Something had broken.
Postpartum with my first child, I didn't fit anywhere. Not at home. Not at the parenting groups where everyone else seemed to know what they were doing. Not at work, where I was supposed to be grateful, capable, fine.
I had no instinct. My child felt like a series of tasks I could never complete. I didn't recognize myself. And I did what high-capacity women do when something isn't working — I tried harder. I tried to locate the person I'd been before and pull her back into the picture. The pieces were all still there. They just wouldn't go back the way they were.
What I didn't know then: they weren't supposed to.
Matrescence — the developmental process of becoming a mother — is as profound and disorienting as adolescence. It dissolves you. It reassembles you. It produces someone new from everything you already were. It has a name, a mechanism, a body of research behind it. Nobody had told me any of that. I was just sitting with the rubble, wondering what was wrong with me.
Nothing was wrong with me. The picture was just changing.
Not from fixing myself — from finding out I wasn't alone. When I started learning that other new mothers at my company were struggling in the same quiet, unnameable ways, something shifted. The problem wasn't personal. It was structural. And I could do something about that.
I started advocating internally. Pushing for better support, better policy, better recognition of what mothers were actually navigating. It wasn't a grand pivot. It was just the first time since becoming a mother that I felt like myself — not the old self, but someone continuous with her. Someone with the same drive, the same values, the same refusal to accept that this was just how it had to be.
I hadn't lost myself. I had become someone I didn't recognize yet. And the work — the real work — was learning to see her clearly.
Not from having it figured out. From having been in the rubble and found a way to see the new picture forming.
I'm an evidence-based, ICF-certified coach at the PCC level, trained at Fielding Graduate University with over 500 hours of coaching experience. My methodology draws on ACT (Acceptance & Commitment Therapy), somatic awareness, parts work, and behavioral science — not because they're fashionable, but because they're what actually works inside real constraints, for real people, in real lives.
I've coached physicians, lawyers, founders, researchers, directors. Women who are high-functioning and quietly dissolving. Women who are trying to force the old picture back together and exhausting themselves doing it.
I know that feeling. I also know what's on the other side of it.
Motherhood doesn't pause you and resume you. It changes you at a cellular level — your identity, your nervous system, your relationship to yourself and everything you've built. That's not a problem to fix. It's a process to move through.
You don't need to go back. You don't need to become someone new. You need to learn to recognize who's forming in the mirror now — and find the steadiness to keep placing pieces while you can't yet see the whole picture.
That's what this work is.