There’s the back-to-school machinery: the lists, the supplies, the logistics of a new routine. There’s the end of something — whatever summer was, even if summer was largely business as usual for you and your family. There’s the beginning of something: the academic year, the fall cadence, the return to whatever version of normal October will eventually become.

And underneath all of it, if you’re paying attention, there’s something that doesn’t fit neatly into the category of either grief or relief.

For mothers who went back to work after parental leave this spring or summer — August is often the month when it all settles into place. The first-day adrenaline has worn off. The trial period is over. The routine is established. And what’s left is a quieter, more sustained question: is this what I wanted?

Most of us don’t pause long enough to actually answer that. The day keeps moving. The pickup is at 5:30. There are dinners and baths and the morning drill and then it starts again. The settling happens — into the routine, into the role, into the version of yourself that shows up for all of it — without you necessarily choosing it. You just find yourself there.

August is also the month that tends to crack open the carrying.

You’ve been managing since you got back. Managing the logistics, the emotional transitions, the professional readjustments, the relationship strain of adding a child to a partnership that was already working to stay connected. Managing the particular kind of exhaustion that doesn’t map onto anything you were trained for.

You’ve been managing well. By most external measures, you’ve been “fineeeeeeeee."

August is when the fine starts to show its seams.

This isn’t a crisis. It’s information. It’s your system giving you feedback that it’s been running lean for a while and the reserves are lower than they look from the outside. That feedback is useful. It’s not comfortable, sure… but it is useful.

What I’ve learned helps isn’t an overhaul. Not a bigger solution, a small acknowledgement. A small experiment. One honest conversation about what’s actually hard. One named thing that you need that you’ve been postponing. One acknowledgment that you’re carrying more than the visible load.

And, oh, is the invisible load is real. The mental overhead of the planning and tracking and anticipating. The emotional overhead of managing how you present yourself in professional spaces while also showing up at home. The weight of being the person who notices all the things that need to happen before anyone else notices they need to happen.

You can carry it. You are doing it. However, carrying it, and carrying it well, are not the same thing, and August is often the month when the difference becomes clear.

If this is you — if August is the month the seams are showing — you don’t have to figure out the next step alone. That’s what the Chemistry Call is for. Forty-five minutes, free, no agenda except: where are you, and what might actually help?

Hope to see you there. 💞

This is how it usually starts: something small.

You’re in a meeting and you say something you don’t quite mean. Or you don’t say something you do mean. Or you look at your calendar and realize you haven’t done the thing you’ve been saying matters to you in three weeks, or six, or since before the baby came.

The values gap isn’t dramatic. It doesn’t arrive with a crisis. It accumulates.

You say you value presence with your child. You look at your phone at dinner. You say you value your own health. You haven’t moved your body in two weeks because there’s been no time and no energy and something had to go. You say you value your work — the actual substance of it, not just the output. But you’re going through the motions more often than you’re actually there.

None of this makes you a bad person. It makes you a depleted person, which is different.

Values don’t stop mattering when we’re depleted. They just become harder to live by. The gap between what we believe and how we’re actually living widens in direct proportion to how much we’re running on empty. And the gap produces something specific: a low-grade feeling of not quite being yourself. Not quite occupying your own life.

Most people attribute this to stress, or to busyness, or to having a new baby. And those things are real contributors. But the feeling I’m pointing at is something more precise. It’s the feeling of acting in ways that don’t line up with what you believe about yourself — repeatedly, habitually, because the margin for anything else has disappeared.

The work of closing the values gap is not a productivity exercise. It doesn’t start with a better schedule or a more efficient morning. It starts with honesty.

What do you actually value? Not what you’re supposed to value, not what sounds good, not the version you put on your coaching intake form. What, when you are quiet enough to listen, actually matters to you?

And then: where is the gap? Not as self-criticism. As information.

Because you can’t close a gap you haven’t named. And most of us are living inside the gap while carefully not naming it — because naming it would require changing something, and changing something takes resources we’re not sure we have right now.

