Gloria Steinem Didn’t Promise Me It All. It was actually a different magazine magnate.

I have been quietly mulling this thought over for roughly four decades, earlier on in depositions, in station wagons, in the wee hour of the night when you are simultaneously unloading a dishwasher and cross-examining your own life choices. It took Gloria Steinem's passing this week to finally push me to write it down. There is something about losing the icon who wrote the syllabus that makes you want to finally hand in the term paper you've been drafting in your head since the 1990s.  Except, I've come to realize, I had the wrong professor.  And for that, I profusely and posthumously apologize to Gloria Steinem.

For years I attributed my exasperation to Gloria Steinem, the way you blame the last person who touched a file for a mistake made three employees earlier. But the promise that broke me wasn't hers. It belonged to Helen Gurley Brown, the longtime editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan, who published a 1982 bestseller called "Having It All: Love, Success, Sex, Money — Even if You're Starting with Nothing" and, with that title alone, handed a generation of women a blueprint nobody had stress-tested. Gloria Steinem, as it happens, spent a fair amount of her own career trying to dispel exactly that myth, arguing, correctly, that "having it all" was never a promise feminism made, but a marketing mantra masked as one.

I was in college studying journalism, and then in law school briefing cases, while that myth was doing its damage. Young women in my generation didn't call it Helen Gurley Brown's blueprint. We called it the "superwoman" model, the unspoken, unexamined assumption that a woman could simultaneously and effortlessly run a high-powered career and produce a perfect family life, with time left over to look good doing both. Nobody handed us a footnote explaining where the standard came from or suggested that anyone tested it against an actual household.

Because here is the part of the syllabus nobody assigned, and the detail that would have saved me decades of quiet guilt if anyone had mentioned it sooner: Helen Gurley Brown did not have children. That was her choice, made with her eyes open, and good for her. Some of the most consequential lives in history are consequential precisely because nobody needed them home by six for dinner. But it does mean the woman who put "having it all" into the American vocabulary devoted fewer than ten pages of her own manifesto to motherhood, an afterthought in a book that ran several hundred pages on career and romance.  And it does mean the woman handing us the blueprint for "having it all" had never once tried to finish an estate planning signing meeting against an impending school pickup. She'd solved for the career and the glamour. The rest of us were left to solve for career, legacy, and a ten-year-old who had, with tragic timing, chosen that morning to misplace his math workbook. That was our chapter to write.

I started out as a litigator in New York City, which in hindsight was an almost comedic level of overconfidence. Litigation runs on a simple premise: deadlines are sacred, judges do not care about your evening, and opposing counsel will absolutely file a motion at 4:58 p.m. on a Friday (for a Monday morning court appearance) just to destroy your weekend. This is a fine system if your only dependents are house plants. It is a considerably worse system once you have two small people at home whose own deadlines -- bedtime, pediatrician visits, the immovable preschool holiday party -- do not care one bit about yours. With a degree of clarity that only sleep deprivation provides, I woke up one morning realizing that the city's version of "having it all" and the suburbs' version of "raising two children" were on entirely separate calendars, and no motion I filed was going to consolidate them.

So, I did what women have quietly been doing since long before anyone put "lean in" on a book jacket. I rebuilt the model. I changed my practice area and location, making both more “family friendly,” and it turned out to be the best legal decision I ever made, right up there with learning to never, ever schedule a signing meeting in the latter part of the afternoon.

Back in the day, when my generation was raised on the feminist mystique, nobody mentioned the logistics of trying to be excellent at two jobs in two different locations, both of which consider you the default emergency contact. My husband was, and is, a genuine partner. I want to be fair, because plenty of women of my generation weren't nearly so lucky. But even in a good marriage, somebody is the one who has the pediatrician's after-hours line memorized and also knows how to draft a trust, and in my house that somebody learned to negotiate a bedtime and a settlement with roughly the same tone of voice, and on a bad day, the same amount of patience, which is to say very little.

None of this makes the feminist promise a lie. It makes it more like a contract I signed without reading the fine print, which, as a lawyer, I should probably be more embarrassed about. Nobody told me that "having it all" would require a spreadsheet of backup babysitters, an almost professional tolerance for exhaustion, and the ability to reason through a client's problem while also negotiating the surrender of a toy at a playdate. Nobody mentioned that the women most visibly modeling limitless achievement had, quite reasonably, offloaded or opted out of the domestic side of the ledger entirely, whether it be through money, through partners who covered it, or through not having children in the first place.

I say all this now with fondness rather than grievance, because law firms are full of sharp young women hearing an updated version of the same promise, albeit in newer packaging.  They need to hustle, optimize, do it all, and document the doing of it all on social media. What I'd like to offer them, in Gloria Steinem's memory and with real gratitude for the door she opened, is the missing chapter.  Recognize and appreciate that it's hard, that it costs something, that moving your practice out of a courtroom and into a life that fits your family is not a failure of ambition but possibly the most strategic legal maneuver you'll ever make. She taught us we were allowed to want it all. It's on the rest of us to admit, with love and a straight face, that "it all" occasionally requires a much bigger calendar, a much thicker skin, and a village nobody thought to budget for, and that there is no shame whatsoever in redrawing the blueprint until it actually fits your whole life.

Rest in peace, Gloria.