The Reason I Built This Has Two Names

Some mornings I wake up before everybody else and I just sit there.

No list. No mental rehearsal of everything I gotta get through before I can breathe again. Just me, in the quiet, thinking about my girls. Then I hear one of them moving around and I get up and go make breakfast and I take my time with it. I'm not already gone in my head. I'm just in the kitchen. Being their mama.

That feeling right there? That's what I'm building toward. Not a number. Not a milestone. That feeling.

For a long time I thought loving your kids meant working yourself to a whole entire stump for them. You grind, you sacrifice, you push through exhausted and you hold it up like evidence — see? Look what I gave up. Look how hard I went. That was for you.

I watched that. Most of us did. And I'm not about to come on here and talk crazy about the women who showed us that because they were doing what they could with what they had, and that love was real. Don't get it twisted.

But somewhere in there the love and the suffering got all tangled up and I couldn't find where one stopped and the other one started. And I started having this thought — real quiet, because it felt ungrateful to even let it exist — what if it was never supposed to be about how much you can take? What if it was just supposed to be about showing up? Actually showing up, not just having your body in the room while your brain is three problems ahead.

I didn't have words for that for a long time. I just knew something was off and I was tired in a way that sleep wasn't fixing.

My oldest plays softball.

And I want to be at every game. Not most of them. Not the ones I can make depending on my workload and whether my manager is on one and how bad the guilt is gonna be if I leave early. Every. Game. I want to be in them bleachers being loud and embarrassing her in the way that mamas do, and when she looks out into that crowd I want her to just find me. Every time. Without having to wonder.

That should be simple. It is not simple when you out here working full time, building something from scratch, trying to keep the house from looking like a crime scene, and also attempting to remain a person. Time doesn't just appear. You gotta build a life where it can exist. That takes some real intentional engineering, sis.

And my youngest — baby girl is at the age where breakfast is a whole production. She got thoughts. She got opinions. She got seventeen things to tell me before she's even fully awake. And I want to be sitting right across from her for all of it. Not halfway in my phone. Not already running the day in my head. Just there. Letting her be her whole self in front of me while I drink my coffee and act like I ain't late for nothing.

That's the vision. It sound simple. It is not simple to build. But that's it.

Here's the part nobody told me and I'm gone need you to actually hear this.

Wanting that is not selfish. Wanting more time, more peace, more resources, more mornings where you don't wake up already behind — that ain't greed. That's love. Just a different shape than what we were shown.

Because we got sold this idea that sacrifice IS the love. That if you not running yourself ragged you ain't really trying. That exhaustion is what good mothers look like. And rest is something you'll get to later, after everything calms down. After what though? Nobody ever specifies. Just — after. Later.

Girl. Things do not calm down. You know this. I know this. Things calm down never, and the bus stays coming, and you stay tired, and the years keep moving.

So you keep grinding. You give from empty and you call it love and part of you believes it. And the other part — the part you tell to hush because you don't have time for feelings right now — that part knows the people you doing all this for would rather just have you. Not the hollowed out, short-fused, already-mentally-in-tomorrow version of you. The you that laughs at breakfast. The you that actually watches the game instead of just being physically present at the game.

That guilt you carrying? That's what it really is. Not guilt for wanting more. It's grief. Because you can feel yourself missing things while they're happening right in front of you and you can't figure out how to stop.

I built this system because I needed a way out that didn't require me to blow my whole life up to get it.

I wasn't trying to be a mogul. I wasn't trying to get a bag and a speaking deal and a podcast where I say "scale" every four minutes. I was trying to get my mornings back. Make more games. Build something that works while I sleep so that when I'm awake I can just BE awake. Not halfway somewhere else.

That was the whole plan. That's all it was.

And I want that for you too — not as a pitch, just as a real thing I mean — because I have sat next to too many women doing the exact same math I was doing. Trading time for money. Calling it love. Going hollow real slow and not knowing how to name it.

You allowed to want the game AND the bleachers. The income AND the slow morning. The business AND the little girl who got a whole lot of feelings about what's on her plate. You don't have to pick. That is not one of the rules. Somebody lied to you.

My why got two names. And I'm keeping those off the internet because that's theirs, not y'all's.

But everything I build is for them two names. Every late night, every system I teach, every guide I put together. All of it is in service of getting back to that table. Back to them bleachers. Showing them that you can build something real without it eating you alive in the process.

That's the inheritance I actually want to leave them. Not just money. The model. The proof that it's possible to want more and still be present for what you already got.

That's why I'm here.

Now you know.

— Des