I had kept dying children alive in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit. I had managed ventilated infants through bone marrow transplant at Seattle Children's. I had been first responder to pediatric codes. I had published NIH-funded research on cytokine response and intestinal barrier function in the most medically fragile children on earth.
I was, by every measurable standard, one of the most qualified people in the room.
And then I had my first baby.
He nursed every ninety minutes around the clock for six months. He had a tongue tie — something I now help parents identify and navigate every single day in my private practice, because I know exactly what it costs a family when no one catches it. But then? No one caught it. No one helped. No one even named what was happening.
I was exhausted in a way I had no category for. My partner would come home from work and find me in the bath — sometimes for the fifth time that day — because it was the only thing that helped. I didn't know it then. But I was regulating my own nervous system by pure survival instinct.
I felt like a failure as a mother. And because I felt like a failure as a mother — with all of my credentials, all of my clinical experience — I felt like a failure as a person. I was alone with that. And I was ashamed of it.
That is exactly who I built this for. The woman I was. The one who leads the room at work and is now on the floor at home, in love with her baby, and completely undone by it.
She doesn't need to be fixed. She doesn't need more information. She needs someone whose nervous system is already steady — someone who has been on the floor and got up.
That is what this work is. That is what I do.