87. 30 Days Without Childcare And Why I’ll Never Do It Again

Hey Doc,

I just came out of 30 days without formal childcare — and let me tell you, it was brutal.

Even with my mom’s help, the constant interruptions, scattered energy, and exhaustion left me running on fumes. I was counting down to bedtime, doom scrolling late at night, and struggling to stay in flow.

Trying to hold everything together without reliable childcare doesn’t prove anything — it only shows how unsustainable it really is. For our family, childcare has always been non-negotiable. But this past month highlighted something important: when formal support falls away, even temporarily, it reveals just how much stability, peace, and freedom the right childcare brings into our lives.

In this episode, you’ll hear:

• The impact of parenting without structured childcare (on your work, marriage, and health)
• Why “just making it work” comes at a cost you can’t afford
• How residual fatigue lingers even after support arrives
• The surprising gifts I found during this season (yes, there were some!)

Doc, I don’t want you living in countdown-to-bedtime mode, running on fumes, or scraping by without the support you need. You deserve better.

🎧 Listen in now as I share what 30 days without childcare really looked like — the struggles, the surprising gifts, and the lessons I want every physician mom to hear.

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Transcript

Hey Doc, it is International Podcast Day, which is why I am so dressed up, looking cute, and I also started back doing interviews for the podcast as well. So I was like, let me just dress up, you know, let me look a little bit cute, but. The main reason I wanted to record today is because it is day two of me having an au pair after months and months of not having one.

Granted, my children were in Trinidad for the summer, so it has been one month that we have been parenting without formalized childcare. Is this really how you are living day to day doc without childcare?

Like it has thrown me so far off of my axis that. I still haven't even fully recovered, even though she's here and she seems great. So I wanted to talk a little bit about the changes that I saw in this period my mom is here, so we do have help, quote unquote, but it is not in the formalized way. That we are afforded when we have an au pair or have had a nanny in the past.

So I want to tell my story of the last 30 days, 'cause it is about, it is exactly 30 days since my kids came back. And, we've been, we've been thugging it out without childcare. So it was different than before, as the children are older, so they are more active.

They require more attention, not as many naps. And the unique factor that my children are homeschooled. So before it was just my son who would be home, which was significantly easier. And the reason that that was is because 1-year-old. One and a half year old is a lot of work to have home all day. So my son was home, we were homeschooling him and my daughter was in daycare before we moved to Houston.

But when we moved we decided to just keep her home for a myriad of reasons. So it's a little bit different than having a 2-year-old and a 5-year-old who may be in preschool and daycare and stuff like that. So, i'll say that it may not be completely relatable to how you may be if you don't have childcare, but it might be, who knows, right?

So we had them home with us all day for 30 days, and I love my children, but what I found was even with my mom and her complete willingness to be of service and to fill in where we needed. She still was doing her own thing. She's an old Caribbean black lady. She was doing whatever the fuck she wanted. So if she was tired of doing things with the kids, she would just go in her room and next thing you know, the kids are in my office like, mommy, what are you doing?

Like, where is grandma? Right? So the constant interruptions was something that. I just really struggled with because I could not get into flow and you know, I've talked about being in flow a lot on the podcast and it's not something that I experienced because I'm creative or because I'm an entrepreneur or because I've left medicine.

You can be in flow in the office, you can, the time when I felt it really was in surgery, just like everybody knows what's going on, the surgery is going well, you know what to do. You are. assistant is right there with you. Like even if there's an emergency, everybody's, everybody's in flow, right? Everybody is tapping into their knowledge, their.

Problem solving for the patient. Safety and things are just working This is not like a me thing. This is something that we can all experience and it's important to me with my clients, but also the business aspect of it when I have to do my marketing, when I have to do my social media. I even just like thinking, brainstorming, planning. I need to get into flow. And when you look at productivity practices and things like that, no matter what you're doing, if you are interrupted, I think there's a study that showed that it takes you like 45 minutes to get back into, you know, your quote unquote flow.

So. The interruptions and not knowing when she was gonna get fed up or when she was going to be in pain 'cause she's having some hip issues or whatever, or the kids start screaming or whatever it was, that affected me and my ability to do the things that, that I needed to do during the day quite a bit.

It led to me just always feeling scattered, always feeling pulled in every single direction because it was also, we just moved getting things ready for the house, making sure the kids were okay, making sure that they weren't just stuck in the house all the time. So we wanna go to the park, we wanna take them to the pool, find the swim instructor, go to the grocery store, do like, do all of these things while we were rebuilding the village and the support system and.

