On a good Tuesday now, I appear at ten past six.
Before the ear infections and the cleats and the lunchboxes that each need something different because I have four boys with four different opinions about breakfast and bread. Before the first name is called from the top of the stairs. Ten minutes, sometimes twenty, that belong to me. Coffee I actually get a few sips of while it is still hot. A walk with my husband where the only thing on the agenda is the walk. The weights I finally dragged back out, lifted on the living room floor while the baby crashes cars and plays beside me, which is not the clean, quiet gym hour I used to believe was the only version that counted.
It counts now. That is the whole shift, and it is smaller and less cinematic than anyone selling you a routine wants it to be. For years I would have looked at ten minutes and a needy baby and called it not enough. Not a real workout. Not real rest. Not the thing itself.
I dismissed almost everything that was actually available to me because it did not match some polished picture of self-care I was never once going to have time to earn. Now I take the ten minutes. I take the imperfect walk. I take the hot coffee. Enough turns out to be a decision, not a threshold.
Here is what I could not say out loud for a very long time.
I was incredibly good at taking care of everyone else’s needs, and I did not realize it was costing me myself.
I have run companies. Five of them through acquisition. I was the operator, the fixer, the emotional regulator, the breadwinner, the one who could always take one more thing because I genuinely could. Employees, partners, clients, investors, the boys, my marriage, my father, my friends. I was the person the whole system routed to when it did not know where else to send the problem. And I was good at it. That is the part nobody warns you about. Being extraordinary at carrying things is exactly how you end up carrying all of them.
I know how to allocate. It is the actual skill of my career. I spent over twenty years deciding where the money went, where the people went, where the hours and the attention and the energy went. I could read a business and tell you in an afternoon what was starving and what was overfunded. I could allocate everything. Everything except myself. I was the primary source of energy in every room I walked into and the last recipient of it in every single one. I funded the whole enterprise off one account I never once deposited into. And an account like that does not send you a warning email. It sends you a body.
This past week, my right leg went through the attic ceiling. Not all the way. Just the leg, punched clean through the drywall, dangling into the hallway below while I caught myself on the beams, covered in insulation, staring at my own foot swinging in midair like it belonged to someone else. I was up there because I was too tired to be careful, and I had been too tired to be careful for months. That was the pause I never scheduled. The universe stopped being subtle.
You can ignore exhaustion for a remarkably long time. It is much harder to ignore your own leg hanging through the ceiling.
So this is not a self-care essay. Self-care is a candle. This is self-allocation, and it is a colder, truer word, because it admits the thing the soft version leaves out. Time has to come from somewhere. You cannot add yourself to the list without something else moving down it.
The change itself was not dramatic. It was quieter than the ceiling, and it stuck better. One ordinary morning someone still needed something, the way someone always does, and I said I am going for my walk, and then I went. I did not attach the paragraph of justification I would have attached a year ago. I did not earn it first or promise to make up for it later. I just went. That was the whole revolution. A closed door and no apology behind it.
Because the reallocation is not free, and I will not insult you by pretending it is. Something lost access to me. I stopped answering the second the phone lit up. I let the house stay messy on a Tuesday without narrating an apology about it. I stopped saying yes to work just because I was capable of it. I asked my husband and the older boys to carry things I used to silently absorb. The no that made me feel the guiltiest at first was the one I said to other people’s urgency, the small fires that were never actually mine to put out. It does not feel guilty anymore. It feels like oxygen.
And here is the evidence, because I promised myself I would give you evidence and not a transformation reel.
I sleep more, so I snap less. The patience I used to fake by nine in the morning is closer to real now. The resentment that was quietly pooling under all that capable, cheerful yes has drained down to something I can actually name and manage. My body carries itself differently when it is not bracing all day. And the truest thing, the one I did not expect: taking care of myself did not make me less available to the people I love. It made me more. The version of me that has ten minutes in the morning is a better mother by noon than the version who gave every scrap away before dawn and had nothing but a short fuse left by dinner. Everyone survived Mom keeping an hour. Everyone is actually better for it. That is the part I wish someone had told me a decade ago.
So if you are reading this running on empty, do not book the girls’ trip. Do the offensively small thing first. Ten minutes outside without your phone. One set of weights. One meal eaten sitting down. One text you do not answer today. One closed door. One sentence, said clean: I cannot do that today.
And then do the harder exercise, the one that actually changes it. Take ten minutes and write down everything receiving your energy right now. All of it. The people, the roles, the companies, the group texts, the invisible labor nobody sees. Then look at the page and find your own name. Circle it if it is there. Most of us cannot, the first time. That blank space where your name should be is not a character flaw. It is a spreadsheet. And spreadsheets can be rebalanced.
You are not becoming selfish. You are a woman who spent her whole life as the source, finally deciding to also be a recipient. You are allowed to fund the one account everything else runs on. You are allowed to appear in your own day.
You are becoming MOMumental.
MOMumentally,
Erika
Erika Hanafin Austria · Creator, MOMumental Reinvention
Co-Founder, NeonID · Former CEO, HeyMama · 2x Top 50 Women Leaders, Virginia
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