filling the silence in the motherhood discussion
As the New Year begins and everyone around you is posting about goals for the year ahead, do you find it hard to envision a future that doesn’t include children?
This is the topic for this week’s Whiny Wednesday:
Feeling lost
Tell us what’s going on with you.
As the New Year begins and everyone around you is posting about goals for the year ahead, do you find it hard to envision a future that doesn’t include children?
This is the topic for this week’s Whiny Wednesday:
Feeling lost
Tell us what’s going on with you.
I’m so excited!
After more than a year of writing and editing, the final ebook in the Life Without Baby series came out today.
Thriving in a New Happily Ever After is all about rediscovering who you used to be and figuring out who you are now and where you’re going next. It’s packed with exercises and tools to help you visualize the future and take the first small steps forward to finding you again.
The book is available now on Amazon.com. If you don’t have an e-reader, you can a download free Kindle app onto any device or computer from here. All the books are also available as downloadable PDFs at Gumroad.com.
A big thanks to everyone who has supporting me in this project and especially to Kathleen, who helped me throughout the whole series with her brilliant editing and proofing skills. I quite honestly could not have done it without her or you.
By Lisa Manterfield
Oh my goodness! What a nutty couple of weeks. There I was, all set for my traditional “summer’s over, time to get back to business” post when suddenly the comments stopped working.
Of course, it was right before the long Labor Day weekend, so any tech experts were busy flipping burgers, their phones and email either turned off or vehemently ignored. I sweated, I panicked, I considered trying to fix it myself based on an assumption of what I thought was wrong.
Instead, I took a breath and reminded myself of what I so often preach:
It will be okay. It will get fixed, even if it’s not today and even if it’s not how I’d envisioned. In the end, one way or another, it will all work out.
And here we are. Everything is back to normal and all is right in this corner of my world again. It turns out that our little community has been around so long that it outgrew some of its technology. We’re all up-to-date now and should remain that way, knock on wood.
So, if you were frustrated, cursing, and muttering my name under your breath as you tried and failed to jump into a conversation, I apologize and I really appreciate your patience. Here are the posts you missed if you want to jump in now.
On Monday, I wrote about the Ring Theory in How Not to Say the Wrong Thing.
Whiny Wednesday’s topic was the thorny issue of making new friends when you don’t move in the mommy circles.
And on Friday, Kathleen, wrote about assumptions and pressure in her post about Being Blessed with Children.
Normal service will resume on Whiny Wednesday this week.
In other news, I spent much of the summer working on the final book in the Life Without Baby ebook series and it comes out next week!
Thriving in a New Happily Ever After is all about embracing the future, rediscovering who you used to be, and taking small steps in a new direction. I didn’t want it to be another “fix your broken life now!” book and what I hope I’ve written is a gentle, encouraging “How do I get unstuck from where I am now when I have no idea which direction to head next?”
The book comes out on September 22nd and it’s available for preorder on Amazon now. I hope you’ll find it useful.
It’s December and I don’t know about you, but I can smell 2013 in the air!
I know we still have the holidays ahead, and I’m promising to get into the spirit this year, but I love the New Year and so I’m already starting to wrap up 2012 and get ready for a fresh start next month.
I tend not to hold grudges or to hold too tightly to the past. Lots of things happened this year that I wish had happened differently, but they’re over now and out of my control. I can’t change them, so I may as well pick myself up, dust myself off, and apply the valuable lessons I’ve learned from my mistakes to make sure they don’t happen again next year.
So far, my plans for 2013 include a couple of trips, some time to finish my book, some exciting projects for this site, and some deliberate “white space” on my calendar to recharge my batteries.
What about you? Are you thinking about the New Year yet? What’s on the horizon for you?
Photo Credit: Sherri Koop
Danielle LaPorte posted this inspirational article on her blog earlier this week: Soul Soup. (Keep this in mind when you’re falling apart.) Naturally, it caught my attention.
