Corporate Mom Says the Lie We All Believed: You Can't Have It All

At 40, TikTok user Ashley Wishman decided to say what plenty of women have been thinking but few dare to broadcast: the“have it all”dream is a setup.

In a video she recorded between work meetings, Wishman reflected on nearly half a lifetime spent climbing the corporate ladder after being sold a familiar bill of goods—the one whispered in college dorms and repeated in leadership seminars. Go to school, earn your degree, build your career, have kids, and somehow manage to do it all without sacrifice.“Do not fall for that,”she said bluntly.“It is not worth it.”

The mother of two described a version of her life that doesn’t exist on her current schedule: taking her children to school, picking them up, chaperoning trips, volunteering, maintaining her home, and actually being present. It’s a vision so mundane it’s radical—and it’s not available to her, or to millions of other women, because the math doesn’t work.

Here’s where the internet got complicated. Some people empathized. One commenter shared that she’d transitioned from corporate work to managing her family’s home-based business. Others echoed a familiar refrain: nobody on their deathbed regrets not working harder. Fair points, grounded in real longing for what feels like a more balanced life.

But reality checked in hard. A 2025 survey by Catalyst, a nonprofit focused on workplace gender equity, revealed that nearly half of women who left work in 2025 cited caregiving responsibilities and the high cost and limited availability of child care as their reasons. The comment section quickly moved past the emotional and into the practical: most families cannot live on one income anymore. Women flooded the workforce not because they all wanted to—because they had to. And as one astute commenter noted, if a woman had skipped her career to become“a trad wife”and then faced divorce, she’d find herself in an even more precarious financial position.

The thorniest part of Wishman’s message? It made no mention of a partner’s income, and observers were quick to notice. The implication hovered in the space between the lines: her aspirational life—the one where she’s home with her kids—might be possible because someone else’s paycheck is subsidizing it. That detail matters enormously when you’re telling other women what they should want.

The“have it all”conversation has always been more complicated than motivational speakers admit. It’s not that women can’t balance work and family—millions do it every day. It’s that the original promise was dishonest. You don’t have it all. You choose what to sacrifice, and then you live with the trade-offs. For some, that’s less work and financial vulnerability. For others, it’s missing school pickups and volunteering at field trips. For still others, it’s both. The real conversation isn’t whether women should work. It’s whether we’ve built a society flexible enough that they genuinely get to choose—and whether we’ve been honest about what any choice actually costs.