No breakdown in a conference room. No final straw that snapped cleanly and announced itself. Just a Tuesday that looked like every other Tuesday, except that I didn’t pick the pieces up.

I left them on the floor.

Not as a choice, exactly. More like my hands just stopped. The tape ran out. The will to keep the mirror looking whole ran out. And I sat there, in the middle of what my life was supposed to look like, and felt — for the first time, without immediately running from it — how far it had drifted from what I actually wanted it to feel like.

That’s the thing nobody tells you about values: they don’t always announce themselves when you violate them.

They just ache. Low and persistent, like a frequency you learn to live alongside. You adjust your life around the ache. You get very good at not looking directly at it. You tape things back together and hang them up and smile at them and tell yourself this is just what this season feels like, this is just what it costs, this is fine, this is temporary, this will get better when —

And then one day your hands stop.

I had values. I still had them, underneath everything I had packed on top of them. I valued presence — real, unperformed presence, not the kind you manufacture to survive a meeting. I valued my body and what it was doing and what it needed. I valued work that was meaningful without being consuming. I valued being a mother without having to make myself smaller to do it.

None of that was what I was living.

And that gap — between what you value and how you’re actually living — has a name. It’s not a character flaw. It’s not evidence that you chose the wrong life, or that you can’t handle it, or that other women are somehow managing something you can’t. It’s information. It’s your self, asking — quietly at first, then louder, then through the body, then through the pieces on the floor — to be brought back into the conversation.

The work isn’t to fix it. Not at first.

The work, at first, is just to notice it.

To say: something here is not aligned. To resist the immediate urge to optimize or problem-solve or perform your way out of the discomfort. To sit with the fact that the mirror is broken and choose, for once, not to reach for the tape.

That act — that single, honest act of seeing what’s actually there — is where everything changes. Not because the noticing solves anything. But because it stops the pretending. And the pretending is what was costing you the most.

I built IMHMO because I needed it and it didn’t exist.

I looked around for something that could hold the complexity of what I was going through — not the productivity version, not the bounce-back version, not the version that asked me to be grateful and resilient and fine — and found nothing. So I built it.

Not as a solution. Not as a set of steps that will get you back to the person you were before. As a place where the ache is allowed to exist. Where you can put down the tape. Where someone will sit with you in front of the broken mirror and say: I see it too. You don’t have to fix it today.

The pieces don’t have to go back the way they were.

They can become something different.

This is the third in a series on what it actually felt like — not the version I performed, but the one underneath. If you found yourself in any of it, that’s not an accident. It’s why this exists.

It doesn’t feel like lying, exactly. It feels more like arrangement. Like every morning you gather the pieces of yourself — the tired ones, the leaking ones, the ones that cried in the car — and you find a way to make them hold a shape that looks like the person you used to be. Sharp. Capable. Fine.

You hang the mirror back up.

You smile at it.

You go to work.

There was a moment, every single morning, that I have never said out loud.

The moment I dropped my son off at daycare and walked back to my (home) office.

It was exhilaration. Pure, flooding, involuntary relief — this cranky ball of tears is someone else’s to contend with now, I am free — and it hit me so fast and so completely that for a split second I just felt it. Before I could stop myself.

And then the tsunami came.

Guilt so heavy it had a physical weight. Rage — at myself, at the situation, at the fact that I had just felt free from my own child. Exhaustion underneath all of it, the kind that lives in your bones and doesn’t respond to sleep. And judgment, pressing in from every direction: the perceived looks, the imagined commentary, the voice in my own head that knew exactly how to find the sorest place and press.

What kind of mother feels relieved to leave her baby?

I would jog-walk across the street. I would walk the mile home. I would log into Zoom smiling.

I have since learned there’s a name for the pattern I was living inside. It’s called the drama triangle — a way of understanding how we cycle through three roles when we’re in pain and don’t know what to do with it: victim, hero, persecutor.

I was spinning through all three. Sometimes within the same hour.

As the victim: I was someone who had fundamentally changed, and no one at work could see it. No one had language for it. No one knew how to hold the new version of me, so I held her myself, alone, in a place where she wasn’t supposed to exist.

As the hero: I had to fix this. Not just for me — for every mother who would come after me. I invented transition protocols. I advocated. I documented. I made myself useful to my own erasure.

As the persecutor: I turned on myself. The men have no problem. What is wrong with you? Why can’t you handle this? Why do you dread the weekends? Why do you hate solo-parenting more than you hate the job that’s breaking you?

The triangle kept spinning. I kept spinning with it.

The weekends were their own kind of impossible.

Everyone assumes the hard part is work. The performance, the meetings, the pumping schedule, the email from the boss. And yes. But weekends were supposed to be the relief — the time with my son, the restoration, the thing that made it all worth it.

Instead I dreaded them.

