Mom burnout with three young kids, working too much, and a bad job

When I was forty years old my life changed forever. My husband was offered a new job as a division chief with a promotion to full professor at a medical school in another city and state. At this time in our marriage, his career seemed more important than mine (always a delicate issue for lots of working moms. We agreed this was a great move for us - mostly for him - since I was trying hard to accomplish just being a good enough mom to three kids while working full-time. My third child was born in February before we moved in June. And boy, was I unprepared for the changes that were to come.

This relocation created a mountain of new tasks for me as a mother - finding a new home, a new school, and a new nanny. We all know this as the emotional or cognitive burden of motherhood. Luckily, we found the perfect house with a big backyard that was affordable. I continued to work at finding a nanny and deciding on a new school for the kids. The public elementary school in our new neighborhood was large, average, and uninviting. I visited several private schools and found one nearby that was known for having great teachers.

I will admit that I was fortunate that we could afford to hire a nanny. Most working mothers worry a great deal about the costs of childcare. Nevertheless, finding the right nanny took more effort than I anticipated. I used a service to narrow down choices and obtain background checks. After checking references and conducting six candidate interviews, I decided on the young wife of a pharmacy student. She had years of babysitting experience and was eager to earn money for their living expenses while her husband was in school. Tammy had a sweet personality and terrific energy. 

I began work in the fall just as the children’s school year got underway and immediately found my new neonatology job to be a hot mess. My boss was a Southern “good old boy.” He was extremely old-fashioned and believed that doctors should make rounds daily for a month at a time (no joke). So, like the other doctors in my new group, I did just that. I kissed my kids goodbye and trudged in to care for sick and premature infants every day - thirty days in a row - for many months those first few years. It felt like being on submarine duty. Displeasure with your schedule and your boss is a key factor towards developing burnout.

At work I was continually confronted with a lousy secretary and a horrendous call schedule. I labored through many ten-hour days in the NICU and took night calls in the hospital twice each week. In contrast, my husband took calls from home and went into the hospital for rounds every third weekend. Fortunately, he was at home to care for our children on the weekends while I worked.

A truly unforgettable moment occurred later that first fall. My older daughter was four and a half years old, sick with a fever and ear infection and I tucked her into bed that morning. After talking with Tammy and giving her instructions for acetaminophen and the antibiotic, I plodded upstairs to say goodbye to Anne. After explaining that I had to go to work and that Tammy would take care of her today, she asked me, “Why do you have to leave?” I replied that I had to go into the hospital and take care of sick babies. She looked at me point-blank, frowned, and said, “But I’m a sick baby, too.”

I paused, pulled that imaginary knife out of my chest, hugged and kissed her, told her that I loved her, and went in to work. This singular episode described how overwhelmed I felt working full-time in this new environment. I felt like a bad mother - horrible, guilty, and angry, and I continued to feel these feelings often throughout our first few years in this new location, yet I continued to work full-time. Maternal guilt and time spent away from children contribute greatly to working mom burnout.

Breastfeeding my third child went flawlessly for one year, despite the prolonged eight-month period of pumping breastmilk once back at work. Snide comments about my efforts to pump breastmilk at work were irritating and the NICU provided little privacy for pumping, but I desperately wanted to continue nursing my youngest, and last child, for as long as possible. It was reassuring to me that she was an easy baby and toddler throughout all the turmoil brought on by my new job.

Unfortunately, the clinical patient care NICU schedule improved minimally throughout my first three years there. Unforgettable is this one conversation with my boss, describing to him how troublesome it was to find a nanny who could work more than fifty hours a week. He smiled at me and said, “Well then, you need to hire a weekend nanny, too.” Was he kidding, or just heartless? My dislike of that boss grew immensely.

While managing all these work-realted challenges, Anne began to tell me about her fears of robbers and burglars. At five years of age, she started biting her nails and wetting the bed. My son was having a tough school transition, from Montessori to traditional, and displaying socially immature and disruptive behaviors. I was too overwhelmed to recognize that what each child needed during that time was my reassurance and me - more mommy time. I was just trying to stay afloat professionally, and I failed to realize exactly how to help my children. At that time, I had no real sense of balance between practicing medicine and motherhood. I became emotionally overwhelmed as so many working mothers do when burned out.

I was not promoted to associate professor for two years, and I greatly resented not being promoted during my first year there. Once my promotion came through it did not feel like much of an accomplishment. Instead, it felt like an insulting delay in my academic promotion. My personal work ethic, typical hyper-responsibility, and tendency toward perfectionism, set me up for continuing disappointments in my new job. My husband continued to work less diligently than I did. To me, his job seemed effortless. I was becoming pessimistic and cynical about my work and my marriage, a sure sign of burnout.

Many of us have doubts about our ability to be a good mother, especially with anxiety from changes in work and home routines after having a baby, and many of us have an unrealistic need to be a perfect mom. Mom guilt is a critical part of working mother burnout. I had always been a high-energy person, but now I felt burdened by all these stressors, and I began to slowly fall apart. In my mind, life was horrible, and everything became a chore. I felt as if I was no longer making a difference, and I found myself in one continual dark mood. I did not eat or sleep much. When I finally fell asleep late at night, I woke up early at 4am or 5am with my mind buzzing about research papers, meetings, and call schedules. It was an incessant jumble of negative thinking that contributed to my sense of failure.  

After describing my bewildering and gloomy feelings to a colleague at work, she recommended a psychiatrist. He diagnosed not only burnout, but also depression and prescribed an antidepressant. Thankfully, medication helped, and along with his weekly cognitive behavioral therapy sessions, my depression began to slowly lift. Over the next six months, I began to feel better.

This story exemplifies the crucial features of burnout:

• physical exhaustion

• emotional overwhelm

• personal distancing from your work, work colleagues, partner, and friends.

• feeling that you no longer make a difference

• feeling like you are a failure

This is a podcast I recorded in March 2026 about this topic. You might enjoy this.

Next week: The best ways to recover from mom burnout.

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