May came in like December.
You know how December gets – the end of year chaos, everything converging at once, the calendar somehow both completely full and completely out of your control? May has become that for me. The end of the school year, sports seasons finishing, trip planning, everyone trying to squeeze everything in before summer. The intensity of it rivals any December I’ve had in medicine.
This year was no exception.
Softball games and lacrosse games for my two high school kids. A solo flight to another state to help my oldest daughter pack up her freshman dorm and move home (my husband couldn’t get off work, so it was just the two of us). An international trip to plan for this summer – the first one I’m taking with my kids – coordinating logistics for myself, two children, and my mom, entirely on my own. A lecture to internal medicine residents that needed actual preparation. Book club. Dinners. Things that mattered.
It was a lot. It was genuinely a lot.
I want to be honest about what this month wasn’t.
I am not exercising as consistently as I’d like. We are eating out more than I’d prefer. I did not do everything perfectly.
But here’s what I keep coming back to:
Every single clinic day this month – through the games, the solo trip to move my daughter, the lecture prep, the planning, all of it – I closed my charts before I left.
And because of that, I was actually there for all the rest of it.
Not physically present while mentally still at work. Actually there.
I’ve been thinking about what’s different now compared to previous seasons like this.
A few years ago, a month like May would have flattened me. The accumulation of it – the scheduling, the extra work, the travel, the emotional weight of a daughter finishing her first year of college – would have felt like something happening to me. Something I had to survive.
This month felt different.
Not easier. The circumstances were objectively harder in some ways. But my relationship to them was different.
I chose all of this. The games, the trip to move her, the lecture, the book club, the dinners – none of it was obligation. All of it was something I wanted to be part of. And because I wasn’t carrying the weight of unfinished work into every part of my day, I actually had the bandwidth to experience it that way.
There’s a concept I come back to often in my own life and in my coaching work – the difference between things you have to do and things you choose to do. The circumstances can be identical. The thought you bring to them is what determines everything.
I’m leaving soon on an international trip with two of my kids and my mom.
And here’s what I notice when I think about it:
I’m not excited to escape.
I’m excited to go.
There’s a difference that used to feel abstract to me and now feels completely real. Escape means running from something still unfinished. Going means stepping into something you’ve actually made room for.
My work is finished. My charts are closed. My kids’ seasons are wrapping up. My daughter is home. The lecture is done.
I get to go fully.
Not as a reward I barely squeezed out of a life that was running me. As something I built space for – imperfectly, with more takeout than I’d like, without as many workouts as I planned – but intentionally.
That’s what this work actually creates.
Not a perfect life. A present one.
If you’re in your own version of Maycember right now – the accumulation of it all feeling like too much – I want you to know that it doesn’t have to feel like survival.
That shift doesn’t happen by doing less. It happens by thinking differently about what you’re doing.
That’s exactly what I help physician moms work on.
Free guide here.
Or if you’re ready to talk, there’s a link to book a free consultation here.
https://calendly.com/mindfuldocmom/free-45-minute-mini-session