Not because I didn’t love him. But because solo-parenting a baby, on no sleep, with no separation and nowhere to put any of what I was carrying — was a different kind of hard. Not the hard of performing. The hard of having nothing left and still needing to show up fully for someone who needed everything.

I couldn’t say that to anyone.

So I shoved it down. Deeper and deeper, into my pelvic bowl — that place in the body where women are so good at storing the things they cannot yet name. It was full. It was bursting at the seams. And still I packed more in: the exhale, the guilt, the triangle, the weekends, the mirror, the pieces.

It seeped, of course. Into every interaction. Into the way I answered emails. Into the tightness around my eyes in meetings. Into the way I laughed a beat too late at things that weren’t funny.

But the mirror was hanging on the wall.

And I kept smiling at it.

Even as the reflection behind the glass was fracturing — quietly, slowly, a piece at a time. Bleeding. Sobbing. Disintegrating.

Even as the shards fell.

This is what living inside the gap looks like. Not a breakdown. Not a dramatic unraveling. Just a slow accumulation of weight in a place you can’t point to. A mirror held together with tape and will and the fear of being seen as someone who couldn’t handle it.

The pieces keep falling. And for a long time, you keep picking them up.

In part three: what it means when you finally stop.

I’ve been thinking about how we did that to mothers… how we do that to mothers.

Not out loud. Not in a policy or a memo or a meeting. Just quietly, collectively, without anyone having to say it. The understanding that motherhood is something you have — not something you are — at work. That it lives at home, in the evenings, on weekends, in the softness of your voice when you answer a call from daycare. Not here. Not now. Not in this room.

The rules are unspoken but they are not unclear.

Don’t talk about your kids at work. Don’t show your stomach. Don’t breastfeed in public — even covered. Don’t be seen struggling. Don’t need a break. Don’t be at a bar. Don’t be distracted. Don’t be wild or wrangling or visibly human in any of the ways that motherhood makes you visibly human. And do not, under any circumstances, let your children exist at work.

Weekends are for rest, so you can be more productive on Monday.

I knew all of this. I had internalized all of this. I went back to work ten weeks postpartum having already memorized a rulebook nobody handed me — ready to prove I could do it. That I could turn mom-me off like a switch. That the woman who walked back into that office would be sharp, refreshed, restored. That the ten weeks I’d spent learning how to keep a human being alive would register, to everyone around me, as a break.

I was going to be fine. Better than fine. I was going to be a revelation.

It was a Tuesday. My second week back.

I had planned to take the day off — communicated it to my team, to my boss, in advance. I was in the middle of a transition back to work that I had designed myself, while pregnant, because it didn’t exist: two weeks of half-days, easing back in. A thing I built from nothing because no one had thought to build it before me.

On that Tuesday, I had a parenting class. The third in a series I’d signed up for months earlier. It was called, simply: Exploring Motherhood.

My boss sent an email. Snarky. Something about needing my schedule in advance, because me disappearing for the day wasn’t acceptable.

He had forgotten. Or hadn’t registered. Or hadn’t cared.

I didn’t go to the class.

I couldn’t stand to disappoint him further — when tensions were already high, when I was already exhausted from trying to take up exactly the right amount of space. Enough to prove I was serious. Not so much that I was demanding. I stayed. I worked. I ate the cost.

I missed the exploring motherhood class because I was too busy trying to prove I wasn’t really a mother.

The week before, in a meeting that ran long, I was supposed to pump.

My boss — remote, on camera — noticed me shifting, watching the clock. He said, generously, in front of everyone: “If you need to go, you can go. I don’t want you to be in pain.”

Pain. That was the threshold.

Not my supply. Not my body’s schedule. Not my wellbeing, or my autonomy, or the fact that I was a few weeks postpartum and my body was still doing something remarkable and demanding and not particularly interested in the meeting agenda. Just: pain. The visible, undeniable kind. The kind that would make even a room full of colleagues uncomfortable enough to excuse me.

I had given birth completely naturally. I can handle pain.

I stayed. I pumped late. My supply went down.

And I blamed myself.

There is a version of this story I used to tell that was mostly about my boss. His forgetting. His snarky email. His well-meaning but impossible bar of pain.

But that’s not quite the story.

The story is that I had quietly absorbed a set of rules that made his behavior make sense to me. That kept me the right size, in the right place, asking for the right things — which is to say, almost nothing. That made me skip a class about exploring my own motherhood in order to protect a relationship with a man who had already broken an agreement with me.

My values and my life had begun to diverge. I didn’t have language for it yet. I just had a feeling — low and persistent and impossible to locate — that I was taping a broken mirror back together and hanging it on the wall and forcing myself to smile at the reflection.

While the pieces kept falling.

