Counseling for Professional Moms in Raleigh, North Carolina

It’s a Wednesday morning and you’ve slept five hours, again, because the proposal you have to submit Thursday wouldn’t leave your head between 1am and 3am. Your daughter is in the kitchen asking you for the third time when she gets picked up from soccer, and you snap at her over a logistics question you should have answered the first time. She gets quiet, you apologize, she nods. You get her in the car. By the time you pull into the parking lot you remember the answer was 4pm. You’re seven minutes late, which is fine, and the assistant brings her in. You drive to work and sit at your desk with the kind of exhaustion that makes it hard to read the first email, and you wonder, for the third time this month, when you got this tired.

It’s the meeting where someone asked for your input and you asked them to repeat the question. You heard it the first time. Your brain just hadn’t kept up. It’s the email you re-read three times because you were too tired to focus. It’s the proposal you submitted last week that needed three more rounds of revisions than it should have. The work that used to take you two hours now takes four, and the work that used to be good is now mostly fine.

The same fatigue that’s slowing you down at work is making you short at home. You snap at your kid over a glass of milk you barely registered hitting the floor. 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.

You’re not used to feeling like this. You got through grad school, the postdoc, the publications, the senior role at the lab or the firm or the startup. You learned to stay three steps ahead, to keep solving the problem in the background while you handled whatever was in front of you. That was the skill, and it still is, except you’re maintaining it on five hours of sleep and a coffee you finished before 10am.

Your body’s sending signals you don’t want to read. The headaches arrive on Sundays. You catch yourself unclenching your jaw while you’re staring at your laptop. 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 deadlines: the work due Monday that you haven’t started, your kid’s school project that needs poster board and a glue stick, the conference talk you haven’t outlined, the meeting you’re supposed to chair Wednesday, the school conference Thursday. 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 burning out the part of yourself you built your career on. 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.