The Woman Who Leads a Team at Work and Lost Her Voice at Home

She coordinates meetings, makes decisions, manages the expectations of an entire team without hesitation. And then she comes home and does not ask for the one thing she has been quietly wanting for years.

Not because she forgot what it is. Because somewhere between building a career and raising a family and managing everything in between, she stopped treating her own wants as something worth voicing.

I have been doing this for longer than I want to admit.

My husband travels occasionally with friends. Just him, a small group, a few times a year. When I travel, I go with my children. For over twenty years, the three women I met at midwifery school and who I call my best friends have taken annual trips together. The four of us, always with children in tow. The oldest of our collective fourteen (!) children is now twenty. The youngest is ten. In all those years, every single trip included the children.

Last year we broke the pattern. Four women, no children, one weekend. Within the first hour, sitting in a hot tub watching the cows in the field beside us, we all said the same thing: ‘We should have done this years ago’.

We made plans for a sunny destination after that. Further away. Just the four of us. That plan is still a plan.

In a few weeks we are meeting again, with the children. It will be wonderful, it always is. Loud, warm, a big table. But also cooking and washing up for a large group. We are not quite there yet.

I asked myself afterwards: why did we wait so long? Why did leaving without the children feel strange, almost something to justify? The honest answer is that I had not given myself permission. Not because my children needed me there. Because I had absorbed, without ever examining it, the assumption that my time was shared property and that wanting something just for myself was at best a luxury, at worst something to feel guilty about.

My husband came home from his weekly work trips wanting to stay home. He had been in hotels and meeting rooms all week and he missed his family. Weekends at home, a fire, a good meal. I understood. I agreed to it.

But I had been home all week. Working from home, studying for my master’s degree, taking care of the children and the house. The furthest I went most days was the supermarket and the school gate. I was craving somewhere different. Not anything extravagant. Just a change of scene.

I did not ask for it. I told myself I preferred staying home. I convinced myself that the dream of five or seven days away together, just the two of us, was not realistic. Too expensive. Too complicated. Not the right moment.

But was that true? Or had I simply never practised voicing what I wanted, in the same way I had always practised anticipating what everyone else needed?

This gap has a structural explanation.

Alice Eagly’s research on social role theory describes how women are socialised toward communal behaviour: care, warmth, accommodation, putting others first. This conditioning does not switch off when a woman becomes professionally capable. It runs alongside her competence. She can manage a team and simultaneously have almost no practice in saying, at home, in her relationship, with her friends: this is what I need.

The two things coexist because they operate in different contexts with different rules. Capability at work is expected and rewarded. Accommodation at home is absorbed as the norm. So a woman who makes decisions all day returns home and does not ask for the weekend away she has been quietly wanting for years. Not because she cannot ask. Because she was never taught to treat what she wants as a legitimate starting point.

The money question makes this sharper. How much of a household budget is reasonable to spend on something that serves only your own needs? A trip with friends. A holiday as a couple. Time that belongs to no one’s logistics but yours.

That question produces immediate discomfort in most women I speak with. Not because the amount is unreasonable. Because spending on yourself requires first believing that what you want is worth spending on. And that belief is often the last one to arrive.

I do not have a clean resolution here. The trip to the sunny destination is still a plan. The five-to-seven-day couple holiday remains a dream I am still working out whether I am allowed to have.

What has changed is that I can name it. I know the difference now between genuinely preferring to stay home and telling myself I prefer to stay home because asking felt like too much. That distinction is not small. It is where everything begins.

If you want to get clearer on who you are outside the roles you carry, there I’ve created a free identity tool. It takes about ten minutes and no one sees your results.

If this resonated, share this with a woman who might benefit reading this.

Reference: Eagly, A.H. & Wood, W. (2012). Social role theory. In P.A.M. Van Lange, A.W. Kruglanski & E.T. Higgins (Eds.), Handbook of theories of social psychology (pp. 458–476). Sage.

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