This is the first in a series on what it actually felt like — not the version I performed, but the one underneath. If any of this sounds familiar: you’re not broken. You’re just someone who’s been trying to live inside a rulebook that was never written for you.

Which means I am about to lose my mind.

Again.

Every year I tell myself I will prepare. I will gradually shift bedtime by 10–15 minutes. I will research “gentle transitions.” I will reduce stimulation. I will dim the lights early. I will have the conversations.

I will be the calm, prepared, emotionally regulated mother who glides her family through the time change like a Scandinavian sleep consultant.

And every year?

I do absolutely none of that.

Instead, I remember approximately 36 hours before the clocks change. I send a frantic text to my husband: “OMG IT’S DAYLIGHT SAVINGS.” As if he controls time. As if he has been secretly negotiating with the sun.

And then I spiral.

Because here’s what Daylight Savings actually means in my house:

One kid will wake up at what feels like 3:53 a.m.

Not 4:53.
Not “early but manageable.”

3:53.

The hour where your body is still deeply convinced it is the middle of the night and your soul briefly leaves your body when you hear footsteps in the hallway.

And bedtime?

Bedtime will feel impossible.

Because the sun will be up. Blazing. Smug.
And my children know how to open the curtains. The blinds. The emotional boundaries.

They will not be tricked by my shenanigans.

I can dim the lights. I can whisper. I can announce, “It’s nighttime now.”

But they will look at me like I am deeply unwell.

“Mom. The sun is up.”

And honestly? They’re not wrong.

Surely she is mistaken, they will think. Surely this woman has finally lost it. Look outside. It is broad daylight. We are not going to bed.

And I will stand there, holding the fiction of clock-time in my hands like some deranged time bureaucrat trying to convince small humans that darkness is a social construct.

Weekday schedules will feel off.
School mornings will be slightly unhinged.

And aftercare pickup?

Aftercare pickup will feel earlier.

The kids won’t want to leave. They’ll want to play all the way home. They’ll discover parkour on the sidewalk. They’ll need one more jump. One more race. One more stick.

Meanwhile I’ll be:

Calculating how long until bedtime.
Scrambling to find street parking because we’re now 18 minutes late thanks to sidewalk gymnastics.
Mentally reverse-engineering dinner.
Trying not to snap because I can feel the clock ticking in my bloodstream.

This is what will actually happen.

And somehow, I will be the one tracking all of it.

I will be the one calculating:

“Okay if we push bedtime by 20 minutes tonight but wake them 15 minutes earlier tomorrow…”
“Should we let them crash and hope for the best?” (Tempting. Also chaos.)
“Should we talk to them about circadian rhythms?” (Yes. We probably should.)
“Should I have started preparing a week ago?” (Yup.)

And here’s the part that makes me irrationally angry:

Why is it my job to think about this?

Who decided that the mother must be the Keeper of the Clocks? The Guardian of Sleep Hygiene? The One Who Anticipates the Fallout?

My husband will absolutely experience the consequences of Daylight Savings.

But will he be mentally mapping the ripple effects three days in advance?

Will he be pre-grieving the overtired meltdowns?
Will he be calculating how this impacts next week’s schedule <> aftercare <> bedtime routines?
Will he be mentally adjusting the bedtime arc while simultaneously planning the weekly schedule?

No.

Because somewhere along the way, I absorbed the responsibility for time itself.

They won’t blame Congress.
They won’t blame time policy.
They will blame me.

And I will blame myself.

Daylight Savings isn’t just about losing an hour.

It’s about the invisible calculus of motherhood.

It’s about the mental spreadsheet that never closes.

It’s about carrying not just your own circadian rhythm — but everyone else’s too.

I wish I had:

• Sat everyone down a week ago and said, “Here’s the plan.”

• Delegated half the preparation.

• Declared that if mornings implode, they implode.

• Decided that not everything needs to be optimized.

Instead, I am here, simmering, thinking about blackout curtains and bedtime snacks and whether I should preemptively adjust therapy by 30 minutes.

The weight of being a mom isn’t just the diapers or the driving or the dishes.

It’s the anticipating.

It’s the buffering.

It’s the constant, quiet scanning of the horizon for disruptions — and trying to soften them before anyone else even notices the wind.

Daylight Savings is stupid.

But the deeper truth?

I am tired of being the human shock absorber.

Maybe this year I don’t fix it.

Maybe this year the clocks change and we all just… deal.

Maybe this year I let someone else carry the sunrise.

💌 If you, too, are already mentally calculating bedtime…

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And then take my son to therapy.

Except… his therapy was canceled today. (It was rescheduled for earlier this week, but that session was also canceled — snow.)

So technically, I can snooze the alarm. But now I’m wondering: Does therapy being canceled change anything about my afternoon?

On paper, it’s more time to work on said Big Well-Funded Project.

