I know many women who are professionals, amazing at their jobs, and have full, impressive careers. Many of these women also have families they return home to each day. Karen Mancera-Cuevas is one of these women.
Mancera-Cuevas has over 25 years of experience in public health, holding a Doctor of Public Health and acting as the Senior Director of Health Equity at the National Health Council. To say the least, she has done it all.
When asked how she has had to challenge herself personally in order to find success, her answer might be a surprise. The challenge she picked was not the countless research, coworkers, or deadlines, but the “intersectional journey of parenting and managing work life balance.”
Mancera-Cuevas, at the time of having her children, was attending graduate school and working toward a career she cared deeply about. But upon becoming a mother, she had to make some choices. She couldn’t do it all, although she tried, and soon realized that her whole life, both work, school, and home would change.
“It’s not doing one or the other. It’s really coexisting on three different dimensions simultaneously, and then having to not only keep up with everything, but also be able to integrate the knowledge gained in all three of those symbiotic spaces”.
Mancera-Cuevas describes how she struggled with the challenge of feeling a point of stagnation in her career when she had to draw back, needing to spend time with her kids.
Reflecting on a time when she desperately wanted to be with her family while also loving her work, she notes, “one has to be open to the fact that careers are not necessarily a constant scaling up. Rather, it’s going to be a lot of these peaks and valleys.”
And in our modern society, women still tend to take on the brunt of this, whether that be fair or not. But as Mancera-Cuevas explained, these peaks and valleys will sometimes be “directly related to career and opportunities, and others are related to things that are outside of those careers that are also creating other types of opportunities.”
She wasn’t entirely stopping just because her focus changed, rather those experiences, as she mentioned before, were woven into the fabric of her as a person, existing simultaneously and informing each other.
When I asked her, as a woman who hopes to one day have both children and a career I love, for advice on preparing for the tension between family and work, she told me, “you can’t be in two places at the same time. You just have to decide where your priorities lie and when you want to make your next move.”
Her words reminded me that success doesn’t always mean doing everything at once, but rather choosing your path with intention, and trusting that just because life may take you into new roles, it doesn’t mean you leave the others behind. It means weaving them together. We are not defined by separate parts of ourselves, but by the fullness of all our parts existing at once.
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This blog post was written by Josie Miller, a student at Tufts University passionate about community health, storytelling, and honoring diverse lived experiences. This piece explores how real stories don’t just inform, they create connections, expand perspectives, and help build stronger, more compassionate communities.
