When I was a young mom I started the blog, Super Busy at Home, as a means to share with my extended family (who were about my only readers) about our kids and life. It was fun and kitschy.
A few years later, working at the local newspaper, I had the opportunity and good fortune to have my blog turned into a newspaper column and moms website blog. It was amazing and a lot of fun as well as a huge learning curve for me.
A few years after that I decided to stay home as a mom. Cal had just recently had some health issues and we felt it was just time. It was something new and exciting for me.
One day soon after THAT, I sat on the bathroom floor and sobbed deep, utteral sobs into a towel that one typically hides in the bathroom to do if one is a mom. And on the floor I noticed the grotesque amount of hair cemented to the tile next to the shower.
And I marked that down as yet another failure of mine. I can’t even keep a clean bathroom to come and cry in!
That was about 8 years ago. I was a mom of two. I had always dreamt my life to be one of living a corporate life in a city far away, clearly without children, living that overly romanticized life seen on Sex and the City. I had graduated college as a stockbroker and the world was my oyster. Bathroom hairballs hadn’t even been on my radar.
But God had other plans.
Instead I found myself living in a rambling home in a small city, married with two kids, and recently finding myself actually deciding and wanting to be a stay at home mom. And occassionally bathroom crying along the way. Despite the quick changing emotions and the unsteadiness of confidence, I was thrilled by my new title of SAHM: I wore those yoga pants well, but I also felt a profound sense of loss of self. Afterall, this was not who I thought I was going to be and everything about my pre-child self felt distant and compartmentalized, like those track medals from high school you put in a box and mechanically forget all about. What had happened to my dreams? I was abandoning life dreams of my old self. I was choosing to, yes, but nevertheless they were being shelved.
That bathroom moment was what shaped my website. I should say “Those” bathroom moments because I’m not pretending that there was only that one, ha. I decided there had to be a better way to be a better mom. Being super busy didn’t have to define me. True, I was always going to be super busy, but I needed to find a way to thrive in that, to find the joy in the chaos. The beauty within the busy.
As we’ve progressed on in life on things have been added, tweaked, and changed to the busy that is life. I no longer take my kids to preschool but instead we are homeschooling. Busy. Our son was diagnosed with autism and both of our children struggle with ADHD. Busy. We started traveling extensively and have now been to 30 states. Busy.
Along the road of writing for so long I think it is only natural to kind of come derailed or disconnected from the purpose that the blog started. After all, I am not a stagnate being but a living, breathing, ever changing person.
And so in 2018 I changed the blog from “Super Busy at Home” to “Our Wonder Collective”. We were going to document all of the wonder we collected, my sails were filled with the winds of change and I was excited once again to be writing. We were going to focus more on travel and less on being at home.
Well, that was the idea at the time. Like that stockbroker thing, that kind of got chucked out the window.
Enter 2019. Emma was accepted into a pre-professional dance company. We had to sign a contract, limiting her amount of absences and suddenly faced a huge barrier to having a travel website. Next I took a new part time position which would also greatly reduce the amount of travel we would be able to do. I struggled with the thought of how does one maintain a travel website when one no longer can just pick up and go? Is that even a thing? Fake traveling?
Also, with the new job came the same feelings I had found myself when I first stayed home. I was able to work mostly from home but again, giving up an identity that I had found so much value in for myself. So now I was going from being a SAHM to a WAHM…goodbye yoga pants and hello ponte pants. It was hard and painful. I cried a lot. I always knew I would go back to work but not yet, not like this, not with the kids so young.
I also have found myself in the sea of juggling and struggling. How do you make it all work? How do you save money as quickly as possible? How do you plan for holidays and events so they don’t sneak up on you and end up being a thrown together mess? How does one homeschool, work, and somehow still feed your family something that resembles something that isn’t Cheerios? How do you cook dried beans in an Instant Pot? All of these questions smooshed into my mind.
And so…earlier this year, 2019 I went back to my roots, “Super Busy at Home” to contain all of this juggling. I want to be here to encourage you to love your home. To love your busy. There is beauty within the busy because, in the end aren’t we busy because we are surrounded by family and blessings to take care of?
From the dawn of my hobby blog to today, a living and breathing website, Facebook has emerged, as well as all of the other social medias which I feel anchor us so much to the unholy standard of mothering perfection. I do not believe God desires for us to spend masses of our minutes scrolling through other peoples feeds, all the while constructing a standard of perfection upon which we are convinced we must hold ourselves to. We are a mess, I am a mess, we are busy, and no one has time for that. It is time to be real, to be together, to be one in our messiness and busy. And to daily make the decision to search out the beauty and the truth.
I know I cannot be the only one juggling with all of these things and so, if you are feeling this way too, then you are in the right spot. This is a safe place, friend. A place where we come together to swap secrets and tell our secret thoughts (like no, I’m not happy all of the time my son has autism and sometimes I wish we didn’t homeschool). And why are these kids so snarky all of the time? How did they learn that? ha.
I hope you leave here loving your husband a bit more (even though maybe sometimes you want to not go home from Target). Or maybe you’ll leave this page and look at the dishes with a heart of gratitude instead of disgust…life is about seeing past the mess to see the full tummies and warm meal that the dishes represent. I believe there’s beauty within all the busy if we decide to look around and find it.
Your super busy can be a busy that is super.
