There are some interviews you listen to because you are curious about the person. Then there are others that, somewhere along the way, stop feeling like they are only about that person and begin to remind you of conversations you have had with yourself.
That was how I felt listening to former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi talk about raising her daughters while building an extraordinarily demanding career. One line from the conversation quickly became the headline: “I don’t think women can have it all.”
It is the kind of statement that invites an immediate reaction. Some women will hear it and nod. Others will strongly disagree. But as I listened to Nooyi explain her experience, I found myself less interested in deciding whether women can “have it all” and more interested in the stories behind that statement.
She talked about missing school events and feeling guilty afterwards. She talked about travelling for work and putting routines in place so family life could continue when she was away. She talked about the people around her who helped make an incredibly demanding life possible.
Perhaps that is where the more interesting conversation begins. Not with whether a woman can have everything she wants, but with what it actually takes to hold a meaningful career and motherhood in the same life.
The Wednesday Morning She Couldn’t Be There
One of the stories Nooyi shared was about a weekly “Class Coffee with Mothers” at her daughters’ school. Because of work, she could not always attend. Her daughter would come home and tell her about the mothers who had been there, and Nooyi described the guilt she felt about not being among them.
Eventually, she found a small way to cope. She asked the school to tell her which other mothers had missed the coffee too. It did not change the fact that she had not been there, but it reminded her that she was not the only mother whose responsibilities sometimes pulled her somewhere else.
Most of us will never lead a multinational company, but that feeling can be surprisingly familiar. Your version might be the school assembly happening at 10 a.m. when you have an important meeting you cannot move. It might be discovering from the class WhatsApp group, at the end of an already exhausting day, that tomorrow is Colour Day and your child owns nothing in the required colour. Or perhaps it is arriving home after bedtime and looking at the child you had promised you would see before they fell asleep.
These moments can seem small when we describe them to someone else, yet they can stay with us because there is often a much bigger question hiding underneath them: Am I giving my children enough of me?
What Is Our Guilt Actually Telling Us?
Nooyi spoke openly about the guilt she experienced when work meant missing moments with her daughters, and about finding ways to cope with those feelings. That stayed with me because working mums are often encouraged to overcome guilt, as though enough confidence, organisation or reassurance will eventually make us stop questioning difficult choices.
Perhaps the more useful thing is to become curious about what our guilt is actually telling us.
Sometimes guilt points towards something we genuinely want to change. Maybe work has been taking more than we are comfortable giving for too long, or perhaps we have repeatedly pushed aside something that matters deeply to us. But guilt can also appear simply because two important parts of our lives needed us at the same time and there was no choice that would have left everyone happy.
You can wish you had attended the school event and still know that the meeting mattered. You can love your career and still hate missing bedtime. You can be grateful for the opportunities your work has given you while occasionally wishing they did not ask quite so much of you.
Those feelings do not automatically mean something has gone wrong.
Instead of allowing every guilty feeling to become evidence that we are getting motherhood wrong, perhaps we can ask: Is there something here I genuinely want to change, or am I being hard on myself because I could not be in two places at once?
The answer may be different each time. But perhaps that is a gentler and more useful way to listen to guilt: not as a verdict on the kind of mother we are, but as something worth understanding before we decide what it means.
The Nintendo Story Was Really About Support
Another story from the interview involved something much more ordinary: Nintendo. Nooyi explained that when she travelled for work, her daughter would sometimes call her office to ask permission to play. Eventually, the people around Nooyi knew the routine. They knew what questions to ask, what needed to happen before permission was given and how to let Nooyi know afterwards.
It is a small story, but it reveals something we do not always see when we look at women who appear to be managing demanding careers alongside motherhood. We see the woman, her job, her children and perhaps her achievements. We do not always see the infrastructure underneath.
Someone knows what time school closes. Someone can step in when a meeting runs late. A partner knows about an appointment without needing a reminder. A grandparent handles a school run. A nanny understands the evening routine well enough to manage it without Mum directing every step.
