The Therapist’s Wife | Your Way Therapy

Self-Care Saturday

Sat, 20 Jun 2026 10:00:01 GMT

Self-Care Is Staying in Bed Until You Can't Anymore

It rained last Saturday.

I drive a school bus all week. I am surrounded by other people's children, and I genuinely love it, and them - truly, it's not just something I say. But by Friday I am done. Done with people. Done with noise. Done with being responsible for small humans who are not mine, and ready to avoid it all until Monday.

I love rain. When the sky goes dark, the sound hits the roof, and something in my body just... exhales.

I always cross my fingers and hope for a thunderstorm to come with it. I don't know exactly why, except that I do — the noise, the jump scare, the brief violence of it, and then the calm that follows. After the storm comes the rainbow. And that feels like a metaphor for so much of my life. The chaos first. Then the quiet. Then something worth seeing.

But I'll take the rain. The rain means I'm going to sleep well, and some weeks that alone is enough.

In my house, rain is basically a permission slip. Permission to step back. To slow down. To nap. To hide away a little longer.

This particular Saturday, I used it.

By 6am, the littles had already tried and abandoned about a dozen different foods — and I'm fairly sure the top ingredient in all of them was sugar. I'm also fairly sure my snack and reward candy had been severely depleted. They had moved on to a full diplomatic standoff over what to watch on TV. In my house, no one is ever satisfied with just one screen playing. There is always negotiation. There is always someone who feels wronged. There is always a kindle involved, and Jason's 3 screens are nothing compared to the number they get up and running simultaneously.

I could only imagine the chaos on the other side of the door. I could hear all of it from my bed. Where I was staying.

The dogs had already been out, which means someone had neglected to catch them coming back in with muddy paws, which means there was already a trail of evidence across the floor. We keep beach towels at every door for exactly this reason. We use them approximately 40% of the time. The other 60% is mud and optimism and avoidance.

Sure enough, the dogs and their muddy paws found me hiding out, and Tessa and Everett weren't far behind.

They took turns coming in to cuddle, which is the part of Saturdays I will never give up no matter how old they get. Tessa brought her chaos and her big heart and approximately fourteen opinions about cats she will never be allowed to have because I am allergic, and she knows this, and she does not care. Everett brought himself and his need to be tickled and the energy of a small engineer who has already mentally redesigned three things in the house before 9am.

If I stayed there long enough, I might get some cuddle time with Gena or Bella too, though they can outsleep the rest of us, so those cuddles might not come until tonight.Or tomorrow. There's a specific kind of emptiness that comes with waiting for my big girls to want affection. The littles climb on me, need me, drag me back into the world whether I'm ready or not. But the older ones are already halfway out the door in their heads. They don't always want to be held. And I can see the countdown to when they're too far away to climb into bed and tell me what they're thinking.

So I stayed a little longer.

Just in case.

When I finally emerged, I saw all the things I'd been successfully avoiding. The table covered in clutter. Dishes stacked because it's always somehow someone else's turn. Eighty-five pairs of shoes by the front door. Someone's pajamas in the guest bathroom because getting dressed in your own room is apparently very hard. Stacks of laundry on the stairs I'd been asking them to move all week. Clumps of dog hair everywhere - courtesy of Tater Tot, who I fell in love with as a 7-pound puppy and who has since grown into an 80-pound monster who still believes she is a lap dog and is deeply offended when she doesn't fit.

I read for a while. Worked on the website. Thought about this blog that had been sitting in the back of my head.

We played Minecraft. I am useless at Minecraft, so my job is always either building walls or digging holes. I've become a master at both. It looks like nothing from the outside. From the inside it's just time together, same space, no pressure.

That counts.

Those moments are the ones they will remember.

Jason was in his office, behind three screens and a closed door. He had nine clients that day - nine. Back to back, for most of our Saturday. The man who spends his days, and nights, and weekends helping people sort through their hardest stuff was doing exactly that, while I managed everything else.

And the kids? Every hour that passed, they inched a little closer to the ledge of my sanity — and probably their own. How many more clients does dad have? When is he done? Is he almost done? Each of them waiting for their own reasons. Their daddy-do lists, their requests, their need for him to just step back into the room. A whole day of him being so close, and so far away.

I asked the kids to clean up the table at least fifteen times throughout the day.

I counted.

The table remained exactly as it was.

