Counseling for Professional Moms in nashville, Tennessee

It’s a Wednesday evening and you walked in the door fifteen minutes ago from the kind of day you can’t leave at the door. The patient safety briefing went sideways. The chief medical officer wants three things from you before tomorrow’s board meeting. The staffing crisis at the affiliate hospital is still escalating. Your daughter is on the kitchen floor with her math homework and she asks you for help with a problem, the third time she’s asked tonight. You snap at her about how she needs to try it herself, and her face does the thing it does when she’s about to cry but won’t, and you walk past her toward the kitchen to start dinner so you don’t have to see it.

You’re going to be on a call at 9pm with the regional VP. You’re flying to Dallas Friday for the leadership offsite. You’re back Sunday afternoon in time for dinner and bedtime and not much else. The work has to be done because the work is patients and people and a system that doesn’t stop running when you need to be a parent.

You did this because you wanted the career, and you still want the career. You worked your way up. The MD or the MBA or the bar. The residency or the consulting years or the senior administrator track. The title that took fifteen years to earn. You learned to be three steps ahead, to make decisions that affect hundreds of people without losing sleep over them. 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 a math problem you should have helped with, you answer your partner’s question about the weekend 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 department head meetings. 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 and laughed at yourself for missing the diagnosis. 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 briefing you have to give Tuesday, the regulatory deadline Wednesday, the staffing meeting that’s going to be hard, the conversation with your boss about whether you can keep this pace, your kid’s school project that needs poster board, the parent-teacher conference Thursday afternoon you might have to do from your car. 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.