Hey friends. It’s been a long time. Thanks for sticking with me!
You know how corn fields get rotated, so each field gets a year “off” to replenish the nutrients and wildlife that will serve the next yield?
No, of course you don’t.
We’re all terribly inexperienced with the principles of farming and agriculture. It’s OK. You can still follow along with this metaphor.
Anyway, I needed some time to process all the perfect and not-perfect ways my life has changed as a result of launching into full-blown parenthood in 2017.
2017! That was three years ago.
Not only would I not physically recognize the woman I was then, I would not relate to her mentally.
Er, I did not.
All of the blog articles on here sounded so… what… smug? Selfish? Figured-it-all-out-did-you? I just wanted to smack the person who wrote all that. So, it had to go.
Another complicating factor is that I write for other people for a living.
So when I have a moment of downtime (that is, when I fight and claw my way to a minute of down time) the last thing I should do or could do was get back on the computer to keep writing.
But. My husband recently came home to be a SAHD. And everything’s still busy, but there are… long periods of time…. of every day…. when…. I am not the primary caretaker.
This has allowed me to almost come back to the place where I can start to figure out who I am now that my life has changed so much.
Theory: People talk a lot about losing your identify when you become a mother. And like most people, that didn’t feel real to me until it happened to me.
(It’s awful.)
But maybe it’s not how much you change that makes you lose yourself. Maybe it’s that what you can care about changes so much that you don’t recognize the person who used to care about different things.
The things I cared about were suddenly very real, and physical, and overwhelming… and very exclusive to the little family bubble of my husband and I. Because not many people care as much about the size of your toddler’s poop as your spouse does.
(It’s… intimidatingly huge, y’all.)
As the kids get older and less… shall we say… of an invasive alien species that dominates all within the time-space continuum… and as I reclaim a normal work day for the first time in three years (3 years!). I am starting to care about some of the things I used to care about. And it’s…. refreshing.
I hope to be back more regularly to write. It’s mostly a one-way thing, but I always welcome a little comment or email if you have something you particularly liked or want to add.
As we get rolling, here’s a roll out of GIFs that express how I’ve experienced 2020 so far:
When I finally felt the urge to write here again
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When they took Frasier and Friends off Netflix the same day
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When I finally de-clench all my muscles at the end of a long, hard day…. and #2 starts screaming for no reason
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When my husband stayed home the first day from work to become a SAHD
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When I get to my co-working space and have — get this — enough time to get all my work done
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When #1 asks “Are you happy, mommy?” after I angrily scold everyone for whatever just happened
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When I learned Athleta released a plus-size exercise line…
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… And I place my order and everything fits ***beautifully***
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When I make it two weeks without refined sugar…
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And then COVID stress sends me right to the chocolate bar aisle
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Hope 2020 has been good to you! <3 Me