This is one of those things I've made peace with and also have absolutely not made peace with. We have four kids, most of whom have ADHD, and two of whom are on the autism spectrum. Cleaning, following tasks, starting and finishing things - that's genuinely hard for them. It's not attitude. It's not laziness. It's wiring. Lots of good stuff tucked away up there. It just gets lost, broken, scrambled, forgotten.

The collective Kelley brain lives outside our heads, laid out for the world to see - on the floor, the table, in the sink, to be worked out in our own unique way.

Does this frustrate me? It does.

A lot? Absolutely.

Here's the part of self-care nobody talks about: most of the time it's not bubble baths and boundaries, or candles and quiet.

Sometimes it's staying in bed because the alternative is standing in the kitchen asking people to do things they will not do, and you have zero capacity for that right then because that ledge of sanity they've been chipping away at all day is ready to crumble beneath your feet.

Sometimes rest and avoidance look identical, and you're not entirely sure which one you're doing. And that's okay.

Sometimes it's just existing. Small as that sounds.

By evening the rain was still going. The mess was still there. Jason stepped out of his office looking like a man who had held space for nine people's hardest feelings and needed someone to not need anything from him for a little while.

Unfortunately, everyone outside that office needed things from him. He's dad. He's husband. He builds Legos and wrestles and carries a sleeping 9-year-old up the stairs. He props me up, mediates, explains. He understands more than we give him credit for - because to the people outside his office, he's just been sitting in there talking. They don't see what it costs.

The second his last session ends, he doesn't get the break I took that morning. He steps out of one room as the therapist and into the next as dad and husband, in a single step.

He's my Clark Kent. The kids' Superman.

Neither of us got the Saturday we needed.

But we got each other at the end of it. That counts too.

Self-care Saturday isn't the Instagram graphic. It's not showing up in anyone's Facebook highlight reel either.

It looks like beach towels piled at three doors. Minecraft in bed. A table nobody cleaned. A husband behind three screens and a closed door. Kids inching toward the ledge all day, waiting for dad. It looks like surviving the week and giving yourself one day to not perform being okay.

It's those 10 minutes sometime around midnight when we greedily grab each other and just be.

That's enough. It's more than enough.

— Holly | Life Behind the Screens

Mindset Maintenance

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 10:00:00 GMT

You Find It Where You Find It

It was a Monday night in a parking lot, 10 easy minutes from home.

Gena and I were waiting for Tessa to finish her clarinet lesson. I was, as is normal these days, on my laptop — checking our social media (bane of my existence) and working on my next blog. What turned out to be this blog, but very much was not what you are currently reading. That blog, one you will eventually read, was more about me, marriage, life, things I think I've overcome — or at least things I think I have something important enough to write about. But I wasn't feeling it. Not that night.

I've spent the first posts of this blog introducing myself and my family. Introducing Jason. Introducing our dynamic, our marriage, our failures, our views. But I really hope I have more to say than just the things I've learned about marriage. I hope I am so much more than what I've boiled myself down to so far.

So there I am. There she is. We're waiting. Just another night.

Then Gena pulled out her phone, connected to the car, and put on High School Musical — the original, the ridiculous one from 2006, the one that came out before she was born, before Bella was born. The one I saw for the first time while pregnant with Bella, while Jason was gone on his first deployment, when I was alone and scared and completely new.

But tonight, Gena and I just sat there. Bopping along. Knowing every word. Being completely, unapologetically dumb about this goofy old movie for 10 minutes of our evening. And I forgot that I was stressing about social media and blogs and the house I know is still a mess because I just got over strep throat. I was just smiling at my beautiful, dorky kid — seeing all those old memories and seeing her here now, 15 years old, over the moon because she has her first boyfriend, she made it through her freshman year, she's going to New York for a student leadership conference soon. So many big things. But here we are in this small, simple moment.

That was it. That was the whole thing.

No deep conversation. No breakthrough. No intentional quality time with a capital Q. Just two people in a car who both knew the words to a Disney movie and weren't too cool to sing them. (I promise you, I am never too cool for anything, so no worries there.)

I've been thinking about that ten minutes ever since.

My original plan for this post was a straightforward take on Maintenance Mindset. I'm not going with that writing — but the topic is sticking around. Because what happened in that parking lot? That was maintenance. Just not the kind anyone puts in a self-help book.

Maintenance doesn't always look like what you think it does.

