It Was March 2020
Nicole Wallace was sitting in her living room when the news broke. Schools were closing because of COVID-19. It was March 2020, and she had just made the decision to finally launch her own counseling practice.
Now she was staring at the television, doing the math. Four kids, college, high school, middle school, and elementary school. All of them about to be home, all day, every day, for the foreseeable future. The dining room table became a classroom. The kitchen became a cafeteria running three shifts. The house echoed with the chaos of it all.
Then her husband fell off the roof.
He broke both his legs. Both of them. And suddenly everything got even harder.
And somewhere in the middle of all that chaos, Nicole was supposed to be figuring out how to register a business, build a website, and find clients during a pandemic that had just shuttered nearly 30 percent of small businesses across the country.
But if her time in the Army taught her anything, it was how to adapt and overcome. No matter how many curveballs got thrown at her, she had a dream of opening her own practice and helping people, and she was determined to make it work.
By the end of 2020, over 4.4 million Americans had filed applications to start new businesses, a 24 percent increase over the year before, the largest surge on record. When the pandemic hit, it made some people’s dreams and goals clearer. For many, that meant controlling their own destiny with entrepreneurship.
Nicole's Military Service
Nicole was the youngest of three, raised by her single mom in an impoverished community in Connecticut. She was the first in her family to graduate high school, and she was determined to be the first to graduate college, too. She signed with the Army at just seventeen, starting bootcamp a year later in 1989.
Nicole trained as an Administrative Specialist, (71L at the time, recently changed to 42A). She served first at a Pershing II missile site in Neu Ulm, Germany during Desert Storm, before transferring to Vicenza, Italy. There, she met her Army Airborne husband, Mark. As Nicole’s enlistment ended, she headed back to her native Connecticut to attend college, achieving that dream of getting a degree.
Entrepreneurial Spirit
Connecticut offered free tuition to returning veterans, which she took advantage of alongside her Montgomery GI Bill education benefits. She earned dual bachelor’s degrees in Elementary Education and Psychology from Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU). She and Mark married the same year she graduated from SCSU and moved to North Carolina to start their life together. She became a teacher, working with kids and giving back to her community.
She was encouraged to study educational leadership at NCSU. While studying, Nicole discovered counseling, and its role in education captivated her. The one-on-one work, the deeper conversations, and the chance to help people make sense of and come to peace with their traumatic experiences—that felt like where she could do the most good. Nicole earned her Master’s in Counselor Education from North Carolina State University (NCSU).
In 2001, Nicole was entering the third trimester of pregnancy, ready to have her first child. Pregnancy complications put Nicole in the ICU for a week. Her daughter was born two months early, spending a month in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). Everyone got home okay eventually, but Nicole remembers the isolation of being a new mom, feeling depressed and alone.
Of course, she wasn’t as alone as she felt. Many women go through similar experiences, and Black women experience these mental health symptoms at double the rate of other moms due to chronic stress, misdiagnosis and systemic issues in our healthcare system. Worse, Black women are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than any other group of women in the United States, and mental health conditions, including depression, anxiety, and suicide are leading causes of maternal mortality.
Nicole knew then just how profound a gap there is in specialized care for women navigating the delicate, often overwhelming journey of motherhood. By the time the pandemic arrived, she was determined to do something about it. Nicole held her PMH-C certification in perinatal mental health, making her a specialist in supporting women and their partners through the entire reproductive journey, from preconception through pregnancy to postpartum. She’s also qualified to counsel women through the traumatic loss of a child.
