On growing up and making friends

I wrote this last week. Enjoy!

Yesterday, as I was picking Lily up from a friend's house after teaching flute lessons, we started talking. At some point I told her, "I am just waiting for my life to finally start." 

She said, "This is it."

True. This is it. This is my life, warts and all. I really do have some wonderful things going for me, and I couldn't be happier with my family. I have the best husband and daughters a girl could ever want. They far surpass my wildest dreams. 

I am not sure what I even mean when I say I am waiting for my life to start. I talked with Robbie about this early this morning to try to figure it out. I suppose I am waiting for a time where we'll mostly just be able to coast along without any huge worries or burdens. I expect that we'll have trials along the way, but I guess I have this naive idea that perhaps we'll get to this point where things won't feel so overwhelming. 

Sometimes I look around at other people and think that they are doing so well. They seem to have it all together. I realize what I am seeing is what they WANT me to see. Most people do not care to air their dirty laundry. Most people want to look good. And a lot of the time, at least I do this, we are comparing our private worst with others' public best. I don't know what anyone else is struggling with. I know everyone has to have something. I sometimes wonder how others are doing and how they feel about how they are doing. 

On an unrelated note, I think I am finally starting to accept the fact that I am a wife and mother. I think I have been resisting this fact for awhile. Instead of a mother, I felt like a girl who just happened to have a baby. Now I have babies. Instead of a wife, I felt like a girl that just happened to have a husband. I resisted doing responsible and grown-up MOTHERY type things. For example, a lot of adults do the grown-up thing and put their dishes in the dishwasher immediately after eating. Well, poo on that. That was a loathsome chore of mine growing up. I still haven't gotten the hang of that. Some people do dishes after each meal and especially after dinner. Yuck. My method of doing dishes has always been when the sink gets full, do them. Usually I have to do them once or twice a day when I get a spare 10-20 minutes. I have always lacked discipline when Robbie is home because I would much rather spend my time with him than doing icky responsible things like doing dishes or folding laundry. But with two kiddos now, I sorta have to do icky responsible things when he is home or we will be overcome with dishes and laundry. 

Something else has happened to me too. It started about the last two weeks during my pregnancy with Kimberly. I've been baking. Yes. Me. Baking. I don't recognize myself! Just tonight I baked two loaves of pumpkin bread for MOPS tomorrow AND I didn't procrastinate. What's up with that? I won't be running around like a crazy person in the morning trying to bake pumpkin bread. It's done. Who is this lady that has taken over my body?

MOPS. What is MOPS? It stands for Moms of Pre-schoolers. It's sort of like play group, only some other people watch the kiddos while the mamas get together for talking, breakfast and fellowship. I have been twice so far and love it. I have felt the need to try to make mom friends, and this seems to be a good way. I feel kind of like a loser saying this, but my best mom friend from church moved away several months ago, and I still have a vacancy. I'm not very good at allowing people to get close to me, but I feel like we became really good friends. Now I miss her like crazy. I need a new mom friend to hang out with again. I am accepting applications! 

You win some. You lose some.

When I first started my doula journey, I started a new blog specifically for my doula journey. I needed a place to process all of the thoughts and feelings I was experiencing that was specific to my doula work. Here is an excerpt of my most recent experience. 

One of the hard parts of being a doula is losing business to friends. I had my first experience in the past several days of being one of two doulas a couple interviewed where the other doula was a friend of mine that I really admire. I admire her so much that I asked her to be my doula at my own birth two months ago. She is fantastic at her job and just and all around amazing person. I knew that as soon as I found out they were interviewing her that I had no chance. Thankfully I asked her after my interview with them whether or not they were interviewing her as well, so that I could rock my interview. I did the best I could with the knowledge that I had. I felt a connection with them, at least on my end, and I hoped they felt it too. A few days later I received and emailed from the mom saying she was going to interview one or two more doulas to get a feel for it all and then let me know something later. I appreciated the fact that she didn't leave me hanging, but I knew what she was truly saying. We weren't a good fit. I was disappointed, but I couldn't squash that last bit of hope I had left that maybe I was just being negative. I decided to ask my friend if they were interviewing her and she said yes. I had that, "Dadgummit!" feeling you get when you know that you are out of the game. The hope remained even though I knew they would hire her on the spot. How could they not? She's amazing.

Continue reading here. 

Should I even bother to try again?

You know how you have an amazing blog post written out and ready to publish, and it just disappears never to be seen or heard from again? Yeah. That just happened. And, yes, I am crying about it. I don't even cry like this over spilt breast milk. It's not because I am still in the postpartum period either. This silly little blog means something to me. When I write something that I feel like I wrote from my heart and it disappears, it really hurts me. It feels like I lost my journal in a fire even though, believe it or not, my journal contains things I won't even post here. This is public after all. I am a pretty open book, but there are still things that I keep to myself. My husband would disagree, but really, I don't bare it ALL. 

I happened to tell my husband a little bit about the post this morning as we were getting ready for church. I told him about it because I was proud of it and couldn't wait for him to read it. I don't know if he reads my blog very much, but there are some posts that I ask him to read. This was going to be one of them. I waited all day to be able to use the laptop to transfer the post to my blog. Usually I write posts in the notes section on my phone and then email to myself. I will copy and paste it from my email to my blog after that. So that's where I was in the process. I was just about to email it to myself when I blinked, and it was gone. I touched nothing. It just disappeared for no reason. A cruel fluke. I tried restarting my phone. It didn't helped. I did a search for it. Nothing. I cried and cried as I tried other things to try to locate my work to no avail. 

Robbie came out of the bedroom to try to convince me to re-write it. He said he was looking forward to reading it and wanted me to try. I think it's sweet that he says he wants to read it and that he is encouraging me to try. I have my doubts. I just can't recreate what I wrote the first time. I'm not really a writer, so when I get little inspirations every now and then, it's a now or never sort of thing. I haven't decided if I will try again. I'm not sure if I want to waste my time on it when it just won't be the same. 

And of course I am probably making it sound way better than it was. To me, it was one of my best, most heartfelt blog posts. The funny thing is, when I feel so good about them, they don't get very many page views. Not that I am going for page views here, but it is slightly annoying that my stupid posts seem to get tons more traffic than my heartfelt ones or the ones that actually mean something to me. 

I just don't know what I want to do. I feel like Jo in Little Women when Amy threw her manuscript in the fire. Jo was able to recreate her work because she was a writer. I am just a girl who has a blog. A silly little blog that means something to her. 

I'm tired now and ready to go to bed, so it is too late to try to re-write it tonight. I think I will sleep on it and see how I feel in the morning. Things usually seem a little better after a good night's sleep. 

So what do you think? Should I bother? Should I try again? Have you ever lost a piece of writing that meant something to you? Did you try to re-write it?