In practice, I’m doing this:

• Realizing I could work from the community center where aftercare is (an old high school turned into a semi-chaotic hub of underfunded programming and broken outlets).

• Remembering I can’t work from there because I don’t have my charger.

• Because I left it at another care center.

• Where I dropped both kids on Wednesday because school was closed (snow again), and my daughter’s school only had a two-hour delay (private school = chaos), and it was too disruptive to drop her off and pick her up a few hours later with my work schedule, especially after I’d already lost Monday and Tuesday to said snowstorm.

• So I dropped them both and set my son up for virtual learning from this care center.

• And forgot the charger there.

So now I can’t work from the aftercare center.

Which means I’ll have to come home.

Which means an extra hour of driving.

But also: what time do I get them from aftercare?

Because after that, I need to get them to the musical kids hang / date night drop-off event (???) — which I still need to:

1. Tell them about.

2. Get them excited for.

3. Pray they aren’t too overstimulated by the whiplash of this week to go without a meltdown.

Also: Did my husband make a dinner reservation for us?
Is he too stressed or behind from his own missed workdays to even do date night?

Where are we going?
What time?
Do I have time to shower first?
Can I shower after drop-off and before dinner?
Do I even have clean clothes to wear?
Do I drive the car home and Uber to dinner so we don’t lose parking?
Can I just work at a nearby bar or coffee shop in the meantime?

I don’t know.

Also: We haven’t talked about weekend logistics.
At all.

My work deadlines?
Today.
Tuesday.
Thursday.

So I need to get a lot done today. Which — reminder — is disappearing by the minute.

Oh! And on Monday, I have to drop the car off for service.
After school drop-off.
Which means working from the dealership.
Which means… I need the charger.

So maybe I should go pick it up today.
Which means less time to work.
Which means I should work from aftercare.
But then: definitely no shower.

NO WONDER everything feels impossible.

No wonder it’s hard to write, create, think, breathe.
This isn’t just “juggling” — it’s playing real-time logistical Jenga with zero breaks, 12 calendars, no backup, and a head full of static.

And somehow, we’re just expected to do it all.
Without dropping any blocks.
Without losing our minds.
Without saying fuck every three seconds.

But I am saying fuck.
Often.
Because the logistics are fucking real.

💌 If this felt familiar…

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Not metaphorically. Literally.

He was nursing on one breast while the other — neglected, overachieving, engorged — started spraying relentlessly. A rogue fountain. A dairy geyser.

When he tried to switch sides, eager and unsuspecting, he caught the full stream directly in the face.

He shrieked.
I panicked.

Without thinking, I shoved him back onto the first boob and sacrificed our couch to the spray. Milk arced across the living room like some deranged Cirque du Soleil act of maternal abundance.

The couch never fully recovered.

Neither did my sense of bodily predictability.

That pretty much sums up my breastfeeding journey.

With my first, I breastfed for 12 weeks. Then I went back to work and quickly pivoted to exclusive pumping for the next nine months.

Nine. Months.

The logistics alone deserve their own federal holiday.

The parts.
The washing.
The sterilizing.
The fridge-ing.
The freezing.
The labeling.
The thawing.
The daycare bag with the ice packs and backup parts and Sharpie-dated ounces.
The calendar blocks at work labeled “HOLD.”
The quiet panic if a meeting ran long.
The frantic pumping between Zoom calls.

It was a second full-time job. Except this one was strapped to my chest.

I wore milk stains like badges of honor. Dried crescents across my yoga tops. Wet circles blooming through blouses during meetings. I was proud of the output. Proud of the discipline. Proud of my freezer stash.

There is something absurdly competitive about breastmilk. We pretend there isn’t. But there is.

How long did you breastfeed?
How many ounces per session?
How big is your freezer stash?
Did you have to supplement?

With my first, formula felt like failure. My husband — a pediatrician — hated the idea of it. He worried we’d stop breastfeeding altogether. That we wouldn’t go back.

I just wanted to sleep.

But the messaging was loud. Breast is best. Try harder. Don’t quit. Power through.

So I pumped. And pumped. And pumped.

Until I stopped.

And no one tells you about the hormonal crash when you stop pumping. The emotional cliff. The way your body recalibrates and your brain feels like it’s short-circuiting. The grief layered with relief layered with exhaustion.

Then came my second.

She breastfed for about eight weeks. And then she rejected me.

Just… refused.

Different holds. Different times of day. Different rooms. Different songs. She was not interested.

And let’s be clear — it wasn’t humbling.

It was fucking rejection.

For the being you made and carried in your body.
Birthed through your canal.
Grew an entire organ for so she could survive.
Cared for 24/7 — every single day, hour, minute, second.

And then she rejects you.

That’s her right. She owns her consent. Her body is hers. I respect that. I respect her.

And it still fucking hurts.