Here’s what I’ve learned from sitting with women in this place: they always have more resources than they think. Not to do everything. To do the one or two things that would shift the center of gravity enough that other things could follow.

The first step is almost always permission. Permission to say out loud: this is the gap. This is the distance between where I am and where I want to be. Permission to treat that distance as worth addressing — not later, not when things slow down, but now.

This is what coaching holds. Not the solution. The space to name it, and then the specific work of moving toward it.

If this is landing for you — the Chemistry Call is 45 minutes and free. It’s not a pitch. It’s a conversation about where you actually are.

The daycare drop-off goes fine.

You hold it together through the handoff. You say the things you’re supposed to say to the provider. You walk back to your car. And somewhere in the first few blocks of traffic, you catch yourself in the rearview mirror, and for just a second, you don’t quite recognize the person looking back.

Not in a dramatic way. Not in a way you’d tell anyone about. Just — something is slightly off. The face is the same. But something behind the face is different, and you can’t locate it, and the light turns green and you keep going.

This is matrescence.

Anthropologist Dana Raphael coined the term in 1973 and it never quite made it into the mainstream conversation. It refers to the developmental process of becoming a mother — the biological, psychological, and identity-level transformation that happens when a woman has a child. It’s the maternal equivalent of adolescence: a transition so significant that the person who comes out the other side is genuinely not the same as the one who went in.

Nobody talks about it like that. We talk about postpartum depression, which is a clinical condition and a real one. We talk about work-life balance, which is a category that mostly doesn’t account for the actual weight of what’s happening. We talk about going back to work as if going back means returning to a prior self — as if you can step back into who you were before, pick up where you left off, and simply also be a mother.

You can’t. You’re not that person anymore.

This isn’t loss, exactly. It’s more complicated than loss. You’ve gained something — something enormous and irreversible and wanted. But the gaining doesn’t come without the changing. And the changing is something nobody prepares you for, because it would require admitting that the version of you who left on leave is not going to be the version of you who comes back.

What comes back instead is a woman who knows some things she didn’t know before. What her body can do. What sleep deprivation actually feels like over months. What it means to love something that cannot yet advocate for itself. What she’s willing to fight for. What she’s no longer willing to perform.

That woman is, in many ways, more. More herself in certain ways. More clear about certain things. More done with certain performances she used to maintain without noticing.

She’s also in a body that’s tired and a mind that’s reorganizing itself and a professional context that was not designed for her — or rather, that was designed for the version of her that existed before.

The question worth sitting with is not: how do I get back to who I was?

It’s: who is going back, and what does she need?

Not from the pump schedule or the childcare plan. Those things matter and they’re covered in the Empower Your Return course. What she needs from herself — the honest accounting of what has changed, what she wants, what she’s willing to hold and what she isn’t.

That accounting is the thing that makes the return sustainable instead of just survivable.

If you’re in this — if you’re looking in the rearview mirror and not quite recognizing the person — you don’t have to navigate it alone. That’s what this work is for.

There’s a version of burnout that gets talked about in professional spaces. Maslach’s research. The six domains of mismatch. The BAT-4 assessment and its four dimensions. Exhaustion, mental distance, emotional impairment, cognitive fog. The science is good and the framing is useful and many women I work with recognize themselves in it immediately. (Ahem, hi, ThriveCycle.)

And then they say something like: but it’s not just work.

Right. It’s not.

Parenting burnout is real, documented, and different enough from professional burnout that treating it as the same thing gets you the wrong map.

Here’s what distinguishes it:

Professional burnout comes from sustained mismatch between what a system demands and what it gives back. You can, at least in theory, change jobs. You can set limits on your availability. There is, somewhere in the system, a lever you can pull. You might not have access to it. But it exists.

Parenting burnout comes from a relationship you cannot and do not want to leave. The demand is constant and the return is not always immediate and the mismatch is not a structural failure — it’s just the nature of early parenthood. You cannot put your child down for four months and go find a better situation. There is no lever.

