The Wrong Clock

Some mornings I wake up and I'm already wrecked. Before I've opened my eyes. Before anyone needs anything. Just — tired. Already behind. Already fighting.

This isn't about a bad morning. This is about the structure of the day itself.

And the thing about being a working mom is that you are always in a fight with time.

How do you make time to be present with your family, with your children, in the moments they're in the house with you — and also join them for the moments that matter outside of it? The lunch drop-by. The field trip. The donation of self to the PTA.

And then there's your partner, who also requires care and attention, because the two people at the helm have to hold the house together.

Jonny and I do date night once a week. Three hours. Five years. Without fail. It's our relationship ritual.

And I'd be lying to you if twenty-five percent of every date night wasn't spent talking about work. We met through work. We think in work. We both lean on each other for advice. It's part of us.

But the kids hate nothing more than when we start talking about work at the dinner table.

We do high, low, buffalo at dinner. That's the rule. That's the container.

And if one of the high, lows, or buffaloes has anything to do with work, Milly will look up and say, Oh, brother. Here we go. And Ernie will start asking what AI is. And I'll try to redirect, and fail, and we'll all laugh, and nobody will get back to the original point.

It doesn't always hold.

Then there are the birthday parties. The beer gardens. The barbecues. The park invitations.

All of it matters. All of it helps build the community we're trying to build — a life that doesn't collapse inward.

But in all of this fighting for time, I realized something. Not enough of us make date nights with ourselves. Just me. Myself. The version of me that exists when nobody needs anything.

That's where Chief Moms came from. Not from a strategy or a pitch deck. From the walk.

Every night, I walk alone for forty-five minutes to an hour. Sometimes Rosie comes with me. Sometimes she doesn't.

But that hour matters to me. Not just for my physical health, but for my mental health too.

It's when I reflect. When I think about me. The things I'm excited about. The things that are plaguing me. The things I haven't given space to think about.

It's also when I do my storytelling and my voice memos, because at night, my subconscious is ready to start talking without a filter in place.

That's where the stories live.

Which brings me back to waking up wrecked.

I am a night bird.

My best work happens at night. My writing happens at night. My clearest strategy happens at night.

The best brand thinking, creative thinking, sales architecture I can put together for my job — that all comes alive after the kids go to sleep.

8 p.m. to 11 is prime time for me.

11 to midnight is when the laundry gets folded and the dishes get put away.

But the modern world wasn't built around that. And it definitely wasn't built around a working mother's rhythm.

If I'm doing my best work at night, and then waking up at 6:45 in the morning to get the kids out of the house, of course I feel wrecked.

What I actually want to do after the kids go to school is meditate for an hour. Maybe take a nap. Then start at 10. Hit it hard until 4. No lunch break. Just some nibbles of fuel throughout the day to sustain me. My morning coffee, working hard to carry me through the day. Then step back into life. And from 8 to 10, open the laptop back up for work. And from 10 to 11, write in The Archive for myself. Like a journal practice. A way to process. A way to talk to myself, write to myself, hear my own voice clearly.

That's my rhythm. That's when I contribute.

And I think about all the invisible work that happens in the hours the world doesn't count. The food deliveries. The holiday planning. The camp scheduling. The doctor appointments. The doctor emails. The administrative work required to run a household.

It needs to be accounted for somewhere.

It's not that I'm failing the day. The day was never built for me.

So I wish more of us could feel like we weren't fighting against time, and that time was actually on our side.

And the reason it would be on our side is that the conversation would finally shift. Not in-office versus hybrid. Not where we work. Hours.

There will always be moments in the day or week when you need to be present for your team, in a room, on a call, in a meeting.

But the work you have to produce on your own — the work that doesn't require anyone else to be present — when I do that should be up to no one other than me. As long as the work gets done, by deadline. And it does.

Unless my employer is going to do my family's laundry for me, go to the grocery store, and create an AI agent that can manage the constellation of different doctors in my life, we need more flexibility with our time. Real flexibility.

And I think that realization hits especially hard once your kids are in elementary school instead of daycare.

Because the irony of school-aged kids is that they are in school less than they were in daycare. Half days. Closures. Random Fridays. Schedules that shift without warning.

And the whole time, you're trying to hold a job together with one hand and a family schedule together with the other.

And if your kids are home, the only thing you want to be doing is being with them.

That's not a productivity problem. That's not a time management failure. That's the truth.

We want to be where they are.

And the mismatch between the structure we've inherited and the reality of raising children in it — that's the battle.

That's why we feel like we're losing.

We're not losing. We're just fighting on the wrong clock.

Some mornings I wake up wrecked.

But some nights I walk alone, and I think about everything that's mine, and I record it in the dark, and I put it somewhere it can last.

That's how I'm making time.

10 p.m. Walking the streets. Alone. That's the only answer I have.

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