Perfection!.!.! Really?

I have often heard people say to me, "How do you get it all right?"

How do you manage a child and your career? How did you do your PhD while working? How do you study, work, write a book, keep learning, and still manage your family? How do you make your child study while managing your own work?

Sometimes I smile because the question itself assumes that I have figured out some secret formula.

I haven't.

In fact, I don't think there is such a thing as a perfect work-life balance anymore. I think it is more about work-life integration. The boundaries are not always clear. While helping my child study, I may also have my laptop open. While working, I may take a call from home. While I'm at work, I may suddenly wonder whether my child has reached home or what she must be doing at school. And when I am finally in bed, supposedly in my "personal time", my mind may already be planning what needs to happen the next morning.

That's life.

We try so hard to separate everything into neat boxes — work, family, learning, personal time. But life doesn't really work that way.

And no, I don't get it right every time.

I have lost my temper. I have been frustrated. I have sometimes taken out my work-related stress on people at home who probably didn't deserve it. There have been days when I felt I wasn't doing justice to one thing because I was busy with another. There have been days when I have questioned whether I was being a good mother, a good professional, a good learner, or simply a good human being.

So when someone looks at my qualifications, my work, my book, my learning journey and asks, "How do you manage it all?", my honest answer is — I don't manage it all alone.

I have a support system.

There are people at home who encourage me, support me, cooperate with me and, sometimes, simply take things off my plate so that I can take the next leap. And I try to do the same for them in whatever way I can.

That, to me, is what makes it possible.

We often celebrate the person who is visible, the mother who has a career, the professional who gets promoted, the person who earns another qualification, the author who writes a book. But behind many of those achievements are invisible hands, conversations, compromises, encouragement, patience and people who quietly make space for you to grow.

So perhaps the question isn't, "How do you balance it all?"

Maybe it is, "Who are the people who help you carry it all?"

Because there is no perfect mother. No perfect professional. No perfect learner. No perfect woman who gets every part of life right every single day.

There is just a person trying, learning, stumbling, adjusting and moving forward.