This produces a specific quality of depletion that is different from what you experience at work. It tends to coexist with love, which is confusing. You can be completely depleted by something you also completely want. That particular combination is hard to name and harder to sit with, because the narrative around motherhood doesn’t leave a lot of room for it.

What I see most often in the women I work with is not one or the other; it’s both. Professional burnout and parenting burnout, running simultaneously, each one making the other harder to recover from. Because the tools that help with professional burnout (rest, reduced demand, clearer limits at work) don’t address the parenting side. And the tools that help with parenting exhaustion (community, connection, lowering the standard) don’t address the professional side.

Recovery from both requires something different from either.

It requires understanding which system is most depleted right now… and that it might be different next month. It requires developing the specific internal infrastructure to regulate your nervous system not just at work, not just at home, but in the handoff between them. It requires getting honest about what you’re carrying that doesn’t have a category yet.

This is the work IMHMO holds. Not the professional burnout (that’s ThriveCycle’s lane) and not just the parenting depletion. The place where they intersect — which is where most mothers I know actually live.

If you’re in that place — if you’re managing both and running out of margin — the Chemistry Call is 45 minutes and free. It’s not a sales call. It’s a conversation about where you are and what might help.

And if you’re ready to embark on the work yourself

, Empower Your Return is the course that walks you through the infrastructure for both.

Link to book a Chemistry Call and link to the course are in my bio.

I was wrong. The leaving was painful, yes. But the part I hadn’t prepared for was the arriving. Walking back in. Sitting at my desk. Opening my laptop. And realizing that while everything around me looked exactly the same, something about me did not.

Nobody warns you about this. The logistics get discussed in detail — pump schedules, childcare transitions, manager conversations, return-to-work plans. There are checklists. HR has a process. The pump bag gets packed.

What doesn’t get planned is what happens to the person who walks back in.

Parental leave ends and you return. But you do not return to who you were before. You return as someone who has been through something — something that rearranges your sense of yourself in ways that take months, sometimes years, to fully understand. You are a mother now. You are also still everything else you were. And those two things do not always know how to occupy the same body gracefully.

What I noticed, in my own return and in the returns of the women I’ve worked with since, is a specific kind of disorientation that doesn’t have a name in most workplace conversations. It isn’t postpartum depression, though sometimes it coexists with that. It isn’t regret about going back. It isn’t grief, exactly, though it contains grief.

It’s more like: you know how to do all of this, and something about the doing of it feels different now, and you cannot find the thread between who you were before and who you are today.

You go through the motions — and the motions are fine, actually. You do your job. You pump in the 12-minute windows between meetings. You answer the “how was your leave?” with the acceptable version. You plan the dinners and the drop-offs and the pickups. You perform readiness.

And inside, in the quiet moments, you wonder: is this what it’s going to feel like now?

It doesn’t have to.

What helped me — and what I’ve watched help the women who’ve done this work — wasn’t more logistics. It wasn’t a better system for the morning. It was actually stopping long enough to ask: who am I going back as? What do I want to feel like in six months? What do I need that I haven’t named yet?

These aren’t soft questions. They’re the most practical questions there are. Because a woman who knows what she needs and has a plan to meet those needs returns differently than a woman who white-knuckles it through the first year and wonders why she’s depleted.

Empower Your Return is the course I built to hold those questions. Fifteen lessons at your own pace. The childcare plan and the identity work. The rights you have that nobody tells you about. The home logistics and the inner ones. And underneath all of it — the question of what it means to go back as yourself, not just as the person they were expecting.

If you’re in this moment now, or you’re heading toward it — the course is at imhmo.com/empower-your-return.

And if you want to talk first, about where you are and what you’re carrying — the Chemistry Call is 45 minutes and free. No pitch. Just a real conversation.

You don’t have to figure out who you’re going back as alone.