It hurts in a place that has nothing to do with logic and everything to do with biology and attachment and ego and exhaustion.

It hurts in the place where you thought your body and her body were still one.

Respecting her autonomy didn’t cancel out my grief.
Both were true.

So I pumped again.

For ten months.

But this time, formula wasn’t the villain. It wasn’t a moral failure. It was food. It was fine. It was acceptable. I had softened. I had perspective. I had already survived one pumping Olympics.

And then 2021 happened.

The fucking formula shortage.

How.

How did no one warn us?

Surely manufacturers saw this coming. Surely factories knew there were vulnerabilities. Surely someone, somewhere, had projections. But there we were — shelves empty. Parents scrambling. Panic spreading quietly through text threads and Facebook groups.

I drove to every pharmacy within a 20-mile radius looking for her sensitive-tummy formula.

Calling ahead.
Refreshing websites.
Texting other moms like we were exchanging black-market intel.

All while holding down a job.
Raising two kids.
Managing pump schedules.
Trying to sleep.
Trying to be a functioning human.
Trying not to unravel.

There is no moral superiority in leaking milk through your shirt while crying in a work bathroom.

There is no purity in a system that leaves parents rationing formula.

There is no medal for pumping until your nipples crack.

Why is there so much fucking judgment about how we feed our babies?

Breastfeed too long? Weird.
Stop too soon? Selfish.
Exclusively pump? Why don’t you just nurse?
Use formula? What happened?
Struggle? Try harder.
Succeed? Don’t brag.

I’ve been the fountain.
I’ve been the freezer stash queen.
I’ve been the woman rage-pumping between meetings.
I’ve been the parent driving across town at 9 p.m. hunting formula like it’s contraband.

And 7.5 years into this parenting thing, here’s what I know:

Fed is not just best.
Fed is fucking fantastic. An achievement. You’re doing it. You are amazing.

The rest?

It’s noise.

💌 If you’ve ever lived in the milk wars…

If you’ve ever washed pump parts at midnight, sacrificed a couch to rogue letdown, felt rejected by your own baby, or driven across town for a can of formula… you’re not alone.

Let’s keep telling the real stories.

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So in the spirit of year-end reflection, let me just say this:
I am grateful AF for Beyoncé.
(And AirPods. But we’ll get there.)

I’m 7.5 years into this parenting journey now. Long past those early months of round-the-clock feeds. But back when my first was a baby and I was absolutely shredded from the inside out—sleep-deprived beyond belief, back at work, still breastfeeding, still doing most (read: all) of the overnights because my husband’s fellowship training > my “cool, flexible, supportive” tech job—I clung to Lemonade like it was life support.

Which, in some ways, it was.

It was the only thing keeping me awake during feeds at 2:07am, 3:41am, 4:26am. The only thing that cut through the fog when I was pacing the hallway, bouncing a baby back to sleep while trying desperately not to fall asleep myself—because I’d been told that if I even drifted off near him, he might die. Instant SIDS. No nuance, no mercy.

And while I resented him a fuck-ton during those nights—while I felt the hot, prickly rage of being needed that hard, that constantly—I somehow, miraculously, still held space for his experience. His pain. His reflux. His fatigue. His yearning to cuddle and co-sleep. And my growing, grief-stricken knowledge that neither of those were options. Not safely. Not in the state I was in.

So I let Beyoncé hold me. Growling, healing, raging, testifying through my AirPods. Keeping me upright. Keeping me company. Giving me something to hold onto besides the weight of expectation and the body of a baby I loved and resented all at once.

I took notes back then. Disjointed, bleary, diligent notes. And today—December 31st, with childcare suddenly canceled, end-of-year deadlines in flames, and back-to-back solo-parenting days ahead—I read through some of them.

And weirdly? What I feel isn’t regret or exhaustion or shame.

I feel gratitude.

Gratitude for how far we’ve come. For the blurry miracle of making it to this point. For the hard-earned, embodied knowing that everything is a phase. Even the brutal stuff. Especially the brutal stuff.

That the days are so fucking long—and yet the years are, against all odds, somehow incredibly short.

So yes, this is a gratitude post. A tired, real one. Today, I am:
Thanking the universe for Beyoncé.
Thanking the universe for AirPods.
And thanking the universe for change. Slow, quiet, relentless change.

❤️🙏 Want more of this?
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He was a baby. No one could soothe him but me. I kept making excuses—“He’s in a leap”—but something was wrong. I didn’t know what, and I couldn’t fix it. I was trying my best. Trying to hold it all together. But it wasn’t about me—except it felt like it was all about me.

Does that ever stop?

At what point does parenting stop being about me—my performance, my composure, my gentle tone, my yelling, my energy, my sacrifice—and start being about my kid, who he is, what he needs, how he processes the world?

At what point do I stop feeling like I’m on trial?

