The other day, I was sitting with an acquaintance when, unaware that I had closed my practice, he began telling a story about a frustrating interaction with a group of women from high school, blaming their petty actions on the fact that they were “stay-at-home-moms with nothing better to do.” Enraged? Yes. Surprised? Sadly, not at all. This has been one of countless similar interactions I have experienced since my career change. A week prior, someone else asked me how my life as a “woman of leisure” was going. Most often, people meet my news with silence, as if I’ve told them that someone I love has died, and they simply don’t know how to respond.

My career didn’t die. I didn’t give up or fail. The baby didn’t smother the fire inside me that made me interesting and passionate and motivated. If this person only knew. If he only knew what it was like to be so busy, not for eight hours a day but for twenty-four, that you don’t know when you’ll have a chance to take a shower again. That you can’t remember the last time you slept through the night, as though you were a one-person crisis line who will spend every moment of your life onward on-call. That every conversation during your child’s waking hours is forced into half of your consciousness and hacked up with pauses so that you can consistently rescue this little person from choking or being electrocuted or otherwise endangered. That a solo trip to the grocery store feels as spacious and relaxing as a trip to the spa.

If only he knew the organization, patience, and mindfulness this work required. That any trip out of the house requires meticulous, multi-step planning and that making time for anything beyond mothering has to be done with the greatest of intention and motivation. That we are pushed beyond the limits of our tolerance over and over with no option of escape. That everything, down to the most basic human operations of eating and sleeping and putting on socks, are so often met with forceful resistance, sometimes for hours a day. That our old tools of reason and boundaries are useless; patience and compassion and surrender are all we have left. If only he knew the level of stillness parents are required to find in their minds in order to hear the nuanced communication of their children who can’t express themselves in any other way.

If he only knew the physical and emotional tax of feeding a person from your own body. Of, each day, holding the person you love most in the world as they suffer in some way, powerless to communicate what’s wrong. Of remaining physiologically connected after birth, so much so that the sound of this person’s tears disregulate the very core of your being, sending you into a preverbal survival mode yourself. In all my work in the mental health, medical, and educational fields, never before have I been responsible for someone at such a high risk of danger. Never before have I been so intimately connected to another’s joys and suffering, triumphs and struggles. And never before have I had to meet such a massive challenge without guidance or supervision, and, much of the time, without assistance or relief. Without sick days or paycheck, and all too often without acknowledgement and respect from those in the outside world.

But I knew I would be met with all this. I knew it and feared it so deeply that it became my primary motivation for continuing my old life, my old identity. To have a business card to hand people as proof of my validity. And now as a SAHM, I reach out, extending only what can be read in the lines on my hand: the subtle, nearly invisible story of what I do, a dusty long-handed narrative in a world of brightly glowing tweets and elevator pitches.

Of course, he also doesn’t understand what makes motherhood the most fulfilling of any incarnation of my career. That the minute my son was born, I could never again waste the precious time I had pursuing work out of anything but passion or necessity. That the world began to glow a thousand shades more vibrant in even the dullest of moments mothering, illuminating the deepest corners of the world, of human experience, of my own being. That its simplicity—its giggles and cries and tiny milestones—encompass the meaning of existence I had spent years traveling the world to find. That I am growing at a rate I never thought possible—growing in my spirituality, in my patience, in my understanding of love and suffering and happiness, in my connection to myself.

We are creating and raising human beings—feeding them and teaching them and protecting them and writing the dialogue that will become their inner voices, the voices that will likely shape their actions, thereby shaping the future of the world. We are practicing love and connection and forgiveness and empathy in their most naked forms, practicing them in ways that will leave a deeper impression than in any other context imaginable. Our triumphs and our mistakes carry more weight and potency than they ever have before. What could mean more than this?

I wish he could see that we all have our journeys to our greatest selves—our paths to both bettering the world and to sinking deeply into all life has to offer us. I trust you to walk your path, to find your way to your highest self. Trust us to walk ours, knowing its depths and authenticity and power, however little of it you can see from outside of our homes.