Taking care of them, making sure they're fed, making sure they still have some level of physical activity. And then running the business, coaching my clients, doing the social media. Oh yeah. And having a, a relationship with my husband. You know, it, it was tough. It, it was tough and. With all of that happening during the day, there was a lot of countdown to bedtime, which is something I definitely experienced in the past, and something that I really don't like.

This. Like, oh my God, when are these? When are these children gonna go to sleep? I need them to go down. And when they did. Just feeling like now I finally have time for myself, I am going to sit here exhausted. I don't want to go to bed even though I'm super tired because I have stuff to do. And even if I don't have stuff to do or I'm too tired to focus on the stuff that I have to do, I wanna check social media.

I'm gonna scroll. I'm gonna watch this show because I just need something light and mindless. Next thing you know, it's midnight and I have not gone to sleep yet. And as you know. I have had many issues with my sleep, and I have a very strict bedtime routine and focus a lot on my sleep hygiene. All of that went out the window.

During this time, so the sleep also got messed up and no matter how late I went to bed, I was up early because everything, the quality of the sleep was also just not good because it's still, I'm trying to find the au pair. I'm trying to do this like the mental. Chatter was still there. A weighted blanket helped by the way that significantly increased the quality of my sleep during this time.

You should get one. Don't get it too heavy 'cause you've gonna feel like may actually hurt, feel like you suffocating, but I think mine is like 15 pounds. Excellent.

It came to a point, especially coming down to the end, even in the days where like I knew the au pair was coming, like in a day I would get up in the morning and just like sit on the couch in my office and not want to do anything. Like I hadn't had good quality sleep, so I'm exhausted. I wanted to exercise, but I just couldn't get up to do it.

So I just ended up scrolling on my phone and I have a rule to not open my phone or Facebook or anything before a certain time of the day, but it was just like, I'm here. Let me just scroll. Let me just do something mindless and next thing you know is eight o'clock. And I have not done anything that is.

Productive. That is nourishing, that is restful.

And I just, I just told my husband, I was like, I need a day where I do not have to do anything at all. I am not requested. I am not planning. I'm not doing anything. Because even though she's here, there's still all of that residual exhaustion, all of that disruption of my routine that I have curated over years at this point to feel good, to be able to do all the things that I do and actually enjoy my life and my children and my husband.

It was just like a stark realization that, oh, yeah, all the shit that I coach about is actually, it's actually important. I, I kid, of course, I know the stuff that I coach about is important, but to see it, to feel it in my own life during this time, I was just like, yeah, yeah. I, at this stage with this age of children, with these choices we have made to homeschool and entrepreneurship and all those things.

Not having formalized childcare that fits the hours that we need, that listen to what we want is really just not an option. It is not an option, but I don't want it to just be that it was just terrible thing and I hated my life for the last 30 days. 'cause that's not actually the case. There were some good things that came out of it.

Even with all of that that was going on, I did start exercising because I knew that I could complain all, all I want about how I was feeling about not having time, but I could get the support that I needed and still not put in the effort. To get healthy to exercise because in this move to this wonderful city of Houston, one of the biggest benefits is the food.

And the food is so good, but it is also so heavy. So I looked down and I saw my belly rising hooked. Almost to the point where I had to lay down on my bed and do a fundal height. 'cause I was like, is my I, is the IUD in there? Did it fall out? Am I secretly pregnant? But no, he had a vasectomy. And even though it took a while for his sperm count to go down to zero, could it have grown back?

Like is this really just my belly growing from all this food? Like it, it was all that. And I told myself. you make time for the things that are important to you. So yes, you don't have childcare right now? Yes, things are crazy. You're settling into a new city. You need to start working in the exercise that I did, I got a Peloton.

I'm staring at it right now and started being consistent in the way that I had the capacity for. So that looks like three times a week doing something, some kind of movement, because I knew that it was important for me to not continue on this trajectory. I knew something had to change.

So we were also going through a couple different, like meal prep chef, uh, situations as well, trying to find what worked for us as a family. so we had some good trial and error options for that as well during this time. So. Starting on my fitness and health journey, even in the craziness was a definite benefit because I was like, if I can start and start to some level of consistency during this craziness, I know when things settle that I will be set up to be very consistent and to meet my goals.

