The Call That Arrived When I Was Already Leaving

I was standing in our tiny apartment in Hawaii when the phone rang. We had plane tickets to Alabama because my husband’s grandfather had shot his grandmother the night before. She was in critical condition; he was gone. Red Cross had finally come through with emergency tickets we couldn’t afford otherwise. We had a narrow window and we needed to go.

I called home first. My brother Kevin answered. After I explained the shooting and our sudden departure, he said, “I’m so sorry… and I need you to call Mom before you get on the plane.” I told him we didn’t have time. He repeated it. So, minutes before walking out the door, I dialed.

One Funeral, Then Another

My mom listened to everything—the shooting, the hospital, the Red Cross tickets. Then she said the words that split my life in two: “I have more bad news.” My dad, sixty years old, had been working in Chicago. His landlady found him alone in the apartment after a heart attack. He was gone.

I hadn’t spoken to him in almost a year. He stopped talking to me after I married—the first choice I’d made entirely for myself. Now he was gone, and I was twenty, five months pregnant, holding a phone in Hawaii while another funeral waited on the mainland.

Why We Keep Moving

We got on the plane anyway. That’s what you do when you’re the one holding everything: you deal with it, you keep moving, because if you stop, everything stops with you. My mom didn’t fall apart on that call either. She told me, felt it, and figured out the next thing—because people were counting on her and the world doesn’t pause.

I carried the guilt for years—the silence, the things unsaid, the reconciliation that never happened. I thought it was my fault for choosing my own life. It took a long time to understand I wasn’t the one who chose silence.

The Rigged Game Begins Long Before the Boardroom

I kept showing up—for my son, my family, my patients, everyone who needed the version of me that had it together. Thirty years on the floor taught me the capacity to carry hard things is real and valuable. It is also not the same thing as being fine.

Most high-achieving women I coach recognize the shape of this story even if the details differ. The moment you realize you’ll have to hold something enormous and no one is coming to help. You get very good at it—so good that nobody asks what it’s costing you, including yourself.

That’s where the Rigged Game starts for so many of us: not in performance reviews, but in a phone call we weren’t ready for, a year of silence we didn’t choose, a Tuesday when we just kept going because stopping wasn’t an option.

Reclaiming Your Capacity

Through the Compass Method to Transformation, I help women set real boundaries, reconnect with themselves, and build lives that don’t require running on empty to prove their worth. Because the ability to carry hard things is a strength—yet it deserves to be chosen, not demanded by default.

If you’ve been the one holding everything for as long as you can remember, I want you to know this: you don’t have to keep carrying it alone. The women who contact me often say the same thing: they finally asked what it was costing them—and decided the answer was too high.

You can get on the next plane without losing yourself in the process. I’m living proof.