Twenty-five years of pediatric clinical practice. NIH-funded research. The PICU. And a nervous system I have been learning to regulate, again and again, through every age and stage of raising my own children. I now teach parents from that hard-won wisdom.
I had kept dying children alive in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit. I had managed ventilated infants through transplant at Seattle Children's. I had been first responder to pediatric codes. I had published NIH-funded research and clinical trials on the pathophysiology of the most fragile children on earth.
I trained at the University of Pennsylvania, earned my doctorate at the University of Washington, and completed my post-doctoral fellowship there on an NIH training grant. I was awarded my own pharmaceutical research grant straight out of my doctorate. I had a full ride through my PhD.
I was, by every measurable standard, one of the most qualified people in any room I walked into.
And then I had my first baby.
"All of that training. All of those credentials. And I had no category for what was happening to me."
He nursed every ninety minutes around the clock for six months. He had a tongue tie that no one caught — but that was almost beside the point. Because even without it, even with a perfect latch and a textbook baby, this season would have brought me to my knees.
I was exhausted in a way I had no category for. My clothes were dirty. They smelled. My partner would come home 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. My body knew what it needed before my training had a name for it.
I felt out of my depth in a way I had never experienced. Some days it felt like failure. Most days it just felt like confusion, and exhaustion, and the particular loneliness of struggling with something you're not supposed to struggle with.
I was alone with that. And it doesn't have to be that way.
Her baby was inconsolable. She was inconsolable. And somewhere in the middle of that call — without thinking, without planning — I noticed what I was doing.
I was rocking. Slowly. Breathing in a particular way. Grounding myself, settling my own nervous system, finding my center — and my voice was carrying it. The cadence of my speech slowed. The tone shifted. Something in me became still.
And she grabbed onto it.
Not because I fixed anything. Not because I gave her the right answer or the perfect technique. But because my nervous system was steady enough that hers could borrow it. Just long enough to find her own ground. Just long enough to turn back to her baby from a different place.
That was the moment I understood what I had been building without knowing I was building it.
Years later, with my boys older — toddler years, early school years — I found myself on a different floor. There were moments when I could feel myself beginning to spiral. When the noise or the conflict or the sheer relentlessness of it was pulling me somewhere I didn't want to go.
I learned to put myself in timeout. Literally. I would excuse myself, go to the bathroom, sit on the floor, and do what I now teach: feel my body, clear it, come back.
Sometimes I didn't make it in time. Sometimes I became what my boys and I came to call Scary Mama — a name I gave it myself, so they knew I recognized its impact. That I wasn't pretending it hadn't happened. That the adult in the room was also learning.
Some of the most important moments in our relationship happened on that floor — all of us, together, after things had gotten to be too much. The tears, the holding, the coming back to each other. Me telling them it is not okay for me to yell, that I am still learning how to let people know what I need, that it takes practice. A lot of practice.
This is not a framework I developed and then stood above. It is something I live. The same tools I give you are the ones I still reach for — whether your child is six weeks old or eight years old.
It came from noticing my own wildly dysregulated moments, and from the bathroom floor — time and time again. It came from a phone call with a mother whose baby was crying. It came from years of my own emotional excavation and the hard-won understanding of what it actually takes to regulate a nervous system that has been surviving instead of living.
ZEN stands for Zero Emotional Noise. It does not mean zero emotion. It means nothing unspoken, unresolved, or tense in your system that your child has to work around in order to be with you.
This is not philosophy. This is physiology. And I have the clinical research, the twenty-five years of pediatric practice, and the personal reckoning to prove it.
Before you respond to your child, pause and ask: what is my ZEN right now? Is there tension sitting underneath this moment — something that needs to be acknowledged, named, or briefly cleared? That pause — and what you do inside it — is the work.
The one who leads the room at work. Who is credentialed and capable and used to being the most competent person in any situation she walks into. Who is now at home — with a newborn who won't settle, or a seven-year-old whose teacher just called — and completely undone by it.
She is in tears and she doesn't know why. She is angry with herself for struggling. She is alone with it — because how do you tell anyone that the thing you wanted more than almost anything is bringing you to your knees?
She doesn't need to be fixed. She doesn't need more information. She doesn't need another book or another app or another person telling her what she's doing wrong.
She needs someone whose nervous system is already steady. Someone who has been on the floor — again and again, across every age and stage — and gotten back up. Someone who can hold the space so she can find her own ground, and turn back to her child from a different place.
That is what this work is. That is what I do.
"This is not something you learn and then implement. Some days you do well. Some days you do not. Having the grace to apologize to those caught in your learning trajectory — and to try again in each of the unfolding moments of your life — is true courage."
That is the Practice."You don't need to be perfect. Just present."