In 2019, I was constantly in motion. Rising early to beat the call of “Mommy!”; gulping down hot coffee; speeding to school pickup; racing through bedtime stories only to crash into bed, exhausted.
My planner — bursting with appointments, birthdays, tasks and deadlines — was my compass. I scrawled my dreams in the margins.
I poured myself into motherhood and writing. Scrimped on sleep, self-care. I wanted to do it all and do it well. I couldn’t let anyone down. At this I did not succeed, yet I kept moving.
Somewhere in the middle of all this chasing, I lost my footing. I forgot why I was running. Did I really need to run?
Weary, I slowed my pace to walk.
One day, I found myself child-free in the wilderness. Into the woods I walked. Over the mountains. Into a clearing.
Violet and indigo mountains scraped the sky and my feet kissed the edge of a frozen lake. All was quiet, save for my heart’s heavy beating. The alpine air smelled brand new.
I looked down and my feet, my tired feet and nearly jumped. Tiny cracks etched in ice echoed modern art.
How had I missed this?
I wonder what else we miss by failing to shift our perspective. By forgetting to stand still.
Hiking boots rooted to the earth, I thought of poet Mary Oliver, who urged us to
“Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.”
This year, I want to notice the beauty lingering at my feet. Matchbox cars and Legos, but also holy play and happy chaos. Tiny toes and big feelings? The gift of good health and togetherness. Cookie crumbs as sweet memories. Spilled milk as Grace abundant.
I won’t forget that moment in the wilderness. Filling up. Seeing. Letting go.
In 2020, my intention is to stop and pay attention. To the ones I love. To the world around me. To small steps on the greater journey. To the beating of my heart.
First things first, you pack your hiking boots, your books, your laptop and your notebook. Make that two notebooks. Plenty of pens, six pairs of socks, underwear, toothpaste and a toothbrush. Two sweaters, four long-sleeve shirts, four pairs of pants. The readings for your workshop, hot off the printer. Cash you forgot to get cash (you will get that at the airport). You tuck away your fear — fear of dying, fear of heights, fear of rape — in the side pocket, next to your hairbrush. Your unearth your winter hat and gloves, and just in case a pair of snow pants. Add courage alongside your laptop in your carry-on backpack. Make sure you have your chargers. Your suitcase is too heavy; you extract three books.
Last but not least “photo of your family” is on the list and you realize you don’t have an updated one in print. You decide the photos on your phone will suffice. (Note to self: Do *not* lose your phone.) You look at your packing list, most items checked off and a few abandoned (you have a tendency to overpack), and wonder if there is anything else you can take to prepare yourself for the journey. This your first pilgrimage to a destination you’ve dreamed of visiting since you were 20.
You’re traveling solo.
Heading into the dark to meet your airport taxi, you worry that maybe you should have brought your son and husband. You think this as you set your suitcase on the security belt, settle into your window seat, step off the bus in an unfamiliar city.
A day later you’ve arrived. No one knows you (yet), and unpacking your boots, books, laptop and notebooks, you feel the chill of sweat down your spine. You question whether you have the capacity to summon the story inside you. To enter the wilderness on your own.
In the library you find a book of poetry by Christine Valters Paintner. You flip to the middle, her words ring out sharp and strong: “This is a voyage best made alone.” You know what you need to do. You pick up the pen and begin.
The blare of my alarm snaps me out of a dream. Eyes half-shut, I roll over to silence it, then consider my options. If I get up now, I can write. Maybe. There’s always a chance I could wake my son, a light sleeper, and lose the gift of time. Or I can sink back under the covers and steal another hour of delicious rest. The rhythmic drone of my husband’s snore propels me out of bed. Today I rise.
Step one: Shower. I creep across our creaky floorboards, steal into the bathroom and twist on the squeaky faucet. “Shit,” I mutter, then mouth a prayer: please please please don’t let him wake up, God, just let me have this morning for myself. I’ll be extra good today, I promise. I step in the shower. Scalding water washes over me and baptizes me with possibility. Next: Soap. Rinse. Dry. Dress.
Step two: Coffee, mixed with a dash of cream. I tip-toe into the kitchen, retrieve my mug, the one with a pug on it, then pour the time-brewed coffee into my cup. The aroma of blonde roast fills my lungs and rouses my sleepy mind. I take a sip and savor the just-right temperature. Pure delight.
Step three: Write. I sit at a spare desk in our family’s dining room, coffee on my left and a ticking clock to the right. The time reads 6:20 a.m. I glance at my son’s door. If I’m lucky, I can eke out 40 minutes of writing before he wakes up. I flip open my laptop and begin.
When I became a mother, I needed writing because it allowed to grapple with the giant identity shift happening inside of me. My too-big emotions and broken, achy body overwhelmed me. Psychiatrists call this matrescence, a period in a woman’s life when her body and mind transition to a new role — caretaker. In those early days, I hard and fast, scrawling out ideas before my son summoned me for another feeding.
