I was just reading this article on Scary Mommy, and couldn’t help but think these three words:

Sarah Silverman – YES.

On the surface, Sarah and I might seem like we have little in common. She’s a world-famous comedian, actor and single woman. I’m a stay/work-at-home mom, a former TV news anchor, and married with multiple kids.

But here’s where our lives intersect, and yours do, too: We are all women who had to make a choice.

Let’s let explain herself. Read her recent tweets from the bottom up.

Pay attention to that middle tweet. She’s right. So right.

There’s no gain without sacrifice–and this is where I get a little preachy–women usually have to make the greater sacrifices when it comes to trying to combine careers and family.

What combination did you choose? Work? Family? Work and family? And if so, working full-time, or part-time?

No matter where we end up on the career/part-time career/no career and just “staying at home” spectrum, here’s the cold hard truth. In many relationships (heteronormative, at least), the choice usually falls on the woman to decide—what do you want more, the family, or the career? And if you want both, how the hell are you going to pull it off?

Don’t get me wrong—this isn’t me complaining. This is just me acknowledging the reality of the family structure, no matter how hard we try to deconstruct and modernize it. Biologically, we make the babies. And with that incredible plus comes the minus of having to figure out how to make the pieces of that jigsaw puzzle we call the “work-life balance,” well, work. And I promise, even though some people will tell you that their puzzle is easy, it’s not.

And this reality is also why I get a little twitchy every time I hear someone say to a little girl, “You can have it ALL!”

Sure, she can “have it all”—the career, the family, the home life and the relationship—but often at her own expense and her own exhaustion.

You don’t have to agree with me. That’s okay. But there’s no denying that Sarah, as well as the millions of other women who have had that difficult conversation with herself, are onto something.

At the end of the day, we aren’t just our careers, or our children, or our partners. We are a totality of them all, in different proportions, and at different times in different amounts.

It’s all a choice, and the choice is yours. How do you want your life to look? It’s that simple, and that hard.