It's 1 a.m. and after weeks, maybe even months, of considering this, I've made the decision to jump head first into an irrational sea teeming with thousands of others throwing caution to the wind and giving the virtual public a look into their deeper selves.
Like so many other writers out there looking for their own corner of the Internet, I'm a stay-at-home mom. It wasn't always this way. I had a career, and still do to a degree, in community journalism.
Tough choices needed to be made when our family grew and I opted to try my best to contribute to the bills by freelancing for my colleagues. Instead of spending bath time at board meetings and breakfast with my nose in my email, I opted for motherhood — the morning fight to get our 2-year-old to wear anything but her pajamas, a daily wrestling match with our 14-month-old that others call "diaper changes" and wondering why the house is a disaster at the end of the day despite my marathon cleaning efforts.
There are a lot of days when I think I made the wrong choice. My daughters give me a reason to keep breathing, so don't think for a moment I would rather spend 60 or 80 hours in an office or holed up in a room in my house with my laptop trying to make sense of notes I took in my own version of shorthand. Simply put, there are days I miss the stress of the office where I could just get up and walk away for 10 or 15 minutes and come back refreshed. When your work is your home and children, though ... the stress follows you around asking for more milk or dancing monkeys or a damn unicorn.
Then there are moments like right this second. The moment in the middle of the night when one of them wakes up and all you have to do is hold them and the smell of your skin, the beating of your heart, is all they need. No unicorns necessary. No jumping through hoops to make them laugh. All they need is you. I've come to live for these moments.
It makes the lack of IRA contributions seem irrelevant
And that last paragraph is why we have made the choices we've made... I relate so well. I look forward to watching your journey unfold, Miranda. I wish you one full of adventure, heart and the many blessings that come from opening your heart. Raising my glass to you!
ReplyDeleteThank you so much, Roni! You are such an inspiration and I'm so happy to have you in my life. I haven't put personal writings out there in quite a long time, not since I was pregnant with Josie and writing a regular column for the paper, so this is a new beginning of sorts for me. <3
DeleteYou will probably always be a journalist if it's in your blood and you will always be a mother. I think it's great the way you can keep at it full time at one vocation and then yet keep your hand involved in the other. In a few years like it or not, the little ones will be going to school and then you will have more free time on your hands again.
ReplyDeleteI try not to think about them going off to school, but I know it's inevitable. When the time comes, I'll have to reevaluate, again, the plan. <3
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