And the other big thing that was very beneficial was sit down meals with my children. So. Because of full-time ob, GYN, because of locums, because of entrepreneurship, we have never really done sit down meals. And I, that's also not how I grew up. We everybody ate separately. The only time we sat down and use our dinner table was Christmas morning and Boxing Day morning, which if you don't know, is the day after Christmas Day for anywhere outside of the us.

So it was never a thing. But you know, my coach had. Told me about like there's this, there's a study and there's like a whole book about the importance of family meals, not particularly family dinners, but the act of sitting down with one's children to share a meal and having that support and conversing and things like that.

And it had always been a goal of ours to increase family sit downs and doing it in a way that was sustainable and fit our lives. So no, we were not gonna do family dinners. It just didn't fit. But we tried to do it on the weekends where we would have breakfast and things like that.

But because we didn't have the childcare, There were more times where I would sit down, not just for breakfast, which was usually the time 'cause that I'm with the kids anyway, but for lunch and for some dinners. And it was just really nice. And you know, the kids there, they can articulate themselves now and they would often say how much they loved us sitting down together for meals and.

Yes. Now that we have the au pair there, that's gonna happen less. But now that I've had a taste, it's definitely something that we are going to be more intentional about and see how we can weave them into the week because it was really nice to just sit and eat with them, and I found that they eat more and are less picky if we are all sitting down eating together, eating the same thing.

Even if they're eating something else and we, uh, have something like super healthy, they're still more likely to finish their meal. They're more likely to try the vegetables that we have if we're all sitting down together having a family meal. So it hasn't been all bad and destabilizing and all of those things.

And like everything in my life. I choose to learn from this time and I choose to share it with you as a lesson that you could learn from and to express my hope and my dream for you, that you please get some childcare. Even if you have a grandparent who will actually follow all of your instructions and give you the type of support that you need, that's great.

That counts. But if you don't, if there is nobody, please pay somebody. Because if your life in general is anything like the last 30 days of mine, I want more for you, doc. Like I want you to feel Settled to feel peaceful, to not feel like you're being pulled in every single direction, to not be counting down the hours, minutes, and seconds until your children go to bed so you can finally get rest.

I don't want you up doom scrolling or revenge scrolling or whatever you wanna call it, because you finally get a moment to yourself where you're too exhausted to do anything but scroll and be numbed by a screen. I want more for you. You know, I want you to spend that time being intimate with your husband.

and no that does not only mean sex, even though it definitely means sex as well. Like I want you to be able to read and to be able to exercise and do anything that you want to do without having the stress and the pressure of not being supported. And, I'm also surprised at how much residual fatigue there is.

I, of course, I didn't expect the moment that she got here everything to be great, but it's gonna take a little bit for me to recover and, you know, my husband and I have already worked out a free day where I can, you know, have my solitude and do whatever I want. because that is important. That's what I know that I need.

From long time, and that's what he recognizes in me as well. And he knows that it benefits him and it benefits the kids. So it is important to him to facilitate that for me. And yeah, I'm gonna be, get back into my massages and all the things that I know that I need to take care of this one body so that I can enjoy this one life.

You can, you can do it too, doc. Just hire somebody. Hire somebody. and if you need help with any of it, if you need help finding an au pair, figuring out the process, vetting, hiring a nanny, if you need help talking to your husband because you're like, yes, this is exactly how I feel, but he doesn't want to have anybody in the house.

All of those things, things that I help my clients with in whatever capacity that they need so that they can get this relief to get the freedom to. Get control back to just be and be happy. So schedule a free coaching session. If you just wanna be happy, I can help you with that. It is my jam, it is my specialty.

Go to my website, dr toya coaching.com, D-R-T-O-Y coaching.com. The link is also in the show notes. DM me, do all of the things so that we can talk. You can get a feel for what this is like. You may think you know what it's like. I guarantee, doc, you do not, you do not know this level of support, this level of understanding, this feeling of being seen on this deep, real level.

It's something you have to experience for yourself, which is why it is a real full coaching session, and only if you're like, yes, this is what I want. Do we talk about ongoing coaching? Because it has to feel right. It has to feel like this is what I have been waiting for to get me to that place that I've been wanting to get to.

So I would love to talk to you. I cannot wait. And in the meantime, as you're scheduling a free coaching session, leave a five star review on the podcast so other physician moms can find us, can find the podcast and get all of this juice and hear all my business and hear all of the wonderful guests that I have on the podcast.

Share it, subscribe, do all the things, and I will see you on the next episode of Stethoscopes and Strollers.