It was late fall, 2019 when I had a complete unraveling.

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I had been a night shift nurse for almost 7 years and had been working in the ER for the last 4. As an ER nurse, I knew I was made to help people. I love both the science + art of nursing and I am really good at it. But as you can imagine, life as a nurse in the ER is stressful. And that would’ve been fine, had that been my only stress at the time but that wasn’t the case…

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• My family recently moved across the state with a 2 year old and 3 month old.

• I was working 2 jobs opposite shifts of my husband in order to make ends meet.

• My 2 year old fell and broke his arm just weeks before our move.

• My youngest son required advanced testing for a kidney issue at Children’s Hospital at 6 months old

• New town means new doctors, new grocery store, new church…All of our old patterns and comforts were gone, not to mention I had to unpack and set up our new home which took the whole first year.

• As a young family we needed to navigate this new normal with next to no social support.

• Oh and did I mention I was a millennial mom of 2 littles? I did? Okay just checking

 

As a working mom of young kids, it’s often joked that we run on caffeine + stress hormones. It’s just what we have to do to survive. But while this may be common, deep down I knew it wasn’t normal and it was certainly less than ideal. However I felt trapped in this chaotic mess that was my life, like I was running on this hamster wheel that just kept spinning faster and faster as I tried to keep up. Afraid that if I slowed down, even for a moment, I would miss a step, fall flat on my face, and tumble along in that wheel that just wouldn’t stop.

 

And this particular shift in the ER, in the fall of 2019, shortly after my son’s first birthday, something happened that changed my perspective forever. I was about halfway through my shift, running non-stop as usual, when I got up to go to the med room and I felt my heart begin to race. And as I stood there in the med room trying to catch my breath, my heart adding extra beats inside my chest, like a dancer without rhythm, I truly thought I was going to have some sort of cardiac event and my first thought was, “well, at least I’m in the ER.” At that moment I knew something had to change but I didn’t know what or how. I felt like the only mother who couldn’t do it all.

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Fortunately nothing happened that night and I didn’t have to check into my own ER, but as I nearly collapsed into bed that morning to get my short 4 hours of sleep before my husband left for work and passed the kids off to me, I thought to myself “it’s not supposed to be this way.”

 

As a nurse I knew I was stressed, but in that moment I realized I was never taught how to balance all the pieces of being a working mom in today’s world and as a result I found myself in burnout, unable to show up as the wife, mom and woman I wanted to be.

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As I went back to the ER for my shift that next night, the same sights, sounds and stresses whizzed around me but I began to see my patients with a new perspective and I began seeing a pattern that had been there all along. Men and women presenting to the ER with real symptoms, yet after all of our typical testing came back normal they would leave feeling frustrated without an answer or simply with a prescription to manage their symptoms until their next ER visit. That is when I decided to search for a better way.

 

We all know how to manage stress- exercise, eat a balanced diet, get good sleep- but what happens if you feel stuck and just can’t? What happens if you reach a level of burnout where you’re just bouncing from stress to stress unsure how to even start to break the cycle? It was this moment of unraveling that gave me the very pieces I needed to heal my unbalanced stress response and design a life I loved, one with joy and purpose. Guided by my love of science and research and my nearly 10 years of acute nursing practice, I took a unique approach in regulating my nervous system and stress response which finally gave me the capacity to begin to address some of the deeper patterns which led me to that day and ultimately I found a level of healing I didn’t even know I needed.

 

Today my work is no longer full time in the ER. My work is instead one-on-one with fellow millennial mothers who can sense the coming of or perhaps have already endured their own unraveling. Those women who are trying to balance it all and now have persistent ongoing symptoms of brain fog, irritability, hormone disruptions, fatigue and are always running on caffeine and stress hormones, knowing this may be common but it’s certainly not normal or ideal.  And those that perhaps have even wondered how long it would take to get to the ER knowing that’s the likely destination should things continue this way. If this sounds familiar, first of all I’m sorry. And second of all, I’m glad you’re here because you’re right, it doesn’t have to be this way and I can show you a better way.