More Than One Title: Paige McCrensky on Motherhood and Leadership

About this article:
The Other Title is a reflection on what it truly feels like to toggle between two (or more) very distinct worlds.  On leading a team, raising a family, and living every day in the tension between them. An honest, human essay about what it actually feels like to hold multiple important roles.  The ultimate balance between the hard days and the great ones, the guilt that does not go away, and the joy that makes it worth it.

For most of my career, my other title has been Mom.

Mom of three girls. Working mom. Marketing leader. For a long time, I thought those titles required me to be two different people. One who was ambitious, strategic, creative, and ready to take on whatever came next. And another who remembered the permission slips, showed up for the school events, took on class mom, worried about friendships, and tried to make sure my three girls grew up knowing they could be anything they wanted to be.

I wanted to be great at both. I wanted to be the leader people counted on and the mother my girls deserved. What nobody tells you is that you can love both roles deeply and still feel like you're failing at one of them on any given day.

When I started my career and had my girls, motherhood was something I kept relatively quiet at work. Not because I wasn't proud of it, but because I understood, even if I didn't want to admit it, that it could affect how people saw me. Especially after having my third child. I was building a career that rewarded ambition, availability, and momentum. I worried that being a mother might make people question whether I was all in. So I kept the artwork at home, and not in my office.

So I did what many working mothers do. I figured it out as I went, trying to prove that having a family wouldn't diminish my commitment or my potential. Looking back, I know that motherhood affected my career trajectory. Some decisions were mine; others were shaped by the expectations I thought I had to meet. I don't always know how much I gave up, or what might have been different if I'd felt freer to bring my whole self to work from the beginning.

For years, I chased some version of balance. Sometimes I felt as if I was failing at everything. Other times, I found a rhythm that worked — until it didn't. The girls grew, the demands changed, my career evolved, and whatever system I'd figured out eventually needed to be reinvented. I took a step back and started consulting so I could be there for my family. I then stepped back into full time work when I was excited for the opportunity presented to me.

I used to think that if I worked hard enough, planned well enough, and cared enough, I could get it right. I am less convinced of that now.

What motherhood gave me at work

Motherhood has made me a more empathetic leader, but not in the way I might have expected. It's not simply that having children makes you more patient or better at understanding people. It's that it changes the way you see the whole person behind the work.

As a leader, I want to understand what someone is capable of becoming, not just what they can deliver.

I think about the long game: the skills someone needs to develop, the opportunities they haven't been given, the confidence they may not yet have. I want to advocate for my team, create room for people to grow, and help them see possibilities for themselves that they might not see yet. At the end of the day, I am a mother through and through. At work and at home. I came to the realization that I needed to be my authentic self - to own all my titles.

At the same time, I know that the work still has to get done. There are deadlines, clients, business goals, and moments when everyone has to pull together. Motherhood hasn't made me less demanding. It has helped me understand that people can be committed to their work and committed to a life outside it. Those things aren't mutually exclusive, even when the circumstances make them difficult to reconcile. We are not our jobs, our careers, our to do lists. We are the accumulation of all the parts of us. At work. At home.

I think about the kind of environment I want people to work in because I think about the kind of world I want my daughters to inhabit. I want them to be ambitious without believing they have to sacrifice every other part of themselves to prove it. I want them to find work they love, to be independent, and to make choices that reflect who they are rather than who someone else expects them to be.

I hope I've modeled some of that for them. I'm not sure I always did. The truth is, our children learn from what we say, but they also learn from what we do — including the compromises we make, the things we prioritize, and the ways we talk about ourselves when we're stretched too thin.

Maybe they saw me building a career. Maybe they also saw me trying to figure out how to build a life. I hope both lessons were useful.

I remember winning an industry award. My girls were so proud. The event producers put a video together and asked my children to say something. I remember vividly my daughter Grace saying during her interview- please don’t ask me what you do!

My girls have visited me in the office and have been by my side when working at home. They’ve interrupted (my youngest Leah especially) my zoom calls and have seen me love what I do. They have attended conferences with me and met my colleagues. My worlds have blended. My titles have blurred. That has allowed me to be authentic with all the aspects of my life and something I wish I started doing earlier in my career.

What I've made peace with - mostly!

I've made peace with the fact that I couldn't be everything to everyone, all the time.

There are things I would do differently. I might have been more vocal about being a working mother instead of treating it as something to manage discreetly. I might have been less concerned about whether people thought I was committed enough. I might have trusted that being a mother didn't make me less of a marketing leader, that the experiences, perspective, and emotional intelligence I was developing outside the office were part of what made me better at my job.