Bleary-eyed and tired, I wrote sporadically. Yet I kept returning to my journal because it both grounded me and brought me back to life. Etching out my story helped me stitch together the woman I was before giving birth with the woman I was becoming. Sharing it online with others — on my blog and eventually in other publications helped me feel less alone.
Two and a half years later, I sit at my desk, clicking letters and letting my thoughts play out on the screen.
What’s different is that the season of motherhood allows me the semblance of a writing routine. A few days a week, whenever everyone is healthy, I rise early to brainstorm, blog or tackle freelance assignments.
The fact remains: I still need writing like I need water. If I go too long without it, I feel parched.
On the page I belong to no one but myself. There’s no crying to comfort, no milk to fetch, no bottoms to wipe. No texts to return, emails to answer, calls to make. Here I am nothing and I am everything. Line by line, I uncover my identities — wife, mother, sister, daughter, employee, neighbor, friend, believer.
This month I published an essay that brought me to head to head with the crushing weight of my motherly worry. In the midst of a story swimming in fear, my editor noticed a different narrative. She pushed me to resurrect the carefree girl inside of me, the girl I was before I became mother. So I wrote a new scene, and in doing so I discovered this:
“There’s a girl inside of me who loves roller coasters and waterparks and white water rafting, who dreams of visiting Sweden and the Grand Canyon, who’s always up for a little mischief. She runs simply to feel the power of her legs and the wind in her hair. She isn’t plagued by the past or preoccupied with the future. She sees every day as a grand adventure.
She’s brave and afraid. She’s rooted and restless. She boldly pursues what sets her heart on fire. And she’s still here now, aching for a chance to shine. All this time I spent consumed with caring for my son made me forget.”
I stop typing for a moment and sip my coffee. Writing that scene brought me to tears. It reminded me that my identity isn’t just wrapped up in protecting my son. I realized something so important: I need to teach him to live too.
These days, with my son, I’m all in and hands-off. We do more exploring together — last weekend he biked a new path at the forest preserve as my husband and I walked alongside him — and I encourage him to explore on his own. (He’s older and stronger than when I first drafted that essay, so I’ve taken a considerable step back at the playground.) What I’m most grateful for is that writing gifted me with a breakthrough off the page. My prayer for whatever I publish is that my story might someone else with a breakthrough or moment of recognition too.
Fingers to keyboard, pen to paper, I record, reflect, discover. Motherhood unearthed in me a desire to share my stories, but writing, in turn, helps me be a more thoughtful mother.
I hear my son rustling so I only have a moment left at my desk. I save my work and shut my laptop. Tomorrow I will rise again and write — like a mother.
I don’t think anyone can fully prepare you for how pivotal it is to become a mother. It’s not that they don’t try. In fact, when you’re expecting, you may find everyone from your great aunt to your coworkers to well-meaning strangers dole out parenting advice. Whether they’re parents or not, many know the searing ache, the bliss of parenthood from their own lives and feel the significance of this new chapter of life of which you’re on the brink.
The journey to parenthood is in and of itself a new chapter, one that for many women and men is full of hopes and heartache. I remember this pain well. Several summers ago, while vacationing with dear friends from college and their families, I stood sobbing in a bathroom stall, wracked with envy. The only childless couple on the trip, my husband and I watched as their beautiful children shared hugs, spread joy and spilled Cheerios.
At the time, we were months into trying for our first child, and it wasn’t going great. For one, after months off birth control, my hormones were all out of wack. Getting pregnant was supposed to be easy, I thought. But now, at 30, it had become clear conceiving a child was much more calculated than others let on. I worried that my body was failing me. I worried we’d waited too long. I worried that my deepest fear — that we wouldn’t be able to have a child — might be true. Over that long weekend, while I observed my friends love on their littles, the thought that dominated my consciousness was, “I want that. Badly.”
Little did I know, I had that. I was actually pregnant with my son, and the hormones were making me tired beyond belief and weepy. The next chapter of my life was already underway.
Flash forward to today. Today is Mother’s Day, and I am actually spending part of it alone in a Starbucks writing. Time alone is a true gift for mothers of small children like myself. It’s what I asked my husband for this holiday, and he graciously granted my request.
Now I am two years and counting into motherhood and feel like an old veteran. I know this sense of security is sketchy at best. Like the time after my son began sleeping through the night consistently, but then began to act — as toddlers often do — in new, headstrong ways. Because I’ve been there before, I know I’ll forever be encountering new challenges and delights. Or, as my coworker and friend Karen says, “Bigger kids, bigger problems.” The constant change of motherhood is exhilarating and unnerving.
But going from expecting to birthing a baby, that change, that new chapter of life is monumental. And not just because your baby is changing. You are too. Those early, grueling months of learning to change diapers and feed a baby on demand are a time of becoming.
In her piece, “The Birth of A Mother,” reproductive psychiatrist Alexandra Sacks says it’s “an identity shift, and one of the most significant psychical and psychological changes a woman will ever experience.” I read this piece weeks into new motherhood, and it brought me so much peace and clarity, I teared up. This year I even had the privilege to interview Sacks for an article I wrote for The Everymom. When we spoke, Sacks said it’s time for us to shed light on this major life transition so that new moms know they’re not alone in their mixed feelings.