Sometimes it looks like Sunday dishes and folded laundry and the calm that comes after the work. Sometimes it looks like staying in bed on a rainy Saturday because your body just needs to stop. Sometimes it looks like a shower that runs too long because it's the only quiet in a twelve-hour day.

And sometimes it looks like High School Musical in a parking lot on a Monday night.

The small moments that don't cost anything. That happen sideways, when you're not looking for them. That remind you there is joy in here somewhere, under all the logistics and the mess and the getting through it.

There was another moment this week.

One of my bus kids — N — was SO excited when he remembered Bella was coming over that night. Just lit up completely. And I paused and pictured it — Bella walking in, him running to her, her face doing the thing it does around little kids. That whole other version of her that I don't always get to see. The one that lights up like nothing else.

She is so good with kids. Patient and present and genuinely delighted by them in a way that makes them feel it. They don't just feel it — they know it. This girl, who I still very much see as my first baby, the one I will always want to shelter the most. The one I made the most mistakes with. The one I have apologized to the most. The one I wonder — daily — if she will ever fully forgive me for all of it.

This kid who has grown into this beautiful young woman. Someone I realize I need to get to know again and again because she is just blossoming, just becoming. And right now she is responsible for four kids — kids who matter to me, who have fallen completely in love with her — for the next eight days while their parents are deployed. She stepped out of her comfort zone. She's adulting.

I am so proud of my kid.

Now — I don't always like my kids. I'll just say that out loud because I think parents aren't supposed to admit it, but it's true sometimes, and pretending otherwise helps no one. And in full admission that I am very, very far from being a perfect person or parent, I have at some point told each of my kids I don't like them — always with a caveat. I may not like you right now, but I love you. I will always love you. No matter what you do or say, that doesn't change. There is nothing you can do to make that not true — even if right now, I don't like you very much.

Okay. Back to Bella.

We are very different people, and I have spent a lot of years grieving the version of her I imagined instead of seeing the version she actually is. Her choices became my failure, in my story, more times than I want to count. It's one of those lessons you don't learn until you're a parent yourself — that the time we spend trying to make them who we want them to be, instead of helping them grow into who they are supposed to be, is on us. Not them. They have not failed. They are not failures. They are who they set out to be. So much of what we needed them to learn is there at the core. We just don't always see it the way they do — because no matter how hard we try, and no matter how much we may wish, they are not us. They are them.

But imagining her evening with those kids — I felt proud. Genuinely, surprisingly proud.

Some of what I did worked. I don't always see it at home. But it shows up out there in the world, in the way she treats people who need gentleness.

That's not nothing. That's actually everything.

So my story tonight isn't really my story — but it's enough mine to share.

Maintenance isn't always grand. It's not always intentional. It's not always planned. Sometimes it's ten minutes of a Disney movie. Sometimes it's catching a glimpse of your kid being exactly who they're supposed to be, even if it's not who you pictured.

You find it where you find it.

That's enough.

— Holly | Life Behind the Screens

Ask Me A Question

Thu, 04 Jun 2026 09:00:04 GMT

Take your time. They're just family photos. Nothing overly special.

Now tell me what you notice.

I'll tell you what I notice.

I'm not there.

Not in the pizza night. Not in the Christmas with the Snoopy tie. Not at the science fair. Not in any of the ordinary Tuesdays that somehow became the whole of our early years together.

I was there for every single one. I made most of them happen. I was standing three feet away, every time.

I was just the one holding the camera.

I showed these photos to someone who knows my entire story. Who had read every word I'd written about loneliness and military life and the specific kind of invisible that comes from running a household for eighteen years. Someone who, theoretically, knew exactly what to look for.

They needed three passes to see it.

That's not a criticism. That's the point. That's how quiet this kind of alone is. It doesn't announce itself. It just accumulates. In camera rolls and pizza nights and Christmases where everyone is smiling and nobody thinks to turn the camera around.

I never liked being alone.

As a teenager, as a college kid, I stayed as busy as possible because quiet left too much room for my own thoughts and I was not interested in that. I was the person who filled the calendar, who needed the noise, who did not do well with empty space.

Then I married into the military.

Nearly two decades of it.

Nearly half of my life filled with training and schedules and TDY's and deployments and odd shifts and coming home to a house that was full of children and completely, profoundly quiet in the way that only happens when the one person you want to talk to isn't there. I adapted, as every military spouse has to do. I don't like alone, but I can do alone now. Afterall, I was alone at 2am with a colicky baby. Alone the first time a school called and I had to take a kid to urgent care and couldn't reach Jason for hours. Alone when Gena broke her leg. Alone for doctor appointments. Alone waking up from surgery.