But hindsight is generous. At the time, I was making decisions with the information, confidence, and choices I had.

I also had to let go of the idea that there was a perfect version of me waiting somewhere on the other side of all that effort. The perfect executive. The perfectly present mother. The woman who could do it all without ever feeling exhausted, distracted, guilty, or unsure.

She doesn't exist. Or at least, I haven't met her.

And maybe the more important realization is that my girls didn't need me to be perfect. They needed me - imperfect, sometimes distracted, sometimes overwhelmed, but always trying to learn and grow alongside them.

We are more than one title

One of the things I've come to understand is that we are all multifaceted. We carry different titles, identities, ambitions, and responsibilities, and they don't neatly fit into separate boxes. For a long time, I thought I needed to keep the different parts of myself in their respective lanes: the marketing executive at work, the mom at home, the PTA involved mom, the ambitious woman building a career somewhere in between.

But that's not how life works. And honestly, I'm not sure it's how we're meant to work.

Being a mother influences how I lead. My career influences how I parent. The curiosity that makes me a better marketer makes me a more engaged observer of the world my daughters are navigating. My experiences outside the office inform the questions I ask inside it. These parts of me aren't competing for space; they're in conversation with one another.

The key I've found is to be authentic and embrace all the titles I hold, rather than trying to hide one to make room for another. That doesn't mean every part of my life always gets equal attention. It means allowing myself to show up as a whole person, even when the different parts of that person are pulling me in different directions.

It also means learning to pivot.

Life is messy. Parenting is messy. Work can be messy. Sometimes a family need takes priority over a professional commitment. Sometimes a work opportunity demands more of me than I'd planned to give. Sometimes the carefully constructed plan falls apart before the day has really begun.

I've learned that resilience isn't necessarily about pushing through or finding a way to make everything fit. Sometimes it's about recognizing that what worked yesterday won't work today, adjusting my expectations, and giving myself permission to change course. It's knowing when to lean in, and when to step back.

And I've learned that having a tribe is a gift. The people who show up across the different dimensions of our lives - family, friends, colleagues, mentors, other working mothers who understand without needing an explanation, make the impossible feel a little more manageable. Sometimes they offer help. Sometimes they listen. Sometimes they remind us who we are when we're too overwhelmed to remember ourselves. Sometimes they just make us laugh.

We spend so much time trying to prove we can handle it all that we forget the value of letting other people show up for us, too.

The next chapter doesn't come with a map

My daughters are now adults. I'm entering my empty-nest era, and my title is changing again. There is uncertainty now as I pivot again and my titles and responsibilities are evolving.

I'm an entrepreneur, building something of my own and figuring out what I want the next chapter of my professional life to look like. I'm also figuring out what being Mom means when your children no longer need you in quite the same ways. The daily responsibilities are different. The caring isn’t. Neither has the instinct to show up, to worry, to offer perspective when it's wanted, and to learn when it isn't. I am loving having my own authority and agency to work on projects that provide purpose, of adding value, that give me joy.

The difference now is that I'm less interested in finding the perfect balance between all these parts of myself. I'm more interested in figuring out how they can inform, challenge, and enrich one another and who I want to become as they continue to evolve.

For so long, motherhood shaped the boundaries of my professional life, sometimes in ways I chose and sometimes in ways I didn't. Now I'm discovering how this new stage of motherhood might shape what's next. There's freedom in it, but also uncertainty. I have more room to ask what I want, what I believe in, and what kind of work I want to put into the world. I am still learning how to answer those questions.

I thought that raising three daughters would be the big transformation. It turns out that becoming their mother was only the beginning of a series of transformations, for all of us.

I am most proud of my title as mother. But also proud of my various titles throughout my career. It’s part of who I am and has enriched my life through accomplishments, friendships, challenges and constantly learning.

But I know this: motherhood didn't pull me away from the leader I wanted to become. It helped shape her. And the career I've built has shaped the mother I've become, too - someone who wants her daughters to be independent, curious, ambitious, and unafraid to write their own definitions of success. I am so proud of my three girls - Claire, Grace and Leah. Each unique, each independent, kind, curious and fun. I see parts of myself in all of them.

Now it's my turn to do the same.

I'm still Mom. I'm still a marketing leader. I'm an entrepreneur, an empty nester, and a woman figuring out what's next and having fun as I own who I am and all the titles that are part of me.

For the first time in a long time, I don't feel as if I need to have the answer before I begin.