What is Worth Saving?
Nearly two years ago, I was on my bathroom floor at 11pm on a Friday night with my hands inside a chicken.
Not metaphorically. Literally. Sally, my eight-month-old Buff Orpington, was egg-bound with a prolapsed vent. No avian vet on call. YouTube got me only so far. I had Google, a growing list of chicken forums, and a husband right there with me, because that's what you do in marriage.
The forums were pretty unanimous: cull her. Cut your losses. It's just a chicken.
I didn't. I read everything I could find in the short time that I had, built a plan from scraps of information from strangers on the internet, and did something I had no business doing, chicken surgery. Sally made it. Two years later she's second in command. Full top-hen energy.
For the record: if I were a farmer, I might have made a different call. That's not a wrong answer. It's a different context. I'm a backyard chicken keeper with a big heart and a semi-free Friday night. The right decision depends on what you're actually working with.
That night I started asking a question I haven't stopped asking since. What is worth saving? It turns out that question doesn't stay in the bathroom. It follows you into boardrooms, career pivots, and the particular exhaustion of trying to build something real in a world that keeps telling you to cut your losses.
I know because I've been following it for years.
I spent my twenties chasing the right rooms.
One of my first corporate jobs was in manufacturing. I was a project coordinator, young, ambitious, a little naive about how much I wanted to change things. I remember looking through the glass into the boardroom and seeing the same faces in every seat. Older white men, uniform and decided. I didn't just want in. I wanted to change what happened inside that room. That desire felt like the most alive thing about me.
Then I got pregnant. And the calculus changed.
Not because anyone told me it would, though they did. You get the full download when you're expecting: you'll love it, your priorities will shift, you can have it all. What they don't tell you is the fine print. You can have it all, just not at the same time. The protection is mostly on paper. And some of what changes isn't visible yet, not even to you.
What I actually sat with was quieter than any of that. When you carry a life and then spend your days sustaining it, you start seeing the cracks in systems you used to just accept. Why does daycare cost more than rent? Why are we commuting two hours to sit in meetings that could have been a well-built process? I wasn't looking for a way out. I was looking at the cost of staying in, clearly, maybe for the first time.
So I redirected. I started working with entrepreneurs and nonprofits, people who had also looked at the existing system and decided to build something different. Every credential I had earned pointed toward a PMO or a corporate gig. When I looked for another way, every forum I found was half selling a course, half selling an Amazon affiliate link.
I ignored them and listened to something harder to name: my values, my reality, what I actually believed about work and impact and what made any of it worth doing. I stopped chasing a title. I started chasing outcomes.
I won't pretend it was clean. There are still days I wonder about the other path. The what-if version of this career has a corner office and a different kind of authority. I made peace with not knowing if I could have had both. What I saved wasn't the career I'd imagined. It was the version of the work that still felt worth doing. It turned out the question just needed a different room to live in.
I have two kids now. A four-and-a-half-year-old son and a two-and-a-half-year-old daughter. Two cattle dog mutts we rescued and are fiercely loyal. And four chickens, McQueen at the top, Sally a very confident second.
Nobody prepares you for any of it. You get advice from people who raised kids in a different world and a different time, before algorithms decided what your child sees, before AI reshaped what work even means. There is no forum with the right answer, and most of them are still trying to sell you something. So you go with your gut, trust your foundations, and make the call with what is in front of you.
Same question. Different bathroom floor.
Not one dramatic decision. A hundred smaller ones, made standing somewhere with incomplete information and doing it anyway. And somewhere in that accumulation, you stop noticing how much you are carrying until someone finally asks.
I have held people through the moments when they almost quit. I have been the voice on the other end when the doubt was louder than the vision. And I have needed that voice too. Six months ago I joined FIA, a fellowship of women who show up for each other through the hard parts and the good ones. I went in thinking it would be good for my network. What I found was that I had spent years learning how to hold space for other people without ever really letting anyone hold it for me.
That is also worth saving. Your own capacity. The part of you that makes everything else possible.
That took longer to name than I want to admit.
I have two kids now. A four-and-a-half-year-old son and a two-and-a-half-year-old daughter. Two cattle dog mutts we rescued and are fiercely loyal. And four chickens, McQueen at the top, Sally a very confident second.
Nobody prepares you for any of it. You get advice from people who raised kids in a different world and a different time, before algorithms decided what your child sees, before AI reshaped what work even means. There is no forum with the right answer, and most of them are still trying to sell you something. So you go with your gut, trust your foundations, and make the call with what is in front of you.
Same question. Different bathroom floor.
Not one dramatic decision. A hundred smaller ones, made standing somewhere with incomplete information and doing it anyway. And somewhere in that accumulation, you stop noticing how much you are carrying until someone finally asks.
I have held people through the moments when they almost quit. I have been the voice on the other end when the doubt was louder than the vision. And I have needed that voice too. Six months ago I joined FIA, a fellowship of women who show up for each other through the hard parts and the good ones. I went in thinking it would be good for my network. What I found was that I had spent years learning how to hold space for other people without ever really letting anyone hold it for me.
That is also worth saving. Your own capacity. The part of you that makes everything else possible.
That took longer to name than I want to admit.
My kids know Sally by name. When the chickens are free-ranging and the kids come outside, the whole flock gravitates towards them. They walk out with dried mealworms in their tiny fists, and Sally comes running. No hesitation. No algorithm. Just two toddlers and a chicken who both decided the world was worth showing up in.
That is what I want my kids to take from all of this. Not the certifications. Not the corporate climb. The part where their mom looked at an impossible Friday night, ignored the consensus, and tried anyway.
Asking what is worth saving is not a comfortable question and often does not have easy answers. But it is the thing I most want my kids to carry. Not the answer. The willingness to keep asking.