I think about that Christmas card photo. All three of us dressed in vaguely matching outfits. Perched on our white couch, the one in front of the hideous burgundy wall we inherited from the previous homeowners. The tree glowing in the background. Trying so hard to look festive, happy, presentable. Like I wasn’t six months deep into chronic sleep deprivation. Like I wasn’t wearing jeans that technically fit but betrayed me with every breath. Like I wasn’t hosting both sides of our family—two full sets of relatives from North Carolina—all while clenching my jaw and holding my baby like a human mute button so he wouldn’t cry, or fuss, or do anything that would make anyone uncomfortable.

The whole scene was a performance.

A performance of motherhood, of joy, of “we’ve got this,” of holiday spirit. We were literally taking Christmas photos at Christmas for a holiday card that should’ve been sent out weeks prior, if not months. The metaphor basically wrapped itself.

Because I was trying so hard to prove—to others, to myself—that we were thriving. That we were good parents. That my baby was a good baby. That I was a good mother.

But here’s what the photo didn’t show:

My baby couldn’t eat the cookies we were “supposed” to decorate. He cried through the handprint ornament we were “supposed” to make. He had zero interest in opening presents. (He didn’t like the ones I picked, either.) I was folding and re-folding tissue paper and salvaging gift bags while keeping the pug from eating half-eaten food people kept leaving on every surface. I was trying to conserve holiday waste while simultaneously leaking milk and holding my baby like a security blanket so no one—especially him—fell apart.

It felt like I had to protect the moment from being anything other than magical. And looking back, that’s the pressure I was responding to: the demand that our baby’s first Christmas be picturesque, calm, presentable, grateful, perfect.

But babies aren’t built for Instagram. Or hosting. Or magic on command. And neither am I.

And. And I’ve grown a lot since then.

I wish I could say the performance ends. But seven and a half years in, I still find myself performing. My son recently started a new school. Holy hell. The performances there could be a whole other post…er, it will be a whole other post

What’s changed is me. I’ve morphed into another version of myself—not just as a parent, but as a person. I’m more attuned to when I’m performing. I’m more aware of why. I’ve built enough space, enough muscle, enough grit to notice when I’m sliding into “holiday card mode” and ask myself: Is this really how I want to show up?

Sometimes the answer is yes. Sometimes no. And both answers are perfect because I’m asking them.

This year? We’re two days into December. We haven’t taken a single step toward creating, let alone sending, a holiday card. Maybe we’ll send one in May. Or maybe not at all. And that feels not just acceptable—it feels authentically right.

If you’re in that place where it all still feels performative, I can’t tell you when it ends. But I can tell you you’re not alone. I’m still in it, too. Just more awake inside of it.

And if you ever want to get curious about the performance you’re caught in—I’m here. I’d love to chat.

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Sometimes I play a game on my phone.
Sometimes I take a little video.
Sometimes I cheer.
And sometimes I zone the fuck out — because it’s quiet, and it’s peaceful, and those few minutes aren’t being pulled from my bones.

And then the baby swim class starts in the adjacent pool.

Giddy parents with wide eyes and phone cameras, giggling and gliding their newborns through the water, taking it so seriously.
Bubbling with joy. Mouthing along to “Twinkle Twinkle.” Holding their babies just right. Moving in a perfect circle like the cult of chlorine.

And I swear something sick starts to seep inside me. Like a grief lodged in my womb.

Because I never had that experience.
I hated that fucking class.
And this isn’t just a rant — it’s a reckoning.

That one class — baby swim — was the only thing I opted out of orchestrating, conducting, curating.
The one thing I asked my partner to lead, because I could not bring myself to fake it.

I’ve never liked swimming pools.
Never liked bathing suits — not even as a kid.
Chlorine makes my skin itch and my hair brittle.
I’ve never been good at swimming.
And yet there I was, postpartum, aching, in a suit I hated, holding a baby in a cold, loud pool full of songs I didn’t know and moves I couldn’t follow.

“Twinkle Twinkle Little Star?” I hadn’t thought of that song in literal decades.
“Wheels on the Bus?” Apparently there are official arm movements, especially when you’re half-submerged and supposed to be bouncing your baby in rhythm with strangers.
I always went the wrong way in the circle. I always felt behind.
Everyone else had clearly been handed a secret choreography I somehow missed.

I felt like a fucking imposter.
A wet, freezing, miserable imposter with a screaming infant suctioned to my soggy chest and a bathing suit that either squeezed me like a python or taunted me with memories of the bikini-clad version of me I no longer recognized. (I still have that two-piece, by the way.)

And every time I was in that pool, it wasn’t because I wanted to be — it was because I had to be. Because my partner wasn’t available. Because I didn’t want to be the mom who didn’t show up.
But I didn’t feel present. I felt trapped.

