During the height of the pandemic, my home was no longer just a home. It was a global headquarters. Working in a fast-paced retail co-op, my days were relentless back-to-back video calls, strategic pivots, and the constant navigation of a world that felt like it was changing every hour. I was the keeper of the focus, the human compass for my program team, all while working from a desk tucked into the corner of a living room that had been overtaken by a toddler.
My son was barely three years old at the time. To me, I was managing a crisis; to him, I was just a woman in a chair who talked to a glowing screen all day. I thought I was doing a decent job of compartmentalizing — keeping the Work Mom and the Home Mom in their respective silos — until I witnessed his first “performance review.”
I walked into his playroom and found him sitting in a circle with his stuffed animals. He had a toy laptop open, and he was wearing a pair of old, tangled headphones. He wasn’t playing a game. He was in a meeting.
He looked at his teddy bear with a furrowed brow, his voice a perfect, tiny mimicry of my own “office tone.”
“No, Teddy,” he muttered, tapping a plastic key. “No more snacks. We have to do the sync. Put a pin in it. We are… at ca-pacity.” And continued typing furiously.
I stood in the doorway, my heart hitting the floor. He didn’t even know what “at capacity” meant, but he knew exactly what it sounded like. He had absorbed the linguistic armor I wore to survive my workdays. In his three-year-old mind, “work” wasn’t about solving problems or helping people; it was about being too busy to listen.
Hearing my corporate shorthand coming from a toddler was a profound wakeup call. As women, we are often celebrated for our ability to multi-task, to “lean in” while we “lean out.” But my son was mirroring back a version of me I hadn’t realized I was presenting.
When he told his bear to “put a pin in it,” he was echoing the times I had unintentionally used that same dismissive efficiency at work. I was managing my stakeholders focusing on optimizing for time rather than connection. I was steering everyone toward the North Star, but I was forgetting to look at the people standing right in front of me.
That lesson, learned in the quiet desperation of a lockdown, has stayed with me long after the world reopened. My son is eight now, and the toy laptop has been replaced by real homework, but the “Mirror Effect” remains just as sharp. He still watches how I handle a late-night ping or a deadline.
I’ve realized that my most important “ops cadence” doesn’t happen between 9 and 5. It happens in the “grey space” when I close my laptop. It is the choice to trade the jargon of the office for the presence of the home.
I still drive alignment and steer the team through the chaos. But I’ve learned that the highest priority initiative I will ever lead is the one that happens at the dinner table. If my son is going to be my accidental apprentice, I want him to learn more than just how to sound busy. I want him to see that even in a world of “high-priority initiatives,” people truly matter.
I’ll still be working tomorrow. But when I step away from the screen, the “pins” are gone, the “syncs” are over, and I am simply, and fully, Mom.
~Ashmita, choosing connection over saving time and chaos.
#AshmitaWrites #DaryenTeaches #UnscriptedConnection #Parenting #WorkLifeBalance #GrowthMindSet
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Vitaly Gariev On Unsplash
