What It Means When You Finally Stop
Part three of a series on what it actually felt like to go back to work after becoming a mother
There wasn’t a dramatic moment.
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.