Raising three teenagers, building companies, navigating loss, and learning to carry all of it at once.
I am 49.
I am building companies across Southeast Asia. Three platforms, teams across multiple countries, problems that do not wait for convenient timing.
I am raising three teenagers.
My body is changing in ways nobody prepared me for.
And there are other parts of this season I am still learning how to name.
I am not writing this because I have figured it out. I am writing it because I suspect some of you are carrying something similar and you have not seen it named out loud. So here it is. Named.
THE WEIGHT OF IT
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes not from one hard thing but from several hard things arriving at the same time. The startup demands your sharpest thinking. The teenagers demand your most present self. Your body demands rest you cannot always give it. And somewhere underneath all of it, you are processing a loss that does not have a clean timeline for grief.
People see the business and draw their own conclusions. They fill in the gaps with whatever makes sense to them. I have learned to let them. The full story is mine to carry and mine to share when I choose.
What I will say is this: I have never been more tested. And I have never been more certain of who I am.
Resilience is not something you wake up with one morning. It was formed. It was built over years of choosing to get back up when nobody was watching. I was prepared for this season without knowing it was coming.
WHAT 49 ACTUALLY FEELS LIKE
Nobody tells you that perimenopause and a life in transition can arrive at the same time. The body has its own calendar and it does not check your schedule before making changes. There are days when the fog is real, when the fatigue sits deeper than sleep can reach, when the woman in the mirror looks familiar but the ground underneath her has shifted.
I could pretend that does not affect the work. It does. Some days I lead a product meeting and then need twenty minutes of complete silence before I can do the next thing. Some mornings I sit with God before I face the day because that is the only thing that resets me.
I am not broken. I am in a season. There is a difference and knowing which one you are in matters more than people say.
THREE TEENAGERS
The greatest test of my leadership has not been in any workplace or product meeting. It is at home. Every single day.
I run teams. I have built businesses from scratch across multiple countries. I have walked away from deals that would have compromised who I am. None of that prepared me for the particular challenge of leading three teenagers through their own becoming while managing everything else happening in mine.
My children go to church. They eat the food I put on the table. They sleep when the lights go off. They surrender their phones at seven in the evening. These are not small things. In the middle of a season like this one, keeping any kind of structure is an act of intention.
During one of my hardest stretches — when I was deep in the middle of everything this season has asked of me — a teacher sent me a video. My daughter’s class had been asked what they wanted to be when they grew up. Her classmates said doctors, lawyers, astronauts.
My daughter said she wanted to be like mama.
I did not know she would say that. She had seen me at my worst. She was watching a version of me that I was not proud of every day. And she still said that.
I have thought about quitting more times than I will admit. Every time, I remember that video. There are three children watching what I do when things fall apart. That is not pressure. That is purpose.
I run teams across Southeast Asia. But the most important team I lead goes to bed at ten o’clock and asks me what’s for breakfast in the morning.
WHAT KEEPS ME FUNCTIONAL
People ask how I manage it all. The honest answer is that I do not always manage it well. Some weeks the startup gets the best of me and the teenagers get whatever is left. Some weeks it is the other way around. Perfect balance is not a goal I chase anymore.
What keeps me functional is perspective. Life is a matter of how you see it. The same season that looks like collapse from the outside looks like formation from the inside. I have been in hard seasons before — not this exact combination, but this weight. And I know now that weight is not there to crush me. It is there to build something.
Finding peace in the middle of the storm — not after it, not once it passes, but inside it — that is the greatest wealth I have found. It does not appear on a balance sheet. But it is what makes everything on the balance sheet possible.
WHAT I AM ACTUALLY BUILDING
MedicalPRO, Smartlinx, Genesis — these matter to me deeply. I believe in what they are solving and I will keep building them with everything I have.
But when I am honest about what I am most proud of, it is not the tech platforms.
It is the three children who have watched me go through the hardest season of my life and are still reaching for God when life gets hard for them. Not because I told them to. Because they watched me do it first.
The dinner table. The lights-off rule. The phone in the basket by seven.
The fact that they know where to go when they do not know what to do.