From Overachiever to Mom: My Journey Through Motherhood and Career
- Feb 19
- 3 min read
By Ekaterina Konovalova
the founder of Trust Me Mom
When Sheryl Sandberg published her influential book Lean In in 2013, she encouraged expecting mothers to continue pushing for career growth and promotions during pregnancy and while caring for young children. The book made a big splash in the media.
Another well-known author and decluttering expert, Marie Kondo, rose to fame by teaching millions of people how to organize their living spaces through the KonMari Method.
I read Sheryl Sandberg’s and Marie Kondo’s books while I was pregnant and breastfeeding my baby in 2014–2015, and both of these influential women continued to promote their ideas of ambitious careers and perfectly tidy homes across my social media feeds. I was confused and perplexed: how did they do it, and why couldn’t I as a new mom?
I was a very ambitious, career-oriented woman. I earned three graduate degrees, immigrated from Russia to the United States with only a few hundred dollars in my pocket, and built a successful career as a marketing executive at an ad agency. Why did I feel like a cancer patient after chemotherapy, vomiting daily throughout my pregnancy? How could Sheryl Sandberg lean in when I couldn’t, even though I desperately wanted to?
Then, when my daughter was born, she barely slept. Her sleep challenges continued for a few years, and the chronic sleep deprivation and stress of managing both family life and a career took a serious toll on my health, ultimately landing me in the emergency room. My body finally gave in, and my husband and I decided that I should take a break from work.
Shortly before my health collapse, Sharyl Samberg suddenly lost her husband and experienced single motherhood while raising two young children. This experience taught her a new lesson: it is brutally difficult to ‘lean in’ when a mother is chronically sleep-deprived, managing an unpredictable schedule, and juggling sudden illnesses and tantrums. [if you need a source, link to https://qz.com/679138/sheryl-sandberg-now-understands-how-difficult-it-is-for-a-single-mom-to-lean-in]. Marie Kondo also became a mother, and she acknowledged that it is virtually impossible to keep a home perfectly organized when you have a toddler. [if you need a source, link to https://www.fatherly.com/news/marie-kondo-admits-konmari-method-doesnt-work-kids]
Maybe there is a reason why parenting is called ‘the most difficult job in the world,’ and a reason why mothers need a season to recover and readjust, when it is virtually impossible to maintain the same lifestyle and rhythm of life they had before children.
I stopped listening to experts who told me to push through, lean in, and have it all. Instead, I reached out to other professional mothers in my network to see how they were handling this season of life with young children. These women were MBAs working at Fortune 500 companies and other innovative organizations. Virtually no one said they had it all. Something always gave way.
Some took career breaks, others had spouses who became stay-at-home dads, and some moved in with their parents to rely on grandparents’ support. Many experienced serious health crises, and one mother even ended up in a wheelchair due to pregnancy-related complications.
In this season of overwhelm, I began reaching out to therapists, educators and childhood development experts, career coaches, and other professionals, asking them to share tips and practical advice on how to navigate my own parenting challenges. I started a website with a blog and a podcast called Trust Me Mom [www.TrustMeMom.com], hoping it could also help other struggling parents. It became my lifeline and a passion project that carried me through some of the hardest moments of my parenting journey.
Today, I am back in my marketing career, working as a Senior Director at one of the leading U.S.-based marketing agencies [feel free to link to Mod Op www.ModOp.com]. But Trust Me Mom has grown into something bigger [feel free to link to https://triblive.com/local/trust-me-mom-mccandless-mother-provides-parents-with-expert-supported-resource/], continuing to provide inspirational and educational resources to thousands of parents navigating their own parenting journeys.
I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to interview so many remarkable experts and authors, including some of my heroes whose books changed my life, such as Dr. Ross Greene, author of The Explosive Child, and Liza Long, author of The Price of Silence: A Mom’s Perspective on Mental Illness. None of this would have happened had I not experienced the challenges of parenting firsthand.
Motherhood fundamentally changed my perspective on success and taught me greater empathy and appreciation for my own parents and for parents everywhere.
In the end, motherhood taught me that real success is not about leaning in harder; it is about learning when to step back, heal, and redefine what winning actually looks like.
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