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On Being a Woman With Stuff To Do While Children Are Underfoot
It's spring break week here. At a playdate today, my friend asked how I was going to have the time to get out today's #365StrongStories installment. While we spoke at three this afternoon, I had absolutely no idea. I just knew or would happen somehow.
This yearlong writing project has forced me to get even more vigilant about carving out for "me time." But trying to make time to work and create isn't a new problem - it's as old as the concept of women with stuff to do even with kids underfoot.
This story is excepted from last year's post on the trials and tribulations of meeting writing deadlines even during spring break:
My stepmom kindly recommended I take off my coat and get some work done while she took the kids for a walk.
Clearly I was exuding deadline stress, and I risked infecting everyone around me.
How could I be surprised that I couldn’t get clear on my writing and I felt choked with “bad mom” guilt? I wasn’t asking for the dedicated creative time I needed and so I was spreading myself too thin as I tried (and failed) to dot it all.
I felt like a fraud, offering advice from and “I’ve got this” blogging pulpit when I was actually just being a terrible, distracted house guest with a couple of needy dependents.
Gratefully, I took that gift of thirty minutes free of mom responsibilities to check back in with my real message, my lived experience, my own imbalance.
I think I found a story worth telling and I drafted a new container to tell it. And then I discovered the space to walk to the beach with my girls – twice.
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“But how can it be a good story if it’s so sad?”
“But how can it be a good story if it’s so sad?”
It was hard to make out the words because she was burying her face in my belly, but I understood exactly what she meant.
It seems impossible that we could love something that awoke our darkest fears and left us in a weeping puddle. It seems like madness that we would subject our children to such pain. But, like countless parents since the beginning of humanity, I’d merrily offered up some entertainment that would terrify as much as it delighted.
Within thirty seconds I figured out the basic plot of The Song of the Sea, the fantastical animated Irish film about the silkies - those seals who came to shore and became human women for a time. This is another mystery of story - why would we devote so much time and lavish so much emotion on something so predictable?
Well, I could predict that the pregnant mother singing so sweetly to her young son wasn’t going to make it into scene two. What I couldn’t predict was that wondrous journey and the magical images that would pull us along for the next hour and more.
These tales of otherworldly parents and children on a quest for happiness in the real world pretty much always end up the same. When I kept reassuring my six year-old that it was all going to end well I was pretty sure I was telling enough of the truth. After all, everyone was smiling in a sweet family tableau at the end. But my daughter couldn’t see all that through her tears.
While the credits rolled I reminded her of how much she’d loved the rest of the movie. I told her to think of how the children were so happy with their daddy even if their mama was off with the other fairyfolk in the sea. Most challenging of all, I tried to make her understand that the best stories are those that open our hearts to experience something powerful and meaningful. Considering that now, two days after that initial viewing, she wants to see it again, I can only assume she heard me. More likely, it’s just a testament to our devotion to stories that transform our everyday view of the world and make us feel.
"I ask my Confidence for help”
On the way home from Girl Scouts last night my first grader and I had a chat about "the inner critic."
Well, I thought it would be a good conversation topic because I was all jazzed up after chapter one of Tara Mohr's Playing Big. Tara wrote something about how it would change the world if girls knew how to change their relationship with that nagging voice of self-doubt before it constrained them. Our sunset drive inspired me: clearly this was the perfect time to transform the future.
Turns out, my six year old didn't really know what I was talking about. She didn't understand that there could be a voice in her head that said yucky things about what she could and couldn't do. Instead, she told me about how she and her Confidence worked together to do hard stuff like reading really long chapter books.
This Confidence creature sounds pretty amazing.
I know I have my own redhead version who got me through those very same books and lots of really big challenges since then. Clearly the trick is making her my best friend just like a six year-old would.
My Confidence and I are busy at work on my new course, Tell Stories that Matter: Write Online Content that Your Readers Care About.
Guess what? One of the things I promise to help you do is “confidently and easily tell stories that connect.” Please click below to join the interest list to get all the details and the VIP perks.
Stories Hold Us Through Life’s Changes
Last week, my daughter and I lay together and wrote the last sentence of a sacred chapter in my mothering story. Without any sense of occasion, I nursed her to sleep for the very last time.
When she woke before dawn expecting to slip back into our routine, I was sad but resolved. Watching your baby get lost in the delirium of a being weaned against her will is its own unique kind of torture.
This must be doing irreparable harm, I worried. I was withholding mother love and sustenance and introducing her to a cruel world of deprivation and lack.
Less than a week later, I realize that I was in my own state of dramatic delirium. She did recover and she did it fast. Now, when my 25-month-old wakes from a nap she asks for a snuggle and a book. With a child’s gift of living in the present moment she has adjusted and found a new way to connect with me and with her world.
Yes, stories change lives, but, even more importantly, stories hold us when life changes
In this midst of this very personal transition, I have been busily crafting my new online course and outlining webinars and fussing over Facebook ads. I’ve been immersing myself in entrepreneurship. All this work is a worthy way to support the family, of course, but it’s also been a handy place to hide from grief.
Only today, when I sat outside with a cup of tea and my journal to draft this story, did the tears start to flow. Great, heaving sobs echoed off my neighbor’s house, but I didn’t care. The sorrow caught up with me as I realized my body would never be called to mother someone in the same way again.
My breasts have nourished and nurtured two children and, since we do not plan to have any more children, their work is done. I am mourning this ending, but I am also humbled and grateful. Because I paused to write this story, I was able to feel all the feelings and heal the wounds left by this rite of passage.
I can see that there’s no accident in the timing of all this. The new beginning can be as exciting as the ending is sorrowful. Freed from having someone depend on me at such a visceral, physical level, I am able to reallocate that energy and serve the world in a different way. My mothering commitments are every bit as intense, but I know that energy has a way of shifting and amplifying in ways that stretch time.
Now that I’m no longer performing the magic act of making milk, I can help more people practice the alchemy of turning ideas and dreams into stories that matter.
In April I’m launching my first writing and storytelling course, Tell Stories that Matter: Create Online Content that Your Readers Care about. Please click below get on the interest list to get VIP perks and special pricing.
It's Hard to Write Your Way Through the Monday Blues
What if every weekend was a three day weekend? Sounds like an ideal life, right?
From my experience, that isn't necessarily true.
Theoretically, Mondays are a mother-daughter day and I don't work except for during nap time. That never really serves anyone.
Today, I tried my best to write my way through the "I don't like Mondays" blues. I tried to write a story of how I just couldn't show up as a mom when I felt like I "should" be working. I ended up in the worst of both worlds, neither present nor productive.
Every story I tried to tell about the day came out in a tangle. I sounded like a whiny victim or a preachy blogger. After all, the easy solution would be to hire a sitter for a few hours and just get to work! I'm going to get on that. Promise. In the meantime, here's the Facebook Live quickie for your #365StrongStories shot of video storytelling.