Alone during the first year of COVID, locked in a house with four young kids, going slowly out of my mind.

I convinced myself it would get easier when he retired.

(insert ALL the laughing emojis ever created right here because

1) I'm an old person who gets told I use too many emojis,

and 2) you know that saying, "when you make plans, God laughs in your face?"

Ya...

...

Guess what?

I got laughed at.

He moved into a supervisory role that kept him busy twelve-plus hours a day, and then we opened the practice, and then there was the building of clients and the paperwork and the certifications and the late nights. Two ships passing in the night is the most accurate thing I can say about how we functioned for a long time.

My best friend was three feet away and I was lonely.

Here's the part nobody talks about: you can be surrounded by people — a full and loud and chaotic house — and still feel completely isolated. In fact sometimes the fullness makes it worse. Because you look around at all of it and you think surely someone else sees this. Surely I am not the only one bothered by the dishes, the laundry, the shoes at the door, the backpacks dropped in the middle of the floor, the mess that regenerates overnight like it has its own ecosystem.

And then nobody moves. And nobody notices. And you're standing in the middle of your own life feeling invisible.

That is possibly the loneliest I ever feel. Not the 2am deployments. Not the surgery. The Tuesday afternoon in my own living room, surrounded by everything and everyone, completely alone in caring about any of it.

There have been more times than I can count — usually in the middle of a fight, usually when I've run out of grace, where I've looked at Jason and said ' okay, roommate.' (And proceeding to ever-so-NOT-gracefully leave -- read: stomping from -- the room.)

Not enemy. Not stranger. Roommate. Someone I live alongside, split the bills with, pass in the hallway. Someone who was right there for every pizza night and Christmas and science fair.

Just not in the same photo.

I made mistakes in that loneliness. When the kids were small and I had no one to talk to, I talked to them. Vented to them. Said things about marriage and military life and the weight of doing it all alone that I thought they'd forget.

They didn't forget.

I know that now because I can see it — in how they talk about relationships, in how they talk about me or to me sometimes. Kids absorb everything, especially the things you say when you think they're not really listening.

I'm not telling you that to beat myself up about it, although I do so, often. I'm telling you because I wish someone had told me, in a way I could understand, that loneliness left untreated finds an outlet whether you choose one or not. It needed somewhere to go and I didn't have anywhere healthy to put it.

That's not a character flaw. That's what happens when you feel like you don't have enough support, for long enough.

Jason is my best friend. Which sounds like a good thing - and it is - but it also means that when we fight or hit a rough patch, I realize just how few other places I have to land. I have a lot of acquaintances who have never been the kind you call when things are hard. I spent most of my adult life moving from base to base, never staying long enough to build the deep kind of friendships that survive distance and time.

So the loneliness in my marriage isn't separate from the loneliness in my life. They're the same thing wearing different faces.

What I've figured out, after nearly 2 decades or 18 years or 6,570 days or 157, 680 hours or 9, 460,800 seconds of this - Rent , anyone?

I've figure out: the loneliness doesn't mean you're in the wrong marriage. It doesn't mean your partner doesn't love you. It usually means you've both been running so hard for so long that the connection got pushed to the back burner and you stopped noticing until it was really, actually cold.

It means you need more than one person to be your whole world, and most of us — especially those of us who moved a lot, or gave everything to a role, or spent years just surviving — haven't built that yet.

It means the mess on the floor isn't really about the mess. It rarely is.

It means you're going to have to say something out loud. Speak up. Be the one to bridge the distance. Invite them to walk life with you, not just beside you.

It's not a failure to ask.

It never was.

Go back and look at that last photo in the carousel. The one where I'm finally in the frame.

I'm right there. Next to him. Looking straight at the camera.

Still alone.

Feeling alone in your marriage is normal.

It comes and goes like the seasons.

Staying there without saying so is optional.

— Holly | Life Behind the Screens

I want you to do something before you read this.

Scroll through these photos:

Relationship Patterns

Tue, 19 May 2026 09:00:00 GMT

We already know how this goes...

There's a moment in certain arguments where everything slows down just enough for you to think, oh...

We're doing this one again.