Wet. Cold. Judged. Tired. So tired.
Not just in my body — in my whole being.

And here’s the thing:
This post isn’t about fixing that.
Yes, there are other swim venues.
Yes, I could’ve made a different choice.
No, I didn’t have to sign up for baby swim.
Blah blah blah. Save your “have you tried” and your “you should’ve.”
This is not a call for solutions. It’s a call for space.

Because I know I’m not the only one who hated it.
I know I’m not the only one who wanted to opt out of this particular brand of performative parenting.
I know I’m not the only one who wishes they could’ve outsourced this part.

And if any part of this sounds like you — the exhausted, resentful, awkward, over it version of you — know this: I see her. She’s valid. She belongs too.
If you’ve been carrying the guilt of hating what others seem to love, let this be your permission slip: you’re allowed to feel that way.

You don’t have to love it all to be a good parent.
You don’t even have to do it to be a good parent.

Let’s normalize hating shit.
Let’s normalize the misalignments between parenting-you and you-you.
Let’s hold space for the ugh alongside the joy. The no thanks alongside the gratitude. The never again alongside the I love them so much it hurts.

Parenting is not a Pinterest board. It’s not always sweet.
Some of it is fucking awful.
And that’s okay.

IMHMO, always.

Coral

It was my first talk of this size and grandeur — and I was terrified.

But what happened in that room moved me deeply: fierce tears, quiet nods, long hugs… a whole room exhaling together. Grieving. Seeing. Feeling seen.

I’m sharing it here in our IMHMO Journal in case it helps you feel a little more seen, too. Here it goes…

In late summer 2018, I found myself breastfeeding on a Zoom call, trying to mute my tears while leading a quarterly business review — and all I could think was:

“I don’t recognize this version of me.”

Before motherhood, I was a marketing leader in tech, helping billionaires make more billions. I had a fast-moving career, a solid paycheck, a clear identity. I was ambitious. I had a plan.

When I got pregnant, I treated maternity leave like a project launch:
Twelve weeks off. Then I’d bounce back.

What happened wasn’t a disruption.
It was a disintegration.

I Didn’t Bounce Back. I Broke Open.

I returned to work 11 weeks postpartum. I hadn’t slept more than 4 hours a night in months. I was still bleeding. I was still in pain. And I was unraveling.

I cried between meetings. And during them. I questioned whether I was cut out for parenting. I wondered what it meant that I loved my baby… but couldn’t feel myself.
Not the old me, not a new me. Just… lost.

Back at work — even in a supposedly “progressive” tech company — there was no real support. No transition plan. No playbook. No precedent.

Turns out, I was the first birth parent in leadership in the company’s 10-year history. There was support on paper — but not in practice. And definitely not in culture.

That’s when it hit me:
This wasn’t just personal. It was systemic.

The Word That Changed Everything

I started questioning everything — my career, my identity, my ambition. I didn’t want the life I had built. But I didn’t yet know what I wanted instead.

Then I came across a word I’d never heard before:

Matrescence.
The psychological, hormonal, emotional, and social transformation of becoming a mother.

Like adolescence. But for moms.

Suddenly, everything I was feeling had a name. A framework. A context.
But no one had ever said it to me.
No one had prepared me for this.

What followed was a slow, painful unraveling of everything I thought I believed about myself.

In coaching, I felt what it was like to be held without having to perform.
In therapy, I realized my hustle had been my mask.
And during the pandemic — when the world paused — I stopped trying to “bounce back.”

And in that quiet, I heard it.

A whisper.

“Coach. Support moms. This is the work.”

The Whisper Became a Path

That whisper changed everything.

I trained as an evidence-based coach. I rebuilt my career.
I redefined success — not as performance, but as alignment.
Alignment with who I am.
What I value.
The mission I serve.

I didn’t return to who I was.
I rose as someone new.

Now I coach high-capacity moms through the same transitions I once felt alone in.
I work with organizations to build systems that actually support caregivers.
And I advocate for policy change — because the problem isn’t just personal.
It’s structural.

If You’re In It Right Now…

If you’re in your own season of unraveling — staring at a life that no longer fits — I want to offer you this:

That whisper inside you?
The one you’re half-hearing?
It knows something your resume doesn’t.

Make space to realign — not just with what you do, but with who you are.

You don’t have to bounce back.
You don’t have to go back.

Maybe something is falling apart.
But maybe… it’s not the end.

Maybe it’s the beginning of you.

—

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With fierce love,

Coral

This one is raw.

It’s about a pediatrician visit that knocked the wind out of me. About the ways I tried to “win” at postpartum, when really, I was unraveling. And it’s about the voice I thought I didn’t have — and the long, quiet journey back to finally hearing it again.

If you’ve ever felt like you were doing everything “right” but still falling apart… this is for you.

—

“I passed. I did good.”

