Now My Life Can Begin

In less than two weeks I will have been a stay at home mom for 12 months.  I quit my job so that I could raise my sweet baby girl (who is still sweet, but not so much of a baby anymore) and begin my journey of trying to get noticed in the publishing world.  However, I have learned that life doesn’t exactly always go the way that you have planned.  This is something I had an idea of before, but having a child will definitely make it real to you.  My experience in the corporate world wasn’t always predictable, but there were a few things that I could always (for the most part) count on:  a paycheck, a lunch break and a yearly review.  Not so much with motherhood.

It all started with a positive pregnancy test after 2 ½ years of trying.  It was a week before we were supposed start adoption classes.  My pregnancy was anything but ordinary due to a chronic, painful medical condition called interstitial cystitis.  The pregnancy part ended with having a c-section because Alexandria was breeched.  No one ever tells you about c-section recovery, but I am telling you it sucks.  Big time.  It took a lot longer and was a lot more painful than I thought it would be.  I remember a mom I knew telling me that I would be bored the first six months of Alexandria’s life.  Boredom was definitely not in the cards for me.  I had a baby who was colicky and had reflux.  She slept in a swing while swaddled the first three months of her life.  The only way I could get her to take naps was to hold her while she slept.  I had to do this for eight to nine months.  I also had to hold her before she went to bed so she could fall asleep.  The entire time I was thinking “I am a failure”, “I am not doing anything I said I would be doing” without realizing I was doing the most important thing in the world, raising an amazing little girl. 

When I finally got my life back, so to speak, I jumped in with both feet.  I was ready to get wet.  In January 2012 I began to start an art community with a friend at church.  The response has been amazing.  Never in a million years would I have thought that I would ever do live paintings in front of the church while the pastor was preaching, but I have done this four times in the past four months.  We are having our first art show with 13 participants this month.  I also started a study on the book of Joshua in my mom’s group at church which I both wrote and led.  I am encouraged and supported by an amazing group of women.  I owe a lot of my sanity as a new mom to them.  I have begun working on my novels again.  One of my friends, a former journalist for the Courier Journal, edited my two finished novels.  I am looking forward to spending the summer doing my final editing and sending the books out to publishers.

The funny thing is that I finally feel like I am able to “start my life” so to speak, but in the back of my mind while I’m doing all of these things all I can think about is that sweet baby girl sleeping in her crib.  It’s times like these I realize my life really began almost 11 ½ months ago on May 20, 2012 when I held that red faced, smashed nosed, wriggling baby in my arms.  My life will never be the same.  And I don’t want it to be.  And that’s completely unexpected.