Same starting point. Same roles. Same defensive postures we've both had so long they're practically load-bearing at this point. You can see exactly where it's headed and somehow, knowing that doesn't stop it. You just keep going, like two people who've memorized a script and can't figure out how to put it down.

Twenty-two years. We have some patterns.

The parenting ones are probably the most frequent. Jason and I are, in theory, on the same team. In practice, we sometimes have very different ideas about what that team is supposed to be doing. One of us thinks a consequence should look one way. The other disagrees. Someone says something in front of the kids before we've had a chance to align, and now we're managing the kid situation *and* the fact that we just contradicted each other in public, which is its own separate situation entirely.

We've had this argument in various forms approximately four thousand times. Possibly more.

The thing about parenting disagreements is they never feel small in the moment. They feel like fundamental differences in values and priorities and what kind of people our kids are going to turn out to be. Which is a lot of weight for an argument that started because someone didn't follow through on a consequence about screen time.

Then there's the one I'm almost embarrassed to admit.

Sometimes I pick a fight because I already know I'm wrong about something and I'm not ready to say so. I can feel the moment it happens, the slight shift where I realize the position I've been holding doesn't actually hold up, and instead of just saying *okay, you're right* like a reasonable adult, something in me digs in harder.

I don't know exactly why I do this. Stubbornness, probably. Pride, definitely. Some old wiring that decided a long time ago that being wrong was dangerous and being right was safe, and hasn't fully updated since.

Jason, to his credit, has learned to recognize this particular pattern. Which is sometimes more annoying than if he didn't.

The hardest pattern to talk about is the insecurity one.

I'm not going to go into the full history of it here, that's a story for another day, when I've figured out how to tell it properly. What I will say is that there are times, usually when I'm already feeling stretched thin and invisible and not quite like myself, when the old doubts show up uninvited. Jason works primarily with women. He talks to people all day about their deepest, most vulnerable places. He is, by all professional accounts, very good at this.

And sometimes my brain, in its least charitable moments, takes that information and does something really unhelpful. Suddenly things that don't bother me most days start to twist, and twist again, until I have a pretzel of doubt hanging over me. Extra salty, obviously. My brain doesn't do plain.

It's not logical. I know it's not logical. Knowing it's not logical does not stop it from happening.

What I've learned, slowly, reluctantly, after years of letting it quietly wreck perfectly good evenings, is that the insecurity is never really about what it appears to be about. It's a signal. It shows up when I'm lonely, when I feel disconnected, when the two ships have been passing in the night long enough that I've lost sight of the shore.

It's not about the colleagues or the job. It's about the distance.

Here's what I know about patterns after 22 years of having them:

You don't break them by being smarter or trying harder in the moment. By the time the argument starts, you're already inside it and reason has largely left the building. You break them slowly, imperfectly, incompletely, by recognizing them early enough to do something different.

By saying the thing underneath the thing instead of the thing on top.

By occasionally just saying ' I think I'm wrong and I'm not ready to admit it yet but I wanted you to know I know.'

Jason finds this both endearing and deeply frustrating. Mostly frustrating. I understand.

We still have the arguments. Probably always will. But we have them a little differently now than we used to. A little faster to the actual point. A little less time spent in the part where we're both just defending positions we've already privately abandoned.

Twenty-two years. We're still working on it.

That's the whole point.

Holly | Life Behind the Screens

On Wednesdays We...

Mon, 18 May 2026 19:29:59 GMT

Keep It Moving

On Wednesdays, we wear pink. Right?

Actually, I try to. Because in my world, pink on Wednesday means something specific — it's how a lot of us bus drivers quietly show up for the ones in our ranks who have fought cancer. It's a small thing. It matters anyway.

But there's a lot more that goes into my Wednesday than a color choice.

My alarm goes off at 4:30.

Then 4:50. Then 5:00. Then 5:10. By 5:30 I've hit snooze more times than I can count, and I'm in the bathroom taking a shower that is always, without exception, too long, because it is the only uninterrupted quiet I will have for the next several hours and my body knows this even when my schedule doesn't.

Skin care, makeup, teeth, hair, clothes, jewelry. Fill the Stanley. Put my meds on the lid so I remember to take them once my stomach wakes up, which takes longer than the rest of me. Pack the bag — small purse, theoretically, though I'm fairly certain it weighs exactly as much as the diaper bags I carried for years. Different contents, same gravitational pull.

Somewhere in this same window I am also getting Everett ready.

