I have always loved writing. Writing, for me, has been a form of not just communication to other people, but a way of communicating with myself. It is brainstorming, finding clarity in my own thoughts and my own beliefs. Writing is therapeutic. It gets things out of my head so I can then move on, like removing the pressure of a thought.
Writing has always been a huge part of my life (at least it has been a huge portion of my life when calculating the numbers of my life I’ve spent doing in :).
As a student in high school, I double-booked my classes taking duel-credit courses for college, which required a lot of writing. Even the math classes had a lot of wiring. In undergraduate school, I studied history, which I will forever argue can rival any English or literature degree in terms of reading and writing requirements. We read and we read, then we wrote and we wrote and wrote some more.
Stepping out into the real world of earning a paycheck, my first office job actually didn’t include much writing. I worked with numbers all day, viewing lengthy spreadsheets and checking off calculations. I learned within the first four of working there that numbers were great, but I missed words.
Transitioning from there, my next office jobs were writing heavy. Which was good…at least most days.
Life Changes
When I became a stay-at-home mom, I knew there would be a transition. I was doubling my number of dependents, going from one child to two, and I knew that feeling of glory was going to shift. The job I left was one I candidly enjoyed, both the people
and the work itself was good for me. And I felt appreciated where I was, I felt worthwhile.
Becoming a stay-at-home mom, though it was something I wanted to do and felt that it was the right time to do, was still hard. While there are definite moments of heaven when staying at home with a newborn and a toddler, most days there isn’t much glory to be felt.
The responsibility of being a mother is one that I cherish and recognize as valuable. But despite knowing that, it is sometimes hard to feel appreciated or valued when in the trenches of motherhood. It just is.
Now, I must include that my husband tried really hard to tell me everyday how much he appreciated me and thought I was awesome. He saw my struggles, and always tried to lift me up. He still does.
But despite my husband’s authentic appreciation, the daily routine of making food, doing dishes, washing laundry, sweeping the floor, cleaning hands and faces, changing diapers, changing outfits from toddler accidents, and on the list goes – that daily routine left me feeling almost without a purpose.
I do not know if I felt that way because people I knew and respected thought I could do so much more with my life than sit at home caring for my little kids, or if I felt trapped being where I was physically and financially without feeling like I was helping to change that. As a country kid at heart, living in town weighed heavily on my emotions, and without bringing in my portion of income, I wasn’t helping to get my family out of town like I so desperately wanted.
I imagine both thoughts looped in to drag me down occasionally.
But writing — again, the writing — has always been a source of comfort to me. Writing seems to give me purpose, even when I’m just off on a tangent on an eight-page Word doc. There is always something grounding about putting words on paper.
In my juggle adjusting to in town living and being a stay-at-home mom, I found writing brought me a form of clarity. Clarity of what I saw, clarity on how I felt about what I saw, and clarity about what I wanted in the future.
This brought me to creating my blog.
Falling Short
You have to take a step in the form of trying in order to slip and fall.
Thoughts of someday starting a blog began for me in 2017, but it wasn’t until 2022 that I actually put down the money to purchase a website domain and begin blogging.
Which sounds really exciting, right?
But as most adults have come to realize, the phrase “and the rest is history” romanticizes life as much as “and they lived happily ever after” romanticizes marriage. There are a lot of ups and downs in any history, and the same was true for my blog.
Within a year of starting out, I gave birth to my third child. Now my husband and I were outnumbered. Balancing the needs of a newborn plus my other two children, along with the rest of life, not to mention learning how to maneuver a website, as well as writing and editing the content of the website became overwhelming.
I began falling short in a lot of areas.
My house suffered, often only getting tidied rather than cleaned. And my blog right out of the gate didn’t get the time and focus I wish it was getting.
And the falling behind and dragging to keep up has only gotten worse.
Between being a mama of three, juggling the individual needs of my children (including offering one-on-one learning and fun time with each of them), trying to raise a garden, trying to can and store away foods from the garden, focusing on eating healthy whole food meals that my young children will actually eat, playing with my wood pile in an attempt to build rustic household furniture, being a supportive wife, and still trying to write this blog – the feeling of being overwhelmed has been growing constant.
Getting even just six to seven hours of sleep at night has become an issue (and I am an eight hours of sleep kind of person.)
I have been pulling myself so many different directions, that I haven’t been doing any of it well. This told me I needed to make a change.
A change in how many projects I am trying to tackle, how many directions I pull myself. A change in my perspective regarding what really needs to be done. A change in priorities.
What Stays and What Goes
As I came to the realization, or rather determination, that something in my life needed to give, I began wondering if perhaps this blog was that thing that need to go, at least for a time.
I haven’t been a consistent writer. With the endless list of everything else demanding my attention, coupled with the limited noise level I need in order to focus and write that rarely comes in a household of littles, my writing has been sporadic, inconsistent, and often incomplete. Not to mention how working through the minor but many technology pieces within the website in order to get even a single article posted has been its own headache roller coaster.
Perhaps the best thing to do , I thought, was to set my blog aside and come back to it in a few years when the kids are a little older and we’ve finally “settled down.” Surely life gets a little simpler once you own your own home and the kids are all in kindergarten.
Right???
Well, as wonderful of a dream it is that life will eventually slow down, I don’t quite buy the story. I have had far too many elderly and middle-aged mothers and fathers tell me that life just gets busier. And I imagine they are right. I imagine life will just be busy and crazy for a long, long time – perhaps forever. The busy won’t change, just the form of the busy.
“…a renewed attitude can do amazing things.”
Rather than quit this thing I basically just started, I am instead deciding to adjust my expectations for myself.
Previously, I have had the goal to post an article every single week. Ha Haha. That goal has been preposterous as a starting goal, and has been a total fail as I have only met that goal one month out of 18. A pretty sad accomplishment streak.
But a renewed attitude can do amazing things.
That said, I am making new commitments. Commitments to take baby steps, and be okay taking baby steps.
Commitments to focus on me a little more, and worry about all the extra stuff a little less. A commitment to write more, to carve out more time to put thoughts to paper, and a commitment to post more so my thumb drive doesn’t continue to clutter with half-drafted articles.
A commitment to find relief through writing, and not through giving it up. Afterall, I really don’t want to quit this thing now when I am just getting started! ♥
