Tay Lautner on nurse burnout, the first trimester nobody warns you about, and becoming a mom

Table of Contents
- Liz Tenety: What is the best advice you’ve gotten so far?
- Liz Tenety: Pregnancy tends to be where unsolicited advice starts, and it does not stop once your kids are running around in the world. How are you handling it?
- Liz Tenety: What has surprised you most about pregnancy?
- Liz Tenety: You went to college for dance. How did you end up in nursing?
- Liz Tenety: And then the timing of it.
- Liz Tenety: What was that stretch like?
- What finally made you step away?
- Liz Tenety: What did healing actually look like?
- Liz Tenety: How do you plan to hold onto those tools as a new mom?
- Liz Tenety: Where did the name Lemons come from?
- Liz Tenety: The Squeeze looks at mental health from inside the spotlight. What made that the conversation you wanted to have?
- Liz Tenety: What is it like building a creative partnership with your spouse?
- Liz Tenety: What have you learned about him in this chapter?
- Liz Tenety: What are you most trying to prepare for before the baby arrives?
- Liz Tenety: What was your first thought when you found out you were having a girl?
Tay Lautner built a career around taking care of other people, first at the bedside as a new nurse working a COVID floor through the worst of the pandemic, and then, after burnout and a PTSD diagnosis forced her to walk away from it, as one of the most candid voices in the mental health space. In the years since, she has assembled a toolbox she can actually rely on, built out of therapy, journaling, quiet mornings, and monthly check-ins even when nothing is wrong. Now she is weeks away from becoming a mother for the first time, stepping into the one role most likely to test whether any of it holds. In a candid conversation on The Motherly Podcast, Lautner opens up about the first trimester nobody prepared her for, why getting sick was the only thing that could pull her out of the hospital, and what she hopes her daughter sees when she watches her mom work.
Meet the expert: Tay Lautner is a registered nurse, mental health advocate, and co-host of The Squeeze, the podcast she launched with her husband, Taylor, in 2023 to talk openly about mental health. She founded The Lemons Foundation in 2022, a nonprofit dedicated to eliminating the stigma around mental health, and she writes and runs her own platform, Lemons by Tay. A former dance major turned telemetry nurse, she passed her NCLEX in February 2020 and was working a cardiac floor when it converted to COVID care that December. She left the hospital in September 2021 and was later diagnosed with PTSD, depression, and anxiety, an experience that became the foundation of the work she does now. She and Taylor are expecting their first child, a daughter.
Liz Tenety: What is the best advice you’ve gotten so far?
Tay Lautner: I’ve definitely gotten a lot of advice, some solicited, some not. The one that’s stuck is that every mom and baby is different. You can have a plan for how you want your birth to go, and everything following your birth, and it may or may not turn out the way you want it to. But you’ll figure it out. Part of me was a little scared of that at first. Now I’m really leaning into it. Whatever happens, happens, and it’s all going to be okay.
Liz Tenety: Pregnancy tends to be where unsolicited advice starts, and it does not stop once your kids are running around in the world. How are you handling it?
Tay Lautner: I’m a pretty laid back person, so it’s pretty easy for me to say “Okay, thanks” and then go about my day. It depends on my mood. If I’m having a stressful day and someone gives me advice, it can get to me. The biggest thing I keep hearing is “It goes by so fast. You’re going to blink and your kid is going to be in high school.” I don’t want to hear that right now. I understand that is how I’m going to be feeling, so I don’t want to think about it until I have to.
Liz Tenety: What has surprised you most about pregnancy?
Tay Lautner: Pregnancy as a whole has been very surprising. I did not realize there was so much going on with body changes and how I’d be feeling and what the first trimester looked like. People talk about it, but the extent of what I heard was morning sickness and being swollen. When you are personally going through it, there are so many layers to it. That was a bit of a shock, and it still is. I think it’s going to be a shock until this baby comes out of me, and then that whole process is probably going to be another shock.
I talk with my girlfriends a lot about how the first trimester was such a shock to us, because a lot of people don’t really talk about it. You’re not supposed to announce your pregnancy. Then you’re in your second trimester and you start to feel better and you kind of forget what happened. None of us were prepared for the first trimester to be what it was.
Liz Tenety: You went to college for dance. How did you end up in nursing?
Tay Lautner: It’s funny, because I never said “I want to do nursing.” It was something that felt like it was always there, and I didn’t realize I had a love for it. I was a dance major. I danced my whole life, and I realized it wasn’t exactly what I wanted to be paying for in college. Someone said I should try nursing, because I had volunteered at hospitals and really enjoyed it, and I loved all of my anatomy and physiology classes. I loved anything that had to do with science and the body. It ended up being my favorite thing. It was the first time in school I ever had straight As. I graduated with honors.
Liz Tenety: And then the timing of it.
Tay Lautner: I graduated at the end of 2019 and passed my NCLEX in February of 2020, so right before COVID. Everything shut down. I thought, I just spent all of this time going to school and getting my degree and my license. I’m going to apply to this one hospital, and if I get the job, great. If not, I’ll stick it out and wait through COVID. I got it, and I was a telemetry nurse, which is basically a cardiac nurse. At the end of 2020 we converted to COVID, and I was a COVID nurse for four or five months.
Liz Tenety: What was that stretch like?
Tay Lautner: It was definitely something I was not prepared for, and I don’t think most were, because you can’t really prepare for a global pandemic. I wasn’t working during the first surge, when it was really scary and no one knew what was going on and there wasn’t enough PPE. I was working during the huge influx of patients because of flu season. We were out of ratio. I was this little new nurse working nights. It feels like a whirlwind that I even went through that.
What finally made you step away?
