What Doesn't Kill Me Makes Me Manage

# What Doesn't Kill Me Makes Me Manage

A little over a year ago, a missile hit our building. Not a metaphor — an actual missile. Middle of the night, air raid siren, kids already in the safe room. My husband and I ran in and locked the door behind us. Then a boom that left our ears ringing, the whole house shaking, the power cutting out, and after that — silence, except for water bursting from broken pipes. In one moment, everything we owned was gone. My husband came out of it with a fractured spine. All of us came out of it alive.

And somehow, that's not the thing that broke me.

The thing that actually took me down (pun intended) showed up months later, in a far less dramatic package: I woke up to check the baby monitor, went downstairs half-asleep, caught my foot on a step, and fell. Ambulance, ER, an X-ray that came back "clean" — soft tissue damage, walk on it as much as you can. Based on that one sentence, I made a brilliant executive decision: full recovery within a week. I survived a missile. What's a hurt foot?

I tried. I tried again. After a week I tried going back to work on crutches — and still felt bad about myself, not because I wasn't trying hard enough, but because I wasn't succeeding, no matter how hard I tried.

**Takeaway #1: Watch out for quiet data**
A "clean" scan isn't the same as "no problem" — it just means that sensor didn't catch it. Leaning on a shallow report to justify a decision you'd already made isn't resilience. It's just deferring the bill to a more expensive later.

The first few days mostly disappeared — I slept almost straight through for two, while the house turned into a war zone the kids adapted to with startling ease. Still, every time I woke up, I couldn't just lie there: I'd prop my knee on a chair, stand on one leg, and do the dishes like a flamingo with a management degree. My husband, whose back injury hadn't fully cleared, didn't exactly step into "house manager" — but he did find time to say the single most annoying sentence I've ever heard: **"You need to take it easier."** He got lucky there wasn't a shoe within reach.

But — painful as this is to write — he was right. Not the way he meant it. In the way of basic maintenance: your body, whatever size it is, needs to survive a broken foot without shutting down entirely. You need to be able to lift yourself up with your own two hands.

**Takeaway #2: Maintain the core machine**
Health, nutrition, fitness — that's not self-care fluff, that's maintenance on the most important asset in any operation: you. When the core machine goes down, there's no backup plan. Only what you invested ahead of time.

Meanwhile, the kids — who already handled a few basics on their own — were suddenly a lot more on their own. Not because they'd changed, but because I wasn't there to hover and hand over the trash bag. A friend covered mornings. My mom and mother-in-law showed up as needed. And around the same time, almost the identical thing happened at my day job managing a warehouse: the team stopped funneling every small problem to me. They started keeping notes, figuring out on their own what used to land on my desk.

**Takeaway #3: Absence is sometimes training**
The system didn't collapse when the manager disappeared — it started documenting itself. As long as I was there for every question, nobody had any incentive to learn without me.

Three weeks in, I went back to the doctor and insisted something was wrong. A CT scan, then the sentence that changed everything: subluxation, avulsion fractures. A cast. Surgery in two days. Then a full no-weight-bearing order for four weeks — chaos again, and this time I was in worse shape than the first round. Life didn't wait its turn: on the day of my surgery, while a nurse asked pre-op questions, my husband sat beside me on a Zoom call for a special-ed eligibility hearing for our son. Medical management and family management, in the same breath.

That's when it hit me — I'd been loading too much onto the kids right when they could least handle more. So I changed approach: not "please help me," but a fixed division of labor, each kid with a standing job matched to what they could handle.

**Takeaway #4: A request is not a system**
A request depends on memory and mood — both of yours. A system is fixed and doesn't need anyone to remember to ask for it. Once tasks shifted from "please help" to "this is your job," the load was no longer mine to remember. It was the system's job to run.

Somewhere between the cast and the couch, I stumbled onto Nassim Taleb's *Antifragile* — looking for some explanation for why, of all times, I suddenly had more clarity than I'd had in years. The idea is simple: some systems survive a shock and return to the same state — that's resilience. Others come out stronger than they went in. That's exactly what happened to me on that couch.

At some point I just stopped fighting. My husband, still not at full strength and now nearly solo-parenting four kids, was close to breaking too. I raised the white flag. Not surrender — a deliberate, cold acceptance.

**Takeaway #5: Not every wave needs a fight**
Fight a wave pulling you under, and you get dragged down. Let the current take you, and eventually you swim yourself back to shore. Sometimes the smartest move is to stop, breathe, and let the process do the work — not you.

So from the couch, out loud, I rolled out clear, fixed procedures for the kids: an entry routine, shoes in their spot, backpacks unpacked. Not one-time instructions — standing rules. It didn't turn the house into a factory running entirely without me; they still need me there to manage. But they're also capable on their own, and I watched how proud they were that I trusted them to be. The procedures just became routine — no more explaining, no more helping, no more doing it myself.

**Takeaway #6: Antifragile ≠ resilient**
Resilient means returning to the state you were in before the crisis. Antifragile means coming out with a better system than you had going in. My house didn't go back to "the way it was" — it became a house that runs on clear systems instead of my constant presence.

The crisis didn't wreck my operation. It forced me to build it properly, for the first time. That's exactly what a good crisis does: it doesn't just break you — it teaches you to re-engineer. Not to work harder. Smarter.

And what doesn't kill me, it turns out, doesn't just make me stronger.

It makes me manage.