Not every woman has access to the same kind of support, and that matters. Still, Nooyi’s story challenges the idea that successful working motherhood is simply about becoming exceptionally good at managing everything yourself. Sometimes what looks like one woman doing it all is actually several people knowing what to do.
But Having Help Is Not Always the Same as Carrying Less
There is another side to that conversation that many mums may recognise. You can have help and still be the person carrying most of the responsibility.
Perhaps your partner is involved, you have a nanny, or grandparents regularly help with the children. Yet you are still the one who knows tomorrow is Colour Day, notices that the cereal is nearly finished, remembers when school fees are due and realises that the shoes bought three months ago somehow no longer fit.
Other people may be doing some of the tasks, but you are still noticing, remembering, organising and following up. In that situation, having more hands has not necessarily meant having less to carry mentally.
That is why one of the most interesting questions Nooyi’s story left me with is not simply, “Who helps me?” but “What in our home still works only because I remember it?”
There may be perfectly understandable reasons for the answer. Every family has different finances, work schedules and childcare arrangements. Some have grandparents nearby; others do not. Some can afford paid help; others are making things work with very little support. This is not about creating another standard for mothers to meet. It is simply about seeing more clearly where responsibility actually sits.
Sometimes the change we need is not another person willing to help when asked. It is another person who knows what needs doing without Mum having to remain the family project manager.
Maybe “Having It All” Is the Wrong Question
This brings me back to Nooyi’s statement. Can women have it all? Perhaps the difficulty is that we rarely stop to define what all means.
Is it a fulfilling career, children, a strong relationship, friendships, health, rest, financial security and enough time for yourself?
Does it also mean attending every school event, being emotionally available whenever someone needs you and never feeling that one part of your life has received less attention than another?
When we put it that way, “having it all” begins to sound less like a life and more like an impossible performance.
Real life has seasons. There are periods when work asks more of us and periods when family does. There are opportunities we pursue wholeheartedly and others we decide are not worth the cost right now. There are things we miss, things we protect and decisions we occasionally revisit.
Nooyi built an extraordinary career, and she also missed Wednesday mornings at school. She loved her daughters, and she needed other people to help family life continue when she travelled. She achieved things very few people ever will and still spoke honestly about guilt. None of those truths cancels the others.
Perhaps, then, the better question for a working mum is not “Can I have it all?” but “What matters most to me in this season, and what support would make that life more possible?”
For one mum, the answer might mean pursuing the promotion she has worked towards for years. For another, it may mean deliberately slowing down for a season. For someone else, it might mean finally having a conversation with her partner about the things she no longer wants to be solely responsible for remembering.
And sometimes it may simply mean accepting that missing one Wednesday morning does not tell the whole story of the mother you are.
Maybe We Were Never Supposed to Carry It All
Perhaps this is what stayed with me most after listening to Nooyi. We spend so much time asking whether women can have it all that we rarely stop to ask why having a full life seems to come with the expectation that a woman should also be able to carry all of it.
Those are two very different things.
Maybe the goal is not to become better at carrying everything without ever dropping anything. Or it is to become clearer about what matters to us, what can wait, what someone else can genuinely own and which guilty feelings deserve our attention rather than our automatic belief.
Because a full life will probably always involve choices, compromises and seasons when something receives less of us. That does not necessarily mean we are doing life badly. It may simply mean we are human beings trying to care deeply about more than one thing.
And I think that is a much more honest place from which to talk about work, motherhood and the complicated business of wanting both.
Let’s Talk About It
When work and motherhood collide in your own life, how do you decide what gets your attention? And when you think about your support system, are there things that still happen only because you remember, organise and follow up?
We’d love to hear what you have learned about making work and motherhood fit together. Your experience might give another working mum something useful to think about.
Editorial note and sources
This article was inspired by Indra Nooyi’s reflections on motherhood, career and guilt—shared more than a decade ago, yet still strikingly relevant to the realities many working mums navigate today.
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