— Coral

The to-do list is never done.

I don’t mean that in a philosophical, such is the nature of modern life way. I mean it never closes. There is no bottom. I have brush my hair on there. Take vitamins. Get kids to school. Things that are either always done or never done depending on the day and my capacity and whether anyone lost a shoe.

And still — incomplete. Still carrying the weight of everything I didn’t get to. The tightness in my throat that arrives around 4pm when I look at what I said I’d do and compare it to what actually happened. The quiet indictment of it. The oh fuck, I did nothing today that is never true and always feels true.

The failing. As a woman, a mom, a paid working professional, an unpaid mom person, a partner, an individual. And was I attempting to run a business at some point? Ha. Hah. HAH.

All of it, living in a little digital list.

And then, one day, something shifted.

I looked at the list and thought: wait. I own this. I own my time. I decide what gets done and what doesn’t. So I started acting like it.

I moved things. Reorganized. Got clear on what was actually urgent, what would feel genuinely good to accomplish, and what was neither vital nor nourishing. That last category — I nixed it. Moved it away. Let it go.

And when the list was tidy, manageable, honest — I stopped. I rested. I nourished myself until tomorrow.

I didn’t finish my to-do list that day. I moved things forward, and I self-resourced. And that felt, against all cultural conditioning, like enough.

Because it was.

It’s not a blog. It’s not a newsletter, exactly, though it arrives in your inbox like one.

It’s a journal, and I want to share why.

A journal is a place to think. To reflect. To process something you’re still inside of, without needing to have arrived at the answer yet. To practice the language for things that don’t have clean language. To write toward understanding instead of from it.

That’s what this is. I’m not writing from the other side of anything. I’m writing from the middle — the same middle you’re probably in — and trying to name what I see.

But there’s something this journal can do that a private one can’t: it can show you that you’re not alone in here.

That’s perhaps the most important thing. That someone else is untangling the same threads. Dissecting the same contradictions. Interrogating the same expectations that arrived, unasked for, the moment you became a mother. Raging at the same things. Grieving the same things. Sometimes laughing at the same things, because what else are you going to do.

This is a place to exhale. To be seen without having to perform okayness. To release — a little, incrementally, imperfectly — the weight of carrying it all without anyone noticing how heavy it actually is.

We hold it together here. We listen. We don’t fix and we don’t judge.

And when you’re ready — when the reflection turns into I want to do something with this, when the awareness becomes a hunger for actual change — you’ll know where to go.

For now, just read. You’re not alone in here.

Before I got pregnant, I had this vision.

A toddler. Full head of hair, bright olive skin, big lips. Looking up at me and saying mommy in the sweetest voice, and it filling my heart so completely I could barely stand it.

I remember being a kid and calling for my mom — mommy! mommy! — and she’d answer with whaties?! Every time. And I was so confused by that. Why wouldn’t she just say yes? Why the deflection? Why the edge?

I get it now.

The mommys never stop. They do not stop. Every single one is a need, a want, a desire, a touch, a poke, a jab, a complaint, unrequested feedback on something I did or didn’t do or should have done differently. Relentless. Never ending. Always demanding. Never satisfied.

And my body knows before my brain does.

My head goes fuzzy. My nervous system crackles — actual electricity, running through it. My stomach fills with tense, black, drooling butterflies. My pelvic bowl becomes a literal bowl of iron. Weighty. Weighed down. A weight to drag through the rest of the day.

The tears — theirs and mine. The fatigue. The drain. The need to just be alone. Untouched. Un-needed. Out of sight, out of mind. Unburdened.

This is what no one told me about. Not the books, not the classes, not the other moms at pickup who seem fine, who are probably not fine. Nobody said: your nervous system will be a tuning fork for everyone else’s need. That you will be on-call in your own body. That the word mommy — the word you dreamed of hearing — would one day land like nails on a chalkboard and you would feel guilty for every single second of it.

