Imagine (or remember!) this… you’re sitting at your desk, already behind on a project when your phone rings. It’s the school telling you your kid has a 102 fever and you have to pick them up immediately. And just like that, your carefully constructed day disappears.
Now what? That meeting you were supposed to lead will have to be rescheduled or done on the fly. Will you even be able to work the rest of the day or will you be pulling an all nighter to get it done? Who is going to pick up the other kids? What about dinner?
As a working mom of 3, I’ve had plenty of these “oh shit” moments over the years and I think most working parents know this feeling. After one too many scrambles, I realized I needed to shift my goal from juggling chaos to building in enough resilience, margin, and support that when something inevitably goes wrong, it doesn’t completely take you down with it.
Resilience Doesn’t Mean Keeping It Together
When we talk about resilience, I think it’s easy to picture someone who is incredibly calm under pressure. Someone who gets that call about a sick child, calmly rearranges their day, orders groceries, reschedules their meetings, and somehow still manages to make a nutritious dinner (and somehow looks good doing it!).
I am not that person and if you’re reading this, I’m guessing you’re not either. And crazy thought here… I don’t think we need to be.
Resilience isn’t about being the most polished, calm version of yourself during a crisis. It’s about being able to experience the disruption, feel the stress, and then figure out what to do next. You can panic. You can be frustrated. You can think, this is the absolute last thing I needed today. And then you can take a breath and ask yourself, “Okay. What do I need to do now?”
That’s resilience.
Unfortunately, I’ve Had Plenty of Practice
The last time my husband went out of town for a full week-long work trip, all three of my kids (all under five) got lice. I was trying to work full time, keep three small children alive and reasonably happy, and wage an all-out war against lice.
It was not my finest parenting week but it was a great reminder that these kinds of disruptions aren’t rare anomalies in family life. They are part of family life. Kids get sick. Schools close. Cars break down. Partners travel. Parents get sick. Work emergencies happen. Sometimes several of these things happen at the same time.
So instead of pretending we can prevent them, I think we should prepare for them.
Create Your Backup Plans Before You Need Them
Start by thinking about the disruptions you’ve experienced over the past couple of years. What keeps happening? Maybe it’s sick kids, school closures, last-minute childcare cancellations, a partner traveling, your own illness, car trouble, or unexpected work emergencies. There’s a good chance some version of these problems is going to happen again.
That’s where creating an if-then plan can be incredibly helpful. If my child gets sick, then what? Can I work from home? Can my partner take the first shift? Who has the more important meetings that day? Is there someone who can pick up my child? Can I work after bedtime? What meetings can be canceled or moved? What work can wait?
The important part is making these decisions before you’re standing in the school office with a sick kid and 14 unread Slack messages. When you have a plan in place, you don’t have to figure out every logistical question while you’re already stressed.
Have the Conversation at Work Before the Crisis
This is one of the biggest things I think working parents can do to make their lives easier: don’t wait until your child is sick to explain to your boss that sometimes your child gets sick.
If you have a supportive workplace, have the conversation in advance. You might say something like, “I have young kids, and occasionally I’m going to need to work from home or shift my hours when someone is sick. Here’s how I’ll handle it, and here’s how I’ll make sure my work still gets done.”
That conversation is so much easier to have when everything is calm. You’re not asking for forgiveness while simultaneously trying to figure out childcare. You’re activating a plan you’ve already discussed and agreed upon.
Build Your Village Before You Need Your Village
We talk a lot about “the village,” but here’s the thing: you can’t build a village during a crisis. You have to build those relationships beforehand.
Look around you. Who are the people you could call if something went really wrong? Friends, family, neighbors, other parents at school, your babysitter, the neighbor who loves your dog, the friend who works from home, or the person who lives five minutes away.
And don’t just think about what they could do for you. Think about what you can do for them, too.
I have a wonderful single mom friend, and at one point I told her, “Make me your emergency contact.” I have three kids, but I knew that if something happened and she ended up in the hospital, I could leave my kids with my husband and go pick up her kids from school. I could stay at her house. I could help. And I already had enough car seats installed that I could drop everything and pick them up for her at a moment’s notice.