I only need look back on my posts from the early days of my son’s life — when caring for a newborn was all consuming, when sleep was a battle, when I felt a love so strong it scared me (still does) — to know the weight of learning to mother.
One of my favorite writers, Shauna Niequist, begins her book, Present Over Perfect naming a period in her adulthood in which she experienced dramatic change as a “sea-change, the journey from one way of living to another.”
And that’s exactly what happens when you become a mother. With a newborn in your arms you toss all your old habits and ways of living out the window and learn to live with and care for another person. Your person. You are no longer alone. You trade freedom for a new way of living. You are a mom! Niequist goes on to say this about her major life transition:
“This is a love story, like all my favorite stories. It’s a story about letting yourself be loved, in all your imperfect, scarred, non-spectacular glory. And it’s about the single most profound life change I’ve yet encountered.”
–Shauna Niequist
I could say the same about my motherhood journey. And I’ll add this: loving my son was the most profound life change I’ve yet encountered. Being his mom is one of my life’s greatest love stories, and it’s still unfolding.
About a month before I gave birth to my son, I started this blog. Since 2008, after I graduated from college and became enamored with blogs, I wanted to have my own. I made a few feeble attempts at blogging over the years but in December 2016 I finally committed. In committing to this blog, I not only committed to writing, I committed to myself, to my story. I was beginning to believe that my words might matter to others.
Then, in January 2017, Jack was born and writing our story has been a tool for me to process, heal, share and reflect on all the highs and lows I’ve encountered throughout motherhood. What a gift to be a mother-writer, what an incredible gift. I look back and see my journey of becoming is written in my heart and on the page — of this blog, my journal, other publications.
In writing through motherhood and sharing it with others, I’ve connected with many other parents — a great blessing. Parents of older children often respond to my stories with comments such as, “Savor it!” and “This time goes so fast.” God, if they only knew just how much I agreed with them.
I’m doing everything in my power to savor this time, even when it’s boring (ever watched three episodes of Umizoomi in a row or cluster-fed a hangry newborn?) or hard to be present (when you have a million deadlines to worry about at work and dirty dishes piled up in the sink). That’s exactly why I’m writing through motherhood — so I can remember it. And give thanks for it. Also: I want others to remember too. Ultimately, when I give birth to a story and offer it up to others, I want it to be a gift that they might use to claim their stories as well.
My friend and writing mentor, author Callie Feyen wrote this about her daughter, “I am a writer because of her not in spite of her.” This resonated deeply with me. When I finally took ownership of my identity as a writer — when I realized I wasn’t just a journalist, I had my own stories to tell — was, consequently, when I became a mother. For that, I am deeply grateful.
Know what I realized lately? So much of the creative process (and life) is about getting out of your head and following your heart.
Noticing your inner critic—who says you can’t make anything original/you’re not talented/you don’t have a story to tell/you can’t finish that project/etc.—and flipping her script. Talking back, then moving ahead.
Wanna try it?
Repeat after me: I am original, creative and talented. I have a story to tell. I have something to say.
Be your own cheerleader. It’s that simple.
It’s time for some spring cleaning: Let go of the clutter and negative noise crowding up your head space. Replace it with something powerful and beautiful instead.
The world has enough angry voices shouting for our attention. How can you give yourself a little more love today?
Writing is a lot like yoga. Want to do crow pose? You have to put in time on the mat before taking flight. So you practice & practice & practice. You come to your mat and put in the work. It takes courage. Discipline. Some days you fall. Some days it seems like you’re never going to reach it—you tell yourself you’re not good enough, it’s too hard, you just don’t have the coordination. But you keep showing up. You keep trying.
One day you decide to test your balance. So you lift one foot. Then the other. And suddenly, for a moment, you start to fly. The more you practice, the easier it gets, and soon you’ve mastered the pose and you’re moving on to other, more challenging inversions—side crow & hurdler’s pose & headstand.
Want to get published? Keep writing. Keep coming back to your notebook, your keyboard, even your smartphone and put in the work. Keep showing up. I have dozens of half finished essays, half baked blog posts and rejected submissions in my files. I know it stinks getting rejected. I know how hard it is to silence your inner critic who says you aren’t really an artist. I know what it’s like to be afraid, to stall.
Today I received some good news; today I felt as if I might be starting to to take flight. I know I’m not there yet, but I’m making progress. And I’m more determined than ever to keep writing.
So I’m saying this to you as much as it is a reminder to myself: Keep practicing. Keep trying. Keep showing up. One day you’ll surprise yourself and soar.
Writing is a lot like yoga. Want to do crow pose? You have to put in time on the mat before taking flight. So you practice & practice & practice. You come to your mat and put in the work. It takes courage. Discipline. Some days you fall. Some days it seems like you’re never going to reach it—you tell yourself you’re not good enough, it’s too hard, you just don’t have the coordination. But you keep showing up. You keep trying.
Erin Strybis 