You’re not broken. Your nervous system is doing exactly what nervous systems do under sustained, relentless demand. It’s telling you something true.

What it needs is a cocoon. Quiet. Repair. To dissolve, briefly, into liquid — until the wings are dry and the parts are reassembled and you are ready to return.

Anew.

Here’s the honest rundown: my husband is deep in what can only be described as a PhD-dissertation-level work project with a two-week deadline, which means our household’s emotional load has redistributed in the way it always does — quietly (yet also loudly?), without a formal announcement, just a not-so-subtle shift in who’s holding what. Maycember is fully in effect (IYKYK — May somehow became December and nobody asked us). The public school district situation continues to be its own special kind of absurd. My work is behind. I’m behind. Everything is fucking behind.

And then, because timing is a comedian, I spent five hours in online training and will spend six more hours in-person to get CPR certified this week. Which — genuinely wonderful. I teach Body Pump now, and I love it in a way that surprised me. It’s physical coaching. It’s the thing I do with my whole body that feels like the same thing I do in every other room of my professional life, just louder and sweatier. It fills me up. The certification is right and good and necessary.

The timing, though. The timing is fucking unhinged.

Underneath all of it: perimenopause doing its thing (will I? won’t I? my body is keeping me in genuine suspense), chin hairs thriving, sleep thinning. The usual suspects.

But here’s where I actually am: hanging in there. Taking real breaths. Self-resourcing in all the ways — nothing dramatic, trying for enough to not tip over. Reminding myself that this is a season, not a sentence. This too shall pass is a cliché because it’s true and annoying and also the only thing that helps sometimes.

If you’re in your own version of the thick of it right now — I see you. I’m in there with you.

Peace and love and fucking parenting and wtf are doing in this fucking country.

Back next week. ❤️

That’s what burnout feels like in the middle of parenting.

Except there’s no blank page. There’s a very, very full one. There’s swim class for both kids, a school flea market fundraiser, an aftercare open house, and a nonprofit Mother’s Day brunch — all in the same three hour window. There’s the teacher appreciation week gifts you cannot, for the life of you, figure out how to organize. There’s the onslaught of texts to respond to, things to sign up for, things to pay for, things to account for, logistics to wrangle, calendars to organize. And it keeps going. It does not stop. There is no release valve.

Sometimes I just stop. I just can’t. I literally cannot wrap my head around how to begin. So I do nothing. I remind myself it’s okay if plates drop — most of them are plastic anyway. And I do nothing.

And yet the onslaught continues.

Here’s the part I’m almost ashamed to admit: during the pandemic, for a few days — just a few — things slowed. The non-work appointments stopped. The classes were canceled. The weekends went suddenly, eerily empty. And I felt something I didn’t have language for at the time.

Relief.

God, even writing that. The pandemic was devastating. I never, ever, EVER want to go back to that time. And yet. For a moment, the relentless machinery of modern parenthood just... stopped. And then it came roaring back — how to educate, how to childcare, how to get groceries, how to teach healthy social and emotional processing during a goddamn pandemic — all while sheltering in place, being the primary parent, with a husband back at work in healthcare, holding down a full-time job that graciously gave us Friday afternoons to “figure shit out.” Thanks.

Even writing this, I can feel it — like gas fumes rising from my throat. Like a sewage line piping out steam. It comes from somewhere deep, some place where this particular madness lives. That feeling of being buried. Too stuck to move.

And yet you’re not covered in dirt. You’re not in a six foot grave. You’re sitting at your desk, in front of your computer, trying to organize the family calendar for the upcoming weekend.

So what do you do?

You do whatever the hell feels most nourishing to you in this moment. Consequences and broken plates be damned.

Take a nap? Yes. Exercise? Only if it actually feels nourishing — not punishing, not obligatory. Eat a sleeve of Oreos? Absolutely.

Do what fills your cup. Not what the productivity gurus say. Not what the other moms appear to be doing. Not what you think you should need.

What actually fills yours.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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