That’s what a village is. It’s not a list of people you call when you’re desperate. It’s a network of people who know they can count on each other.
And don’t underestimate your neighbors. We’ve made sure that people in our neighborhood have each other’s numbers. We have someone who can take our dog in a pinch, someone who can help with the kids, and a next-door neighbor who knows who to call all those people if we aren’t able to manage it ourselves.
Build Margin Into Your Life
This one is hard for me because I’m naturally inclined to fill the calendar, To Do list and general life commitments. If there’s an empty space, I can probably find something to put in it. But a life that’s operating at 110% capacity has zero room for disruption, and disruption is coming.
Recently I’ve started thinking about operating at something closer to 85 or 90% capacity. Not because I’m unmotivated but because I need some margin for those moments of disruption.
Margin might mean not scheduling meetings back-to-back all day. It might mean keeping a couple of easy meals in the freezer, having some money set aside in an emergency fund, leaving an afternoon unscheduled when possible, having backup childcare options, or simply not assuming that every evening needs to be productive.
These things seem almost too simple to matter, but when the 102-degree fever arrives, they matter a lot. The frozen waffles suddenly become a feature, not a failure.
What Happens When Your Backup Plan Fails?
Here’s the problem: sometimes you do all of this. You have the backup plan. You’ve built your village. You have the frozen meals. And then everything still falls apart.
That’s when I use what I call the RESET method.
R: Regulate. Before you start solving the problem, pause. Take a breath and give yourself 60 seconds. Feel the panic without immediately acting from it. You don’t need to solve your entire day in the first 30 seconds after getting bad news. Pause first.
E: Establish what’s actually urgent. When everything feels urgent, nothing is prioritized. Ask yourself what actually has to happen right now. Maybe your child needs to be picked up. That’s urgent. The email you’ve been meaning to send probably isn’t. The laundry definitely isn’t. The house being clean? Absolutely not. Separate the actual emergency from everything else screaming for your attention.
S: Simplify, and this is where we lower the bar. And I mean really lower it. Dinner can be frozen waffles. The kids can watch a movie. The house can be messy. The laundry can wait. You can cancel something. You can order takeout. You can do the bare minimum. There is nothing wrong with having a crisis-mode version of your life. You don’t have to maintain your normal standards when your circumstances aren’t normal.
E: Execute the next smallest step. When we’re overwhelmed, we often try to solve everything simultaneously. That’s when we freeze. Instead, ask yourself, “What’s the smallest thing I can do that moves this forward?” Don’t try to figure out how you’re going to get through the entire day. Just figure out what’s next. Call the school. Text your partner. Cancel the meeting. Get the medicine. Put dinner in the oven. One thing, then the next.
T: Take the lesson. Once the crisis is over, don’t just move on and wait for it to happen again. Take five minutes to ask yourself what worked, what didn’t, and what would have made the situation easier. Maybe you realize you need a backup babysitter. Maybe you need to talk to your boss. Maybe your partner needs to take more ownership of sick-day logistics. Maybe you need to keep more food in the freezer. Maybe you need to stop scheduling yourself at 100% capacity.
The goal isn’t to eliminate future problems. It’s to make the next version of the problem easier.
You Don’t Have to Be the Person Who Can Handle Everything
This might be the most important lesson I’ve learned as a working mom: you don’t have to be the person who can manage everything.
You don’t have to be the person who always has a plan. You don’t have to be the person who can somehow keep your career moving, your kids happy, your house clean, your relationships healthy, dinner on the table, and everyone emotionally regulated through every possible crisis.
Instead, be the person who knows how to ask for help. Be the person who builds systems. Be the person who creates backup plans. Be the person who invests in relationships before you need them. Be the person who knows how to lower the bar when circumstances require it.
And when everything falls apart, take a breath. Figure out what’s actually urgent. Simplify. Take the next smallest step. Then learn from it.