Everett, who hates getting up early, (unless it's a Saturday). Who hates being rushed. Who hates having choices made for him. Who treats sock selection like a negotiation requiring a mediator and brushing his teeth like a philosophical debate he intends to win. We should be out the door when the 5:50 alarm rings.

We leave after 6:00. Every time. Without fail.

There's a solid chance Everett hasn't eaten, because he was dragging his feet all morning and there wasn't time. So I'm ordering McDonald's or Sonic on the app while racing out of the neighborhood. We stop, we collect whatever was ordered, we race the rest of the way to the high school where my bus is parked.

I can make that drive in 8 minutes alone. With my tagalong: 20 minutes, minimum.

It is now 6:23. I take corners faster than I should. My bus aide is already there and has been for a while, though he will not admit this because he is too kind to call me on my constant tardiness. I leave Everett in the car with his kindle and his food — spoiler: by the time he needs to come to the bus he has had approximately three bites and I will spend the rest of the morning saying "Everett, eat" at regular intervals like a very tired metronome.

I drive a SpEd bus. I know what people sometimes picture when they hear that, and I want to be clear: my kids are not a horror story. They are eleven small humans with big situations and specific routines and parents who are doing their best. I have learned their stories, their medical histories, their siblings' names, their parents' jobs. Some of those parents have become genuine friends.

I have special routines with some of the kids. Things that must be said, in order, every single day, or the day starts wrong.

"All right guys, you know the rule — backpacks on before you leave your seat, and have a great day!" - That's the start of my goodbyes when we get to the elementary school.

I flip the doors open to the horde of teachers waiting to shepherd the kids inside: teachers, aides, helpers, the whole army that shows up every single day giving these kids everything they've got.

Then the parade begins.

Everett gets "bye bubb, I love you." S gives me a hug and assures me she will make good choices. B makes it to the front of the bus and stops, blocking everyone, every day. J rushes down the steps so fast it makes my heart stop every single morning. I is my little minion — wanders without direction until I give him one. N insists on checking his own name off the drop-off roster. And H greets us every morning with Happy Wednesday! with the full conviction of someone announcing something important.

She is not wrong. It is important. They are important and I make sure they know it. Plus, *these* kids are always excited to see me, (the ones at home, not so much), so I give them a lot of big energy every day, no matter what is going on for me off of the bus. The bus is its own world and I thrive there.

It's now 7:24 and I think to myself "I love these kids.", and off we go again.

I see Everett in a lot of them. I see my other kids, too. Which means sometimes I'm holding the secret key one of them needs that day, or the hug or the understanding. I also understand their parents in a specific way. So I give unsolicited advice. Probably too much of it. Things I wish someone had said to me ten years ago, hoping something lands.

I am more generous with wisdom on the bus route than I am in my own kitchen. Make of that what you will.

We finish about 8:45, after running the high school route — tier 3, for those keeping track. It has been less than two and a half hours. It feels like it's been a full day.

I lock up the bus and head home, where there are dishes. Laundry. The business to manage. Errands. Meals. Dogs. Grocery shopping. Getting a few minutes of kid-free time with Jason. The Amazon returns that have been sitting by the door for an amount of time I will not admit publicly.

It is not yet noon.

And here's the Wednesday thing: you look at all of it and make a quiet, practical decision.

Not today.
Not this one.
This can wait.

You stay functional. You keep it surface level. Nothing that requires the kind of energy you already spent before 9am.

It's not avoidance exactly. Let's call it: resource management.

At least that's what I tell myself, again, next Wednesday.

— Holly | Life Behind the Screens

The Sound of...

Mon, 11 May 2026 18:59:01 GMT

The Sound of ...

Nothing Being Said

There's a specific kind of quiet that settles into a house when something is off but nobody's saying so.

Not peaceful quiet. Not the kind that follows a good cry or a hard laugh or the moment all four kids are somehow, miraculously, in their rooms at the same time. This is a different animal. This is the quiet of two people who know each other well enough to know exactly what they're not saying — and are choosing, mutually, wordlessly, to keep not saying it.

You move through the day like it's normal. Make coffee. Step over the dog. Find permission slips that were due last Tuesday. Keep moving.

It's not normal.

I've been married for 22 years to a therapist. Before opening our practice, I spent 18 years as a military spouse, which is its own graduate program in holding everything together while someone else has the mission. I have moved houses, managed crises, raised kids through deployments, and made approximately ten thousand decisions alone that probably should have been made together.

