My life in extremes: 18 months in parenting + publishing

Five weird milestones of blurred emotional lines and big feelings

First of all, a big THANK YOU for all of the love on last week’s post revealing the cover of my book and officially opening pre-orders! It was incredibly cool (to say the least) to welcome all of you into the next stage of this process—and your kind words and support meant so, so much.

MY BOOK HAS A COVER... AND YOU CAN PRE-ORDER IT!

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When you become a parent, you anticipate a lot of changes. Adjustments. Transitions. Discomfort. Our families are different and our littles ones are different—plus, we are all (obviously) super different as individuals—so those things don’t show up quite the same for any of us, but they show up nonetheless.

At the beginning of 2024, I knew to expect them.

I’m a girl who likes to be prepared and hates to feel silly, so I tried to have a highly reasonable, realistic picture of what my life might look like once I became a mom.

In some ways, the real-life version of that picture matched what I’d prepared for. In others, it completely missed the mark. Much of the disconnect was, of course, due to the sheer newness of the whole experience. But there were also a couple of things in the early days that I never could have seen coming: things in my professional life that unfolded in weird parallel to Will’s big introduction to the world and how it rocked mine. This trend has continued until this very moment.

Technically, Too Blessed to Stress’s journey to publication began well before my son arrived, but my writing career really did shift into a new gear once he’d made his presence known.

I’ll break down some of the major milestones and how they played out across these two major segments of my life shortly, but in the meantime, a few general thoughts about the extremes I’ve been navigating for the last eighteen months:

• As always when I write about parenthood, I want to make it clear that I am incredibly grateful for the chance to be Will’s mom. Few conversations are more sensitive (and understandably so) than those related to building and growing our families. I respect that—and I also respect that there are huge differences in the way we parent and experience our children when we do have them. I hope you’ll return the favor!

• Like (I think) most parents who have jobs beyond (the truly hardest job of) parenting, I had high hopes that I would be able to master the art of compartmentalization. I’d heard from enough working mom veterans to know that “work/life balance” is kind of a myth, but I was hopeful that I could figure out a rhythm that would work for my family. I realize that working as a freelancer with a ~portfolio career~ of sorts means that I approach this in a unique way that has both pluses (ex. flexibility) and minuses (ex. I started working again less than two weeks after my son was born).

• It’s all felt so extreme and polarized: seriously high (if also majorly stressful) turning points in a writing career that I quite literally have always dreamed of, happening simultaneously with majorly stressful (if often joyful) rites of passage in parenthood that I didn’t even know I could or should dream about. Trust me: I’ve been talking about it a lot in therapy.

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There have been a lot of moments along the way that have felt very confusing, but I’ve picked a couple of the biggies that really stand out as major shifts in the publishing process that just so happened to take place alongside an overwhelming parenthood experience.

If you keep scrolling, I’m also opening up a little bit more about the bizarre emotional ride happening behind the scenes…