That’s what I told myself after my son’s one-month check-up.
I had filled out the postpartum emotions checklist — sleep-deprived, trying not to cry in the waiting room, doing the appointment solo — and checked all the “right” boxes.

The pediatrician looked at the form and said:

“Seems like you’re doing just fine postpartum.”

I nodded.
Good. I passed. I did good.

But here’s what he didn’t see:

• I hadn’t slept more than two hours at a time in weeks.

• My husband and I were both quietly, separately having suicidal thoughts.

• My baby only slept if he was on my chest. … which meant I couldn’t sleep, because I was taught co-sleeping = SIDS.

• I was scared. I was drowning. I felt like I had already failed.

Still, I believed him.
I believed that if I said I was fine — and someone in authority said I was fine — then I must be okay.

—

✦ The Shaming That Changed Everything

My son screamed the entire appointment. The pediatrician was visibly annoyed. He looked at me, shook his head, and said flatly:

“He’s either tired or hungry.”

I told him he had napped on the car ride over — maybe 25 minutes.

“That’s not long enough,” he replied. “He should be sleeping for 2–3 hours. In his crib. Alone. He shouldn’t be sleeping on you. And he should be on a schedule.”

I felt myself leave my body.

My inner Over-Achiever (aka The Oversee-er) kicked in.
Okay. Got it. New mission: Get him on a crib nap schedule. Alone. No more contact naps. No more messing this up.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but something quiet and sacred in me — something I now know was my intuition — got buried that day.

—

The Mission: Fix It

From that moment on, I made it my job to get him on a nap schedule.
In his crib. Alone. The way I was told was “correct.”

And for weeks, it was just the two of us — him crying, me trying and failing to get him to sleep without me.

Every missed nap was a failure.
Every scream confirmed I was incompetent.
Every deviation from the schedule meant I wasn’t trying hard enough.

Eventually, I said f*ck it.

He napped on me. I watched TV.
Sometimes we co-slept on the couch, and I lived in fear that I’d hurt him in my sleep.
But at least we were surviving.

I thought I was broken for not enjoying this.
For not bonding instantly.
For not “knowing what to do.”

—

Where Was My Intuition?

That was the question on a loop in my head.

Where was my maternal instinct?
Why couldn’t I “just know”?
Wasn’t it supposed to be automatic?

Now, years later, I know the answer:

I wasn’t deformed.
I was injured.
And I was never given the space, support, or safety to actually hear myself.

That baby seed of maternal intuition — the one I thought I didn’t have?
It was there.
It just got buried under judgment, fear, and a crushing lack of support.

—

Now, I Can Finally Hear Her

Seven years into this journey, something has shifted.

I’m not reclaiming my intuition — I’m rediscovering that original spark I never got the chance to know.

Since then, I’ve grown something new.
A wiser, deeper maternal voice — one shaped by experience and self-trust.
She’s blooming now.

But that initial flicker — the baby version of my intuition?
She’s still in there.
And I’m so glad I finally get to meet her.

—

💛 If This Resonated…

If something in you softened, cracked open, or nodded along as you read this — I’d love for you to stick around.

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This shit is scary…and it’s scary to share. I appreciate you being here.

Coral

This is a space for honest writing about motherhood, burnout, identity shifts, and what it means to live, lead, parent, and exist in systems that weren’t built for us — especially if you’re trying to do all of that while holding onto your humanity.

This is not a parenting newsletter.

This isn’t a performative self-help blog.
This isn’t a how-to.

IMHMO is a space to feel, think, burn down, rebuild.
It’s essays, tools, frameworks, and reflections for people who are:

• Done pretending burnout is just a scheduling issue

• Questioning who they are now, after the big shift

• Trying to lead with integrity while staying alive in their own body

• Holding rage, love, grief, and ambition at the same time

Maybe you’re a mother.
Maybe you’re neurodivergent.
Maybe you’re holding emotional labor that no one else sees.
Maybe you’re just tired of lying about how tired you are.

Either way: You’re not too much. You’re not behind. You’re right on time.

What you’ll get here:

• Essays and dispatches about motherhood, burnout, identity, and emotional clarity

• Hot-minded opinions — about school systems, capitalism, “balance,” all of it

• Tools and reframes — because naming the truth isn’t enough unless we can work with it

• Optional voice notes and audio reflections (coming soon)

• Resources for those navigating the messy, beautiful, exhausting, and revolutionary work of becoming someone new

Some posts will be public.
Some will be for paid subscribers — who make this work sustainable, honest, and independent.

This is the beginning.

Thanks for showing up. For subscribing. For being here.
Let this space be a mirror, a journal, a pocket of oxygen — whatever you need it to be.

I’m so glad you’re here.

— Coral
Founder of IMHMO

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If you’re not sure yet — stick around. I’m not going anywhere.