Slams laptop shut. Indefinitely.

You read that right. I’m not going back to corporate America. Maybe for a few years once the kids are in school. Maybe never. Time will tell.

This is something our family has been quietly thinking about for months. In April, I was promoted to what many would call my dream job. In June, I was invited to speak as a panelist at the Meta office in New York City for a paid media conference focusing on the healthcare vertical. From the outside, it looked like everything was falling perfectly into place. The career was thriving. The trajectory was clear. The résumé was impressive.

But on the inside, I was unraveling.

I wasn’t the mom I wanted to be. Our house was a train wreck. Laundry was never done. Nothing was stocked. We never had food. I was juggling 100 to 200 emails a day, stacked on top of back to back meetings that never seemed to end. I felt constantly behind at work and even more behind at home. No matter how hard I tried, I was failing somewhere every single day.

Then life forced me to stop.

When I was hospitalized for emergency surgery, I asked Kyle to bring my laptop from home with him while he packed our things. He didn’t. At the time, I didn’t think much of it. Now I know it was intentional.

Those seven days were the first time in my entire career that I didn’t check my email. I didn’t answer a Teams message. I didn’t feel the constant pull of notifications demanding my attention. I was completely unplugged, and in that space, something shifted.

For the first time, I could see clearly.

I didn’t want to work until my inbox was empty. I wanted to pick up my kids at 4 p.m. I wanted evenings without screens, without half listening while responding to messages, without mentally being somewhere else. I wanted presence. I wanted peace.

And even though it made absolutely no financial sense, one night Kyle looked at me and said, “Why don’t you quit?”

He told me he would rather our family be happy than keep my income. Then he said something that stopped me in my tracks.

“What if you measured your success by how happy our family is instead of how successful your career looks?”

At first, I snapped back. Of course I wasn’t leaving my career behind. I had worked too hard. I had sacrificed too much. This was everything I was told to want.

But as the weeks went on, the idea became less terrifying and more freeing. I started to really examine my priorities. I realized I had been so focused on building a good life for my kids that I forgot to give them good days.

So I left.

I left corporate America to be a mom.

And truthfully, it’s one of the scariest things I’ve ever done. Walking away from a career I worked incredibly hard to build was not easy, and I don’t take that lightly. There is no doubt in my mind that being a full time mom will be harder than being a full time marketing director. The work is invisible. The days are long. There are no promotions or performance reviews to validate your effort.

But I’m ready for the challenge.

This next chapter looks different. Slower. More intentional. Less polished and more present. I’ll still create. I’ll still contribute. But my primary role now is here, in the thick of motherhood, building a home and a life that feels aligned with what matters most to us right now.

So if you’ve been feeling this pull too, questioning the pace, the pressure, the constant demand to do it all, I hope you’ll stick around. I’ll be documenting my life as a modern trad wife, the beauty, the mess, the growth, and the uncertainty.