watching it slowly become real.

Somewhere in the middle of all of that I started noticing a pattern that I think many people eventually recognize if they are paying attention. Every milestone I thought would feel like arrival eventually became familiar and another goal would quietly appear in the distance. There was another launch, another project, another target and another thing to work toward. There was always a subtle feeling that life was beginning somewhere slightly ahead of where I was standing.

Then I became a mother and I started measuring things differently.

Motherhood introduces forms of work that never appear on résumés and forms of building that rarely receive recognition in public. You realize that homes take shape over time. Family cultures take shape over time. Traditions are created and children grow through thousands of ordinary moments that do not seem particularly important while they are happening. I started realizing that I had spent years thinking about what I was building professionally while overlooking the fact that I was also shaping an entire life.

I think that realization eventually became my own version of Señora Era. Ann and I built Señora Era together, but for me it grew out of something personal first, a shift in how I was thinking about life, family and ambition and how those pieces fit together.

I slowly stopped asking what women should do and started asking what kind of life we were trying to create. I realized I had spent years absorbing other people’s ideas of success without fully noticing it. The world is very good at handing women scripts. For a while the message centered around becoming a girl boss and proving yourself and building and achieving and pushing forward. Then the conversation shifted and another ideal began appearing everywhere, slower mornings, homemaking and stepping away from ambition. Once again women found themselves standing in front of categories and being asked where they belonged.

I have lived enough life now to know that I never felt entirely comfortable inside any category.

I love building things. I love ideas and business and creating. I love sitting at Margaux’s golf tournaments and family dinners and creating a home that feels warm and alive. Over time those parts of my life stopped feeling separate from one another.

What changed was the way I started making decisions. I stopped looking only at what opportunities offered and started paying attention to what they required in return.

One of the questions I ask myself now is whether something adds energy to our family or quietly pulls energy away. I think about this with work commitments, travel, schedules and opportunities that sound exciting on paper. Some things create momentum and excitement while other things slowly create stress and exhaustion without you realizing it at first.

I think about this constantly with Margaux because children today have access to endless opportunities. More sports, more activities, more lessons and more travel teams. We could easily create a schedule where every hour felt full. Instead I find myself asking different questions. Does she genuinely love this? Does this build confidence? Does this fit the rhythm of our family? Does the emotional return feel worth the energy investment?

I have realized that adults probably need to ask themselves these same questions.

Because saying yes to something always creates a trade. More of one thing almost always means less of another. More travel can mean less time around the dinner table. More commitments can quietly remove breathing room. A schedule can look beautiful from the outside while feeling exhausting from the inside.

Maybe balance has less to do with dividing attention equally and more to do with recognizing what matters most during a particular season. Life begins feeling lighter when your schedule and your priorities begin reflecting one another.

That became my version of Señora Era. Building and creating and dreaming continued to matter. Family dinners and golf tournaments and slower mornings continued to matter too. Life became much quieter once I stopped looking around for instructions and started deciding for myself what deserved the most of me.