The Dress With No Pockets: The Second Shift and the Origin of The Shift Shop

Before The Shift Shop became the home for my psychotherapy, consulting, speaking, and my work as co-creator of Centering YOU, it was supposed to be a clothing company. But the story really begins with a ritual.

A Ritual Between Work and the Second Shift

When I was in graduate school, one of my best professors taught us the importance of creating boundaries so we did not carry our clients' work home. Changing out of my work clothes became one of my rituals, a simple practice of self-care that helped me shift my energy and mark the end of the clinical day.

When I became a mother, the ritual became practical, too: changing protected my work clothes from sticky fingers. But I was rarely changing into rest. I was changing into the next shift.

In 2016, our family moved less than a mile into our current Atlanta home, a house more than a century old that was new to us. That was when the old sundress entered the ritual. Although we lived on a residential street, the front of our home felt surprisingly public. People walked dogs past our yard and parked near our house for the cafés and restaurants a block away. My three children also had the full orbit of after-school life. As the default parent, I moved constantly between clients, pickups, school emails, appointments, dinner, and whatever everyone would need next.

I needed something comfortable enough for gardening or chauffeuring children, but presentable enough for the life around our house. Yoga clothes did not always fit the occasion. My husband's worn-out T-shirts felt too ragged, my other sundresses too dressed, and Atlanta was far too hot for anything complicated. So I kept reaching for the same old dress: loose, cool, comfortable, and put-together enough that I did not mind seeing someone I knew.

It also had no pockets.

That detail seems almost absurd to me now. Men's clothing routinely assumes the wearer will need to carry something; women's clothing gives us tiny pockets, fake pockets, or none at all. Mothers, meanwhile, are always carrying something: keys, phones, snacks, tissues, or whatever a child has handed us.

The dress I wore through the second shift could not carry anything, even though I was carrying everything.

A Modern House Dress for Women's Unpaid Work

I began describing the need as a modern-day house dress. There were clothes for work, exercise, sleep, and going out, but almost nothing for this part of the day. Occasionally I found traditional house dresses in what I thought of as the old-lady section at Walmart or another random store. The selection was sparse, and the dresses were usually made from synthetic, nonbreathable fabrics that made no sense in Atlanta heat.

They felt like remnants of an older idea of women's lives, not garments made for women moving among careers, caregiving, errands, community responsibilities, and home. I wanted something strong, breathable, and modern—a loose, cool dress I could zip on, with two large pockets in front.

Motherhood was my doorway into the idea, but the dress was never meant only for mothers. Many people move from paid work into caring for children or aging parents, tending a home, supporting a community, volunteering, creating, and holding relationships together. The details differ, but the need to move between roles and to have that work recognized is much wider than motherhood.

The more I described this need to friends and advisors, the more my practical feminist mind returned to the same questions: Why didn't this category already exist? Why had the garment failed to evolve alongside women's lives? And why did the labor it was meant to support remain so unrecognized? I was hearing the same question in my therapy practice.

Women clients who had first worked with me during pregnancy or postpartum were returning years later. Their babies were older, and they were holding careers alongside children, relationships, and care for aging parents. Their husbands or partners were often more involved than their own fathers or care givers had been, but involvement was not the same as sharing the mental load. These capable women were exhausted by the relentless anticipating, remembering, and organizing. I understood them because I was living inside the same tension.

Trying to Build a Sustainable Clothing Company in Georgia

This was not a quiet season in which to start a business. I had closed the group practice I co-owned and was running my own psychotherapy practice. I was helping establish Postpartum Support International's Georgia chapter, where I served as founding president. My husband's long days in Georgia's booming film industry strained our marriage. I was raising three children, training for a marathon, beginning therapy, and moving through perimenopause without knowing it.

Somewhere inside all of that, I also began trying to build a sustainable clothing company with no background in fashion, manufacturing, or sewing. After growing up near Chicago and living in Alaska for 15 years, I came to Georgia knowing the South's history of growing and milling cotton. I assumed some version of that local ecosystem must still exist, a way to source the fabric and make the dress close to home.