I am sometimes a person who struggles to function.

I am, it turns out, sometimes a person who struggles to just *say the thing.*

And here's the part that would be funny if it weren't so true: I live with a man who professionally helps people say the thing. Who sits with couples, individuals, people carrying years of unspoken weight, and gently, skillfully helps them find the words. He is genuinely good at this.

He comes out of his office and we sometimes don't talk for three days about something that's sitting right there on the kitchen counter between us.

This is not a complaint. This is a confession. There's a difference.

We have four kids — three girls (two teenagers and one who hasn't gotten the memo that she isn't one yet) and a nine-year-old boy who is outnumbered and thriving somehow. One of our daughters leaves for college in the fall, which I am handling extremely well and definitely not thinking about at 2am. We have two dogs. Our house is, at any given moment, somewhere between "lived-in" and "hurricane wreckage." Plans get made and forgotten. Things are always on the go or getting dropped entirely.

We are not a polished household. We are not a Pinterest household. We are a *loud, complicated, full, and occasionally chaotic* household, and within that, somehow, we have built something real.

But real doesn't mean easy. Real means you've earned the hard parts.

The silence I'm talking about, the slightly-off, unaddressed, everyone's-fine-why-do-you-ask silence, it's never actually empty. It's full. Packed. It's got everything you decided not to say this morning, plus the thing from last week you let go of but didn't really, plus a few older things that are basically fossils at this point.

That stuff doesn't dissolve on its own. It marinates.

We know this. My husband *really* knows this. It's literally his work.

And still. Dinner happens. Someone mentions something they saw online. The dogs need a walk. We are two people with decades of hard-won emotional intelligence between us, moving carefully around a thing we both see.

The fight eventually happens. (Sometimes there's yelling. I'm not going to pretend there isn't yelling.) And then, usually, after the fight — we talk. Actually talk. And whatever the thing was gets smaller once it has words on it, the way things do.

After 22 years, we're finally, *finally* starting to feel like we might actually be figuring some of this out.

That sentence took a long time to be able to say.

This blog is attached to my husband's therapy practice, which means somewhere on this site there is clinical language and framework and actual expertise. That's his lane and he's good in it.

This is my lane.

I'm not a therapist. I'm not here to tell you what healthy communication looks like or hand you a framework for difficult conversations. I'm here because I think there are a lot of people — couples, people in high-pressure lives, people carrying more than they let on — who are tired of being handed the clean version of something that is, in real life, genuinely messy.

You're not behind. You're not broken. You might just be in the quiet.

It's okay. We've been there.

--Holly | Life Behind the Screens

The Therapist's Wife

Thu, 07 May 2026 16:22:41 GMT

Life Behind the Screens

My husband has three monitors.

I'm not sure when that happened exactly — somewhere between the therapy practice taking off and the man deciding that one screen was for amateurs — but it's become a kind of shorthand for our whole dynamic. He's over there managing sessions, notes, scheduling, whatever therapists do on three screens. I'm over here managing everything else.

That's not a complaint. It's just the layout.

I'm Holly. I'm not the therapist. I'm the military spouse who moved houses more times than I care to count, raised kids through deployments, kept things running when running things wasn't optional, and somewhere in the middle of all of that, ended up married to a man who now professionally helps other people do the hard stuff we were just figuring out in real time.

We have four kids — three girls (two teenagers and one who hasn't gotten the memo that she isn't one yet) and a nine-year-old boy who is somehow thriving in a house that is, at any given moment, at least 40% chaos. Two dogs. One therapy practice. Twenty-two years of marriage that have been, depending on the season, beautiful and hard and funny and exhausting and worth every single bit of it.

I grew up religious. Then I didn't. He didn't, then did, then didn't again. We've been messy in that way too.

This blog lives on a therapy website, which means somewhere nearby there is clinical language and actual expertise and a person with a graduate degree. That's his lane.

This is mine.

I'm not here to tell you what healthy looks like. I'm here because I think a lot of people are carrying more than they let on, living lives that don't fit the clean version of the advice they keep getting handed, and occasionally just need someone to say yeah, same without a framework attached.

I write about marriage, parenting, military life, the weird specific thing it is to support someone who supports everyone else, and whatever else is sitting on the counter that week demanding to be dealt with.

It's honest. It's grounded. It's sometimes funny and sometimes a little too real.

Welcome to life behind the scr eens.

— Holly