I watched my mother wait her whole life for someday. I decided I wouldn't.
What growing up watching a single mother sacrifice everything taught me about building the life you actually want.
When I told my best friend I was moving to London with my fiancé, she didn’t miss a beat.
“I always thought you would have moved away long after you graduated from college,“ she said.
Ten years had passed since graduation. I had met Duane, built a business, and was finally doing the thing she apparently always knew I would do. She saw it in me before I could see it in myself.
I was the one who loved change. The one who always found a way to do something different, go somewhere new, push past what was familiar. Even as a kid, I was comfortable with the uncomfortable.
That probably came from my mother.
What I saw growing up
My mother is an immigrant. She raised me alone, and she worked multiple jobs, long hours, in a career she had not chosen for herself but worked because it paid the bills.
She was a staff accountant at a manufacturing company. Stable. Reliable. Not her choice.
I watched her do that for years. I watched her be the mother who dropped you off and picked you up, but was never really there, not because she didn’t want to be, but because the life she was living did not allow for it.
I was a latchkey kid. In the sixth grade at ten years old, the same age my daughter Mia will be next year. I was putting myself on and off the school bus. I had a key. I had a routine. I would call my mom at work when I got home so she knew I was safe. No one was allowed inside when I was alone. It was afternoon snacks, cartoons, and homework, by myself, until she got back.
I want you to sit with that image for a second. Because that image is what built everything that came after it.
I knew then, not in words, but in the way that children know things before they can articulate them, that someday I wanted something different for my own children.
I didn’t know yet what that would look like or how long it would take to build.
The job that showed me what I couldn’t have
When I started working, I was in the office by 8 am to beat the morning rush and stayed past 6 pm to miss the evening one. Most nights I was working in front of the TV. It was never a 9-to-5. I traveled across the country constantly. I was good at my job, and I knew it.
But I also knew something else.
I could not have that job and keep the promise I had made to myself about the kind of mother I wanted to be. The two could not coexist. The job required a version of me that left no room for the version I was trying to build toward.
So I started looking into entrepreneurship. Not because I had a burning passion for running a business, but because I needed a different structure. I needed to be in control of my own time in a way that a corporate job would never allow.
I started The CEO Partner in April 2011. From my dining room table. In my one-bedroom condo in North Brunswick, New Jersey.
And the day I replaced my six-figure corporate salary with work I had created for myself was the first someday that became real.
The someday I didn’t know I was building toward
When I moved from New Jersey to London, something else shifted.
Because I had the business, I had been able to build a proper relationship with Duane. I could take six-week trips to visit him because I was not sitting in an office with the standard ten days of annual vacation. I could be present for the relationship in a way that a corporate job would never have permitted.
And then we had Mia. In London.
And then Elise. In Copenhagen.
And then I was living a version of my someday that I had never specifically imagined but that was, in every way that mattered. This was exactly what I had been working toward since I was ten years old putting myself on a school bus.
I kept the business running as a boutique agency with a small team. That structure allowed me to take real maternity leave… not the kind where you check emails from the hospital. When I came back, I was able to get support at home. Someone we trusted. Someone who allowed me to be home and working with my daughter in the same space, present in the way my mother never got to be, until Mia started nursery at twelve months and Elise at thirteen.
Because of the time difference between Europe and my US clients, I had my mornings with my daughters. I worked in the afternoons. I had built, without fully realizing I was building it, the architecture of the life I had decided I wanted when I was a child, sitting alone in a house in New Jersey, waiting for my mother to come home at night.
This is where the free version of this article ends.
What comes next is the part that is actually for you.
Up next is a direct conversation about what your someday actually requires… not the inspiration, the operational reality. What it took to build a business that could move across time zones and countries. What the global decision framework looks like when it is applied to motherhood, money, and the life you keep saying you will build later. And the honest question I want to ask you about the someday you have been carrying.
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