Why I Only Offer Counselling on Saturday Mornings (for Adelaide Working Mums)

If you’ve ever tried to book a counselling appointment as a working mum in Adelaide, you’ll have hit the same wall I did:

“The next available appointment is Wednesday at 11am. Or Thursday at 2pm. Or Friday at 9:30am.”

Wednesday at 11am is when you’re in a meeting. Thursday at 2pm is when you’re doing school pick-up. Friday at 9:30am is when you’d have to take half a day’s leave you don’t have, then explain that to a workplace, then organise care, then drive somewhere, then drive back, all to have a 50-minute conversation about how depleted you are.

Most of the women who need counselling the most can’t access it.

This is why my counselling practice for mums runs only on Saturday mornings between 9am and 12pm. Not as a constraint. As a deliberate choice.

The maths of weekday counselling

When clinicians schedule “9 to 5, Monday to Friday,” they’re catering to people who can rearrange their workday or whose work is flexible enough to lose 90 minutes in the middle of the week.

That excludes:

• Adelaide mums in shift work, customer-facing work, or full-time office work without easy flexibility
• Mums whose income is needed and whose leave is finite
• Mums whose partners also can’t easily flex
• Single mums managing solo
• Mums who feel guilty enough taking time for themselves that the additional friction of taking leave kills the booking

So weekday-only counselling, by design, gets booked by a self-selecting group: women with flex, often with partners who also have flex. The women working the hardest, with the least give in their week, opt out — and then we read articles about how “women aren’t reaching out for support.”

Why Saturday mornings specifically

Saturdays solve a few things at once:

• Most mums aren’t working (or working different hours)
• Partners are home to take the baby — meaning you don’t have to organise childcare and explain to anyone what it’s for
• The session can happen from your couch — no driving, no parking, no transit time
• It’s outside the working week’s adrenaline — Saturday mornings have a different texture to Tuesday mornings, and that texture matters for sinking into a real conversation

There’s a feminist piece to this, too. Booking a Saturday morning for yourself — when culture tells you Saturday mornings belong to swimming lessons, parkrun, family pancakes, and the never-ending household catch-up — is its own small act of saying “I matter inside this family, not just to it.”

Why online

The same logic applies. Driving to a counsellor’s office in Adelaide CBD or Burnside for 50 minutes, then driving back — that’s not a 50-minute session, it’s a 2.5-hour session including transit, parking, and the buffer either side. For a mum, that’s nearly an entire morning gone.

Online means:

• The session fits inside a feed
• If the baby cries, you can pause and come back
• You can do it from the bedroom with the door shut while your partner takes the kids out
• If you’re in the Adelaide Hills or somewhere regional, you’re not driving an hour each way

This isn’t a downgrade on in-person counselling — for postnatal counselling specifically, online often works better.

”But I’d rather see someone in person”

That’s completely valid. There are excellent counsellors and psychologists across Adelaide offering in-person sessions — your GP can refer you, and PANDA’s directory has perinatal-trained practitioners. If in-person is the right fit for you, please go with what you’ll actually attend.

What I’m offering is for the woman who’s been trying to make weekday in-person work for a year and hasn’t booked the appointment yet.

What every Saturday session includes

• 50 minutes online (Zoom)
• A written summary afterwards — short email capturing what we worked through and any gentle next steps. New motherhood is foggy; this means nothing important gets lost.
• $150 per session, or $380 for a three-session package

You don’t need a referral. You don’t need a diagnosis. You don’t need to be in crisis. “I just want to talk to someone who gets it, and I can only do Saturdays” is enough.

Book or ask

Book a counselling session, or send a short message and I’ll come back with the next available Saturday. If counselling with me isn’t the right fit, I’ll point you to someone in Adelaide who is.

Your Saturday mornings can be more than parkrun.