Danielle writes:
“There will be a time, a passage when you don’t really know who you were, or are, or can be. It’s natural, it’s divine, and it’s the chemistry of beautiful, awesome change.
This passage can happen in big dramatic swells, as years of not quite knowing what you want to do; or seasons of confusion that aren’t quite depressing, but confusing enough to invite sadness in. This can happen in compressed bouts of uncertainty before you do something new or monumental.”
If you’re feeling lost right now, not sure what the future holds for you and uncertain who you will be, if not a mother, you are making Soul Soup.
This is a time of transition. Trust that you will emerge from the forest. And trust that you will find who you are and who you are meant to be. For now, have faith in the Soul Soup.
Where do you see yourself in 10 years?
I always used to have an answer to that question. For a time the answer was, “Raising my children and writing brilliant novels in my spare time.”
These days I don’t have a clear vision of how my life will look 10 years from now. It’s not to say that I don’t have goals and plans—I have plenty of those—but what I no longer feel I have is certainty. I really have no clue where or who I’ll be in 10 years time.
After a strange week, where I’ve felt sure of nothing, I always know that there’s one thing I can count on. If I walk around the corner from my house and go down the hill, I will find the ocean. Some days it will be calm and enticing, other days—like today—it will be wild and intimidating. But it will always be there. And if I am here, in this place, 10 years from now, I can be absolutely certain that the ocean will be there, too.
If you’re feeling uncertain right now, what’s the one thing you can count on?
By Dorothy Williams
“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD,
“plans to prosper you and not to harm you,
plans to give you hope and a future.”
~ Jeremiah 29:11
I love that passage from the Bible, where God promises prosperity, hope and a future. Now that I understand the context, it’s one of my favorite verses to reflect on at this time of year, especially now that I have faced my own form of cultural exile as a childless woman.
The prophet Jeremiah spoke for God to people who loved the Lord, but nevertheless had been driven into exile from their homeland. At the same time he delivered a promise of welfare and not woe, Jeremiah also prophesied that the exile would last several more decades! Can you imagine a frail, little old lady, hearing this and shaking her veil? She had, maybe, a few good years left on earth, so how could these promises be applied to her life? Since scholars say that the prophecy pointed to God’s plan for a messiah, perhaps she placed her hope on an eternal relationship with God, rather than a passing, earthly reality.
Like her, I also face an exile that I will not outlive. After enduring pregnancy announcements from friends and family in my thirties, I now dread the upcoming “I’m going to be a grandma!” to a chorus of whoops and yells. As the mommy club keeps expanding (gosh, even women in convents use the title of Mother) so does my period of exile.
But unlike that frail lady in Babylon, I believe God’s plan for a messiah has been fulfilled. So when I reflect on the passage from Jeremiah, I think about the past year and see clearly how God provided welfare and not woe, in the here and now of my lifetime. I may not be delivered from exile but, like my brothers and sisters in Christ, I have a Messiah who walks with me through it, blessing me with a double portion of life’s goodness.
How do you approach this time of year? What are your plans for the future?
Dorothy lives near Chicago. She and her husband spend January weekends cross-country skiing the snowy, winding paths of forest preserves.
According to recent news, “Beauty queen-turned-international TV personality Maria Menounos has announced she’s freezing her eggs to make sure she can be a mom once she has achieved all her career goals.”
Menounos goes on to say: “We’re going to freeze our eggs so that we have no problems down the line.”
And I’m biting my tongue, because I want this to be true for her. When she’s ready to be a mom, I hope she gets her dream. And I’m sitting on my inner cynic, who’s yammering on about it not being so simple as that, and how life doesn’t always work out as planned. I don’t want to be that bitter old crone who has to rain on everyone else’s parade, just because my own parade had a monsoon.
So, I’m not going to do it (although I think I just did) but instead I ask you this: If you knew then what you know now, would you change anything?
I have my own answer, but I’m curious to hear yours.
~ "a raw, transparent account of the gut-wrenching journey of infertility."
~ "a welcome sanity check for women left to wonder how society became so fixated on motherhood."