Tay Lautner: It took a very long time, because I’m a little stubborn. I kept saying I could tough it out. I think that’s the dancer mentality, and I think any athlete would attest to it. You tough it out and you keep going. I didn’t realize how much I was struggling. It took my husband saying “You seem a little checked out,” and I said “No, I’m just working nights.” That was the first time I thought, am I okay?
Then I got COVID, not from working, from the outside world. I had to go on disability. I had long COVID and I was sick for a month or two, and I really could not do anything. Even doing the laundry was a very hard task. I would almost pass out. It took being removed from the environment and being still and not being able to distract myself. I finally left the hospital around September of 2021.
I’m thankful that I did get sick, because I think it would have taken me a really long time to remove myself otherwise. I would have said, oh, I can go to part-time, I can go to one day a week. It would have slowly worked its way down and it would not have been good for me. With any trauma response, it’s hard to assess what’s going on in your body and your mind while you’re still very much actively in the environment.
Liz Tenety: What did healing actually look like?
Tay Lautner: A lot of therapy. Therapy made me accept the fact that what I went through wasn’t okay, because I would always end each sentence with “But I’m okay. It’s fine. I got through it.” My therapist had to tell me that what I went through actually is not okay, and that no one should be going through it, let alone someone my age.
I had never fully struggled to that extent before, so I didn’t have any tools or tricks or self-care practices in my back pocket. Now it’s really about continuing to build my toolbox. I check in with my therapist once a month, even when things are great. Journaling, having quiet time in the morning, whatever it is, being consistent with it. When hard things come up, it’s a lot less scary. It doesn’t take away the impact. Life is life-ing all the time. But now I can say, okay, I’ve gone through this before, I know I’m going to get through it, and these are the steps I have to take.
Liz Tenety: How do you plan to hold onto those tools as a new mom?
Tay Lautner: It’s definitely going to be rewiring my brain and rearranging how I show up for myself, because I’m going to have a little human that I’m caring for, and that’s obviously going to come first. So it’s about putting my baby first and still finding the time to check in with myself, to have a few minutes of quiet. I think it’s going to take a minute to get into that routine, but I’m hopeful I will get there.
I also want my kids to see me taking that time for myself. How are they going to learn to do that if I’m not leading by example?
Liz Tenety: Where did the name Lemons come from?
Tay Lautner: When I left the hospital, I still really wanted to find a way to connect with people. Everyone was struggling with their mental health, whether you were a healthcare worker or whatever you were doing, even if you were just sitting at home. I’m really big on community and human-to-human interaction. So I started a blog and I was trying to think of a name, and Lemons just came to mind. At that time in my life it really felt like life was chucking lemons at me. It wasn’t handing me one, it was throwing thousands. Lemons by Tay started everything, and then it morphed into a nonprofit, and then into the podcast.
Liz Tenety: The Squeeze looks at mental health from inside the spotlight. What made that the conversation you wanted to have?
Tay Lautner: When I first started doing a lot of this mental health work, people would come up to me and say they didn’t realize famous people dealt with mental health struggles. I don’t consider myself famous, which was part of what was funny about it. But being married to my husband, who has been in the spotlight for the majority of his life, and having friends in the same boat, I’ve had a closer look behind the curtain. It doesn’t matter how much money you make, where you’re at in the world, your job, your anything. People are going to struggle with their mental health. It may look a little different, but it’s something that everyone deals with.
Liz Tenety: What is it like building a creative partnership with your spouse?
Tay Lautner: He’s my best friend. We really enjoy being with each other, and we also really enjoy being creative together. We always joke that he’s the talent. He just shows up, and I say “Hey, we’re going to do this,” and he says “Great.” It’s fun, because I get to take all of the stuff that he’s gone through and learned, and he’s so creative with how he sees a social clip being played out. He’ll say “This should go here.” It’s really cool to be collaborative with the person you love.
Liz Tenety: What have you learned about him in this chapter?
Tay Lautner: I always say that I started dating him because I knew he’d be a really good dad. I’m so excited to see him be a father. It’s been really cool to walk through this pregnancy together, because it has not been fun, and he’s been such a help.
We’ve both struggled with our mental health, and we’ve done a lot of work separately and a lot of work together. We did a lot of it in the earlier years of our relationship, so now it’s a lot easier to work through things, whether I’m needing more from him or he’s needing more from me.
Liz Tenety: What are you most trying to prepare for before the baby arrives?
Tay Lautner: It’s weird, because a lot of the stuff I worry about actually won’t even be a thing for another 10 or 15 years, which is silly and very much like me, worrying about things that are so out of my control and so far in the future. I’m trying to take in as much information as possible from friends who are moms, ones I love and trust and whose parenting I align with, and even ones who parent differently, because that’s still great advice to take in.
I nannied for a while. I watched a little girl from eight months old until she was four, so part of me thinks I just have to get through the newborn stage and then I’ll understand what’s going on. The stuff right now is what I’m not going to understand, but I’m going to try to learn and read the books and watch the videos and take the advice from friends.
Liz Tenety: What was your first thought when you found out you were having a girl?
Tay Lautner: One of the first things I said was that I’m so excited for her to see me work. I look up to my mom. She’s one of the hardest workers, and she still works to this day. I went to after-school daycare because my parents were at work every day. Seeing that hard work from my mom shaped me, and I’m excited to have my daughter see it in me, and to know she can achieve whatever she wants. She can dream big. That’s definitely my personality.
This article has been edited and condensed for clarity. Listen to the full episode of The Motherly Podcast wherever you get your podcasts.
















































































