In the summer of 2008, I was a young mother already somehow feeling old, as if my career potential had already been squandered, discarded in preference for starting a family in my mid-20’s. Not regretful. But certainly locked in.
Forty-three year old me looks back now at that woman and wants to scream at her that she is still, in fact, just a baby herself in many ways and that there are still many lifetimes to be lived. Forty-three year old me looks back at that woman and wants to be able to fit into her jeans.
But I digress.
Out of that yearning for something more came a reminder of a long forgotten friend who, like piano playing and going to the bathroom alone, had been lost during those seemingly endless baby days. Those days when exhaustion and joy just sort of blend together into a euphoric trance that results from far too many nights in a row spent awake with a toddler getting his two year molars combined with sitting in the sun, watching a gaggle of four year olds running around the playground as if this is all there is and life will always be fabulous.
What I missed was writing. Writing a heartfelt letter. Writing an analysis of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. Writing a report on the reliability and validity of the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scale. Writing a snarky piece for the underground school newspaper I wrote instead of attending Calculus.
Writing anything other than a grocery list, quite honestly. Anything at all.
Writing was the lifelong dream that I rarely dared to say out loud. Becoming a writer and a mother were the two callings I remember most from my earliest childhood memories. But somewhere along the way I had convinced myself that not only was writing professionally unlikely – impossible? – it was also incompatible with motherhood. And so I became an English teacher. Summers off. A schedule that would match my children’s. Tenure. A pension. Safety.
That summer began the one year countdown to my financially inevitable return to the classroom. Only I could not imagine returning. The dream of motherhood fulfilled was far more wonderful than I could have ever imagined, and I was not yet ready to relegate that part of my life to the hours before and after school. My kids had time left at home, and I was hellbent on being there for it. And taking the safe path forward no longer seemed right in the wake of the magic of being a mom.
How could this be possible – the creation of two magnificent little humans – and anything else be impossible?
So what is Resourceful Mommy? This URL, this slow-loading, more than a decade old jumble of WordPress posts, images, links, rants, heartfelt cries, snarky bits of humor – memories – is the result of that young mom, exhausted yet hopeful, taking a crack at being her whole self, her mothering self and her writing self. It’s a timeline through the years when I had so much to say that I posted three times a day and the months when I stared at the screen only to find I had no words.
Resourceful Mommy is my emotional immaturity. It is my fear. My selfishness. My joy. My faith and my lack of it. My pride. My embarrassment.
What began as a shot in the dark and a place to explore a long forgotten part of myself morphed, without much intention, into a business and a career. And now it remains as my little home on the web, my reminder of what has come and has gone and what is still yet to be.
After all, what I would love to be able to tell that young mom remains true.
There are still many lifetimes to be lived.