Work-Life Wholeness
by Molly Heacock
What I'm learning about being a mother and a CEO, and about who gets to decide what "enough" means.
I have the privilege of leading an organization that works alongside people living with HIV in some of the lowest-income communities across East and South Africa. I have a five-year-old son and a three-year-old daughter; my parents are in their late seventies, and I help care for them through their various medical journeys. I stepped into leading my organization in a season when funding across our sector has been harder to come by than at any point since 2008. I am, in other words, feeling pressure and need from just about every angle at once these days.
So when people ask how I balance it all, my honest answer is that I don't, and I've stopped believing that balance was ever the thing God was asking of me in the first place.
For most of my working life, I was handed a particular story about what success is supposed to look like for an ambitious woman, the one that says if you work hard enough and push relentlessly enough, you can have all of it at once and entirely on your own steam. That version of ambition was built on a very American idea, the conviction that the point of a life is to climb, to perform, and to be utterly self-reliant, and the rule sitting underneath it is quietly merciless, because it whispers that if you cannot do all of this alone, then perhaps you were never meant to lead. The trouble is that this is simply not the story my faith tells me about myself. The kingdom of God describes a very different kind of life, one that is embodied, rooted in community, and gloriously limited, and the longer I lead, the more convinced I become that those limits are not flaws to be engineered away but part of how we were made to reflect the One who made us.
I've come to believe that balance is the wrong goal entirely, because it imagines two tidy weights I can hold level if I only try hard enough, and that is not how an actual life behaves. Some days my children need me, and the meeting can wait, and other days the work has to come first, and no amount of striving turns that into a clean equilibrium. What I am after instead is wholeness, by which I mean being one undivided person at home and one undivided person at work, refusing to chop myself into competing pieces, and trusting that God can hold the whole of me together far more faithfully than I can hold the parts apart.
When the demands pile higher than I can carry, which is most days if I'm honest, I have learned to stop and ask one stubborn question, which is who is actually demanding this of me. Sometimes it really is my family or a genuine call on my life, but far more often it turns out to be the culture I'm swimming in, dictating how I ought to look, how I ought to show up, and how much I ought to produce. The discipline of naming that out loud, of asking whether a particular pressure has come from God or merely from the air around me, is most of what allows me to set it back down.
Most of what weighs on us is never said aloud, which is precisely what makes it so heavy to carry. There is an unwritten script insisting that a serious leader keeps her emotions in check, never mentions her children at work, does not cry in a hard meeting, and above all, never admits to needing help, and that if she does need help, she had better be wealthy enough to purchase it discreetly. There is even the impossible arithmetic of simply getting dressed in the morning, where the heels cannot be too high, and the whole look has to be polished but not so polished that anyone wonders whether she is serious, and I would love nothing more than to lay that entire exhausting performance down at the foot of the cross and walk away from it for good.
What I most want every working parent to hear is that nearly everyone I know has felt, at one point or another, that they are simply not enough, and I have become convinced that this verdict says far more about the culture we have built than about the people living inside it. We were never meant to take the measure of ourselves by our output, and yet we do it relentlessly, and if we never confess as much out loud, we tend to burn out and quietly disappear. So I would rather keep calling the lie what it is, and keep returning to the truth that my worth was settled long before my first day of work and will not be revised on my last.
What genuinely surprised me is that motherhood made it almost impossible to hide my own humanity, and that this turned out to be a gift rather than a liability. After each baby I was pumping between meetings, I weep more readily than I once did and cannot always choose the moment; my children sometimes turn up in the office, and every so often I have to step off an important call because one of them is running a fever. A decade ago I could perform a kind of seamless competence, and I can no longer manage it, so I have stopped trying, and I have come to think that is nearer to holy than to flawed. The God we follow built rest into the very architecture of creation and called it good, and Jesus slept and wept and bled and grew tired, none of which a modern workplace would happily tolerate. If that is the pattern woven into how we were made, then real Sabbath and genuine parental leave and honest days of rest are not indulgences, and pretending we can produce endlessly without them is not strength but a slow unraveling of the very people God made us to be.
The moment that reordered all of this for me came, as the important moments so often do, from one of my children. I am someone who has always tied a great deal of my worth to what I produce and how many people I can help, and if I am truthful, the words I have most longed to hear my whole life are well done, good and faithful servant. One afternoon, when my son was two and a half, he was draped across my lap, and he looked up at me and asked, "Hey, what's your non-mommy name?"
It stopped me right where I sat, because the person on this earth who loves me more than anyone alive did not even know my name, and he certainly had no notion of what I did for a living, what my targets were, or how much money I had raised that year. It came to me as clearly as anything I have ever heard, as though the Holy Spirit were leaning in to tell me that the few things this child already knew about me were the only things that actually define me, and that not one of them had anything to do with my productivity. That is the secret gift tucked inside early childhood, that it drives you straight to the end of yourself, and it is precisely there, with nothing left to perform, that you are handed the chance to relearn who you are in the eyes of the God who made you in his own image.
If you happen to lead others, especially other mothers, I want to leave you with one picture. In the book of Exodus, Pharaoh commands the Israelites to keep making the same number of bricks while taking away the straw they need to make them, demanding full production with none of the raw materials, and the theologian Walter Brueggemann argues that Pharaoh was the first ruler to loose a mindset of scarcity upon the world. We are living through our own explosion of scarcity right now, and the temptation for any leader is to mirror it, to let the anxiety of the age quietly set the terms inside our own organizations. But a leader always mirrors something, and we are given the choice of whether we will reflect the fearfulness of the culture or the abundance of the kingdom of God, and only one of those takes deliberate, sustained effort to keep alive.
So the question I would press on you is whether you are quietly demanding bricks without straw, and I mean that as concretely as I can, in your parental leave policy, your time-off policy, and your honest expectations around hours and travel. Those are the raw materials, the structures you genuinely hold the authority to set, and Jesus spoke of a yoke that is easy and a burden that is light. For those of us entrusted with any measure of power, building that kind of lightness into the lives of the people we lead is not a generous extra but very nearly the highest use of the authority we have been given.
I have not figured out the balance, and I no longer believe balance was ever the real assignment. What I can reach for is wholeness, the slow and unglamorous work of being one undivided person who is held by something far steadier than her own performance, and on most days, the knowledge that I am already fully known and fully loved turns out to be more than enough.
Written by Molly Heacock
Molly Heacock is the CEO of Untold, which works alongside people living with HIV across East and South Africa.