Instead, I found a global supply chain powered largely by women and too often marked by low wages, poor conditions, pollution, synthetic materials, and waste. I could not justify another garment unless I could make it responsibly. That led me into the slow-fashion movement, but the local pathways were fragmented. I knew how to run a psychotherapy practice; I did not know how to connect responsible fiber, breathable fabric, ethical labor, and local production.

Still, I ordered vintage patterns. A friend who sewed helped make the first prototypes. I tried to source sustainable fabric, invested in branding and a website, and worked with a designer I hoped might become a partner. We made several versions, but the partnership was not right, and I could not build the business alone.

When the Dress Became The Shift Shop

The name, however, had already arrived.

A shift dress is an actual style: a simple, straight-cut dress that hangs loosely from the shoulders rather than fitting closely at the waist. The Shift Shop was a play on that kind of dress and the many shifts we clock into our jobs, homes, families, and communities, whether compensated or not. I chose "Shop" because I imagined I might eventually make more than dresses. Even then, the idea was reaching toward something larger than a single product.

After nearly two years of trying to push the concept forward alongside all the competing demands of my life, I packed away the books, patterns, and prototypes. The clothing line paused, but the question did not.

Then the pandemic arrived. Jobs, school, caregiving, domestic responsibility, and relationships collapsed into the same rooms, and the boundaries between our roles nearly disappeared. In my home and my practice, the depletion was impossible to ignore. It became harder to pretend women could solve it simply by taking better care of themselves; the structures around them also had to change.

Versions of the dress began appearing in the marketplace. Women were home, but many did not want to work in pajamas every day. Seeing those dresses confirmed that I had recognized something real, even though I had not been the person to bring it to market.

My psychotherapy practice still operated under my name, but the work was expanding. I wanted to bring what I understood about healing, the body, caregiving, capacity, and the mental load into workplaces and institutions—examining not only how women cared for themselves there, but how those spaces were built and what they expected women to carry. I did not know what to call that vision.

Then my therapist said, in essence: You already named it. You already have the website. The Shift Shop. She was right. The name had never belonged only to a dress or the shifts women worked. Shift was also an action word: we could change how businesses were run, how care was valued, how women related to their capacity, and what we accepted as normal. The dress had revealed labor hiding in plain sight; The Shift Shop could help change the conditions around it.

Making Invisible Labor Visible

What are women carrying that the systems around them have been designed not to see? That question now runs through everything I do. And the dress? The idea is on ice for now. I am not pursuing a clothing line. If the right person or opportunity ever approaches me with the expertise and capacity to help carry it, I will listen. Until then, my attention belongs to Centering YOU and the work The Shift Shop is doing now.

For now, I understand something I could not name when this all began. The Shift Shop was never only about what a woman changed into when she came home. It was about everything she was still expected to carry after she changed.

The dress was my first attempt to give that work a public form. We have clothing that identifies the work our culture formally recognizes, the suit, the uniform, the scrubs. I wondered what it would mean to create clothing that acknowledged the unpaid shifts sustaining our homes, families, and communities made to carry some of what women were carrying.

That same mission runs through my work now. In psychotherapy, I help women name the bodily and emotional cost of what they have been holding. Through consulting, speaking, training, and reflective supervision, I bring the demands that often remain hidden into the room where organizational decisions are made. Through Centering YOU, we make space for a mother's inner experience within systems that too often focus exclusively on the baby.

This is the work of The Shift Shop: bringing what has been hidden into view so it can be recognized, valued, shared, supported, and changed.

I am not interested in helping women privately withstand the consequences of systems that refuse to see their labor. I work with leaders and organizations prepared to look honestly at what people are carrying and to build more humane, sustainable ways of working and caring.

If your organization is prepared to do that work, bring me into the room.

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