Alyssa Jaffee, a venture capitalist who invests in healthcare companies serving women, has a new message for working mothers: ask for help. In a commentary published by Fortune on November 8, 2026 — written at 38 weeks pregnant, six days before she welcomed her fourth child on June 29, 2026 — Jaffee says the pursuit of "doing it all" has left women depleted and measurably sicker, and that the most important step an overwhelmed mother can take is asking for help.

The essay opens with a scene from the week before her delivery. It was 11 p.m., and Jaffee was lying in the dark instead of sleeping, silently running a mental inventory: camp forms, a pediatrician follow-up, a board deck due for review, and the question of who would cover carpool the week she gave birth. "My body was begging me to rest, and my brain wouldn't let it," she writes. "By every external measure, I was doing it all. But lately, I could feel myself disappearing."

Four years earlier, in a Fortune article, Jaffee urged women to stop asking about work-life balance. Her advice at the time: "You can never be truly balanced. The goal is to live unbalanced, to teeter back and forth, but with conviction about which way you're leaning." She was then pregnant with her third child and, in her own words, a "hustling venture capitalist." Today, she is a mother of four with a growing portfolio behind her and more than three-quarters of a billion dollars raised to deploy into healthcare companies. The question she keeps returning to now is different: did women perfect the art of teetering so well that they forgot to live?

Four kids and a full career later, she says, the to-do list never ends. "Check one off, move on to the next. Whack-a-mole to the extreme," she writes, describing a life organized around optimization, prioritization and efficiency — even at the cost of the person doing the optimizing: "Don't worry if I'm the sacrifice."

The mental load, she argues, has shifted dramatically from the previous generation. The days when children ran free until dinner have given way to meticulous planning and overscheduled kids whose parents absorb the brunt of the logistics. Work has intensified too, with ever-rising expectations of output and advancement compressed into the question, "How does she do it all?" Hybrid and remote arrangements have blurred the boundary between the office and the kitchen table "until there was no line at all," and artificial intelligence — pitched as a way to make workers faster — has instead raised the bar for productivity "around the clock, forever."

"But is this having it all?" Jaffee asks. She recounts countless working mothers describing days that end with barely enough energy to reach the next one. "We figured out how to live in the unbalance yet it appears we teetered too much, too quickly, and we started losing ourselves in the process," she writes. She points to the rise of the "trad wife" movement — a social-media trend romanticizing full-time homemaking and traditional gender roles — as evidence of a backlash: "It's not really about sourdough and aprons; it's a referendum on a deal that stopped working." When "do it all" leaves women this depleted, she says, opting out entirely starts to look like the only way to breathe.

Jaffee's work as an investor in healthcare companies serving women has made the consequences impossible to ignore, she writes: the mental load is exhausting, and it is measurably hurting women's health. Without health, she adds, women have nothing — and they are paying for it.

Citing research from the University of Bath, she notes that mothers carry 71% of the household's mental load — the invisible work of remembering, planning and anticipating — even as fathers are more involved than at any point in modern history. Fathers have nearly tripled their childcare hours since the 1960s, according to Pew Research Center data, yet it still isn't enough.

That load, she writes, "has a body count." Chronic stress has a clinical name — allostatic load, the cumulative wear and tear of a stress response that never fully switches off. It is not a metaphor, she stresses: it shows up as inflammation, hypertension and disease, quietly accruing in women who are praised for how much they can carry. Women spend 25% more of their lives in poor health than men — roughly nine years each — and nearly half of working women say their job has damaged their mental health in just the past six months. "This isn't fatigue. It's a deterioration we've normalized," she writes. The McKinsey analysis behind that figure frames closing the women's health gap as a $1 trillion opportunity to improve lives and economies — a measure of the scale of what Jaffee is describing.

The system that is supposed to provide support is not built to, she adds: less than 9% of NIH research dollars over the last decade went to women's health.

Humans, Jaffee argues, were meant to be raised in tribes and in community, yet today's mothers are expected to accomplish more than ever in isolation — please your spouse, take care of your kids, crush it at work, don't ask for help, and above all, don't even tell anyone you have it. She recounts a friend who, asked on a panel how she managed four children, answered honestly: "I have two nannies and lots of help." The conference organizers later scolded her: "shhh don't tell the truth! We don't want to scare people."

"Isn't asking for help one of the most important things we can do for ourselves and each other?" Jaffee asks, arguing that society has lost the ability to say plainly: "I can't do this alone. I need you."

She felt that loss herself. The optimization of her own life consumed her to the point of losing "the greatest gift of all: time," prompting her to seek help — first in small, confined ways, and later more outwardly. Even now it remains incredibly difficult, she writes: "I'm a high-performing woman with local family and resources to pay for help; shouldn't I be able to do it all?"

During the pandemic, Jaffee found herself on a text chain with four other women, half of whom had never met in person. Six years later, the group has texted every single day, and she counts its members among her closest confidants. The chat's name: The Womb of Silence. It is where one member admits she is drowning before a board meeting; where another asks, without shame, for a trusted pediatrician, a therapist taking new patients, or a name for what she is feeling or the ailment she is experiencing. It is where "'I can't do this alone' is the price of entry, not a confession." Nothing anyone says there gets them exposed or judged, she writes; someone always answers.

She has since replicated the feeling in other groups, including her Core of Core and Bad Ass VC Mamas circles. The chat taught her something the rest of her life kept trying to unteach, she says: "asking isn't the moment you fail. It's the moment you actually start living and thriving."

Little by little, Jaffee is reframing her own thinking: doing everything herself wins no awards, and "deteriorating in plain sight" will not improve her health and happiness — asking for help will. The companies that draw her as an investor, she says, are the ones giving women back the two things the world keeps taking from them: their time and their health. "Every time I ask for help, I get a little of myself back." With more than three-quarters of a billion dollars raised to deploy into healthcare companies serving women, where that capital lands is one concrete place to watch as the questions she raises about women's time and health play out.

The woman lying awake at 11 p.m., doing it all and quietly disappearing, is starting to reappear, she writes — not because she is carrying less, but because she is "finally not carrying it alone." It is okay, she concludes, that ChatGPT wrote the tooth fairy poem, that Instacart auto-ordered the groceries, or, "gasp," that she hired a babysitter so she could take a nap. Four years on, with her fourth and final baby now here, she has made peace with resting on one side of the see-saw — or even climbing off it for a while to take a break.

"Ask for help when you need it," she writes. "And we all know, we need it."

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