Counseling for Professional Moms in Charleston, South Carolina

It’s a Thursday at 5:45pm and you’re sitting in the parking lot of a school event you have to walk into in fifteen minutes. Your daughter is in the back seat in the dress she didn’t want to wear, and the two of you just had the kind of conversation in the car that you wish nobody had heard. You snapped at her about the way she’s been acting. She said something that landed harder than she meant it to. The car is quiet now. You have fifteen minutes to put on the face that walks into the event and says the right things to everyone you’ll see in the next two hours. You apologize. She nods without looking at you. You take a breath, you apply lipstick in the rearview mirror, and you walk in.

You’re going to be at the hospital or the office or the base early tomorrow. The deliverable that’s due Tuesday needs more time than the week has to give. Sunday is supposed to be church and a long lunch with your in-laws and your kid’s tennis tournament. The week ahead is already on top of you, and the event you’re walking into now is one of three you’re supposed to be at this week wearing the face you just put on in the parking lot.

You did this because you wanted the career, and you still want the career. You worked your way up. The residency or the MBA or the bar. The years of long hours, the senior role you fought for, the title that took fifteen years to earn. You learned to be three steps ahead, to handle whatever showed up in the inbox before lunchtime. That was the skill, and it still is.

The same drive that’s making you good at your job is making you short with the people you love. You snap at your kid over the dress and the tone she used in the car, you answer your partner’s question about Saturday with a tone that makes him stop asking, you watch yourself be impatient with everyone, you feel terrible, and you overcorrect at bedtime by reading three books instead of one and reading them as warmly as you can manage. You wake up the next morning more wiped than if you’d just held the line at one book, and the whole thing starts again before you’ve poured coffee.

Your body’s sending signals you don’t want to read. The headaches arrive on Sunday afternoons before the week even starts. You catch yourself unclenching your jaw during a long meeting. You wake up at 3am with your chest tight enough that the first time it happened, you sat on the bathroom floor convinced you were having a heart attack. Your bloodwork came back fine. Your 3am wake-ups kept happening anyway.

The dread shows up Sunday afternoon. The week ahead is a stack of overlapping responsibilities: the deliverable due Tuesday, the case or rounds or briefing Wednesday, the conversation with your boss about whether you can keep this pace, your kid’s school project that needs poster board, the school conference Thursday afternoon you might have to do from your car, the charity gala Friday night you’re supposed to attend with the perfect face on. You’ve been keeping all of it in your head because the second you try to put it on a calendar you see there isn’t enough time for any of it. You move the pieces around until midnight, and you wake at 3am to keep moving them.

What you haven’t admitted yet, even to yourself, is how scared you are. You’re scared you’re going to burn through the career you spent fifteen years building. You’re scared your kids are going to remember the impatient version of you. You’re scared you’re going to keep doing this until your body forces you to stop.