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This! My bullet points don’t seem to mean much these days and that seems to be making all the meaning. Thanks to @wellinthewest for passing on this bit of brilliance! Here's another great shot from @annmarieloveslove 😍 I think this one gets the spirit of our family. It's so sweet and it's also so consuming. Jonah is sick again today and I'm home with him on a daycare day. It's hard to think I have a day for myself and then shift that expectation so quickly. Yet Micah has a big briefing tomorrow and it's much easier for me to change my schedule. I'm ok with this but it's still hard. Being almost nine months into motherhood, I'm struck by how much easier it's getting and how much more challenging it seems at the same time. I am sleeping more and Jonah can play by himself for longer. We've figured out the right balance for us between disposable and cloth diapers, and learned how to make our own baby food (so fun!). The harder part is that in reaching this milestone of time, I'm realizing that there truly is no going back. I'm not going to pick back up on my work in the same way. I won't be able to be in relationship like I was before. I'm having to reform who I am and what I want from the ground up. This restructuring of identity is deep work. This is where I guide my clients. Our fear of change is pretty much always what blocks our self-care. Something in us-usually not a very conscious part of us-is super afraid of who we will be on the other side of all that empowering change and who we will disappoint in the process. But, we're never going to be content until we allow ourselves to evolve. It's scary, it's hard and it makes us do things we don't want to do. And we will never feel satisfied until we figure out a way to courageously work through the hardness of personal growth. We emerge on the other side, muscles aching and so proud of ourselves. In that way, motherhood is a gift. Before meeting Micah Haskell-Hoehl, I had gotten pretty comfortable in my ruts of life. I was good at who I was. Now, I'm pretty uncomfortable a lot of the time, but I am growing in such deeply important ways. I think this is the stuff we talk about when we talk about "adulting." It's not about having kids, getting married or buying a house. (Continued in the comments...) Since celebration is a huge part of self-care (one that we often deny ourselves in the pursuit of being “good”), I want to do one more post about the spectacular wedding of @brobuchowicz (my brother) and his now lovely wife @sarahtoday. Aren’t they stunning? What follows is a mishmash of the day: my dresses from RTR (the top for the rehearsal dinner and the bottom for the ceremony - wish I could have kept that one!), Jonah refusing our attempts to block the ceremony sun, the scrabble cake toppers for the most delicious cakes, and my post-wedding breakfast to reset my system after a weekend of indulging (scrambled eggs with sautéed carrot greens + butternut squash oven home fries). Also, see the comments for my reading from the wedding, one of the best passages of love I’ve found from Rainer Maria Rilke. Wishing you celebration, today and always! This has been one of the biggest weeks for my family. We found our home on Monday and my brother got married on Sunday (congratulations @brobuchowicz and @sarahtoday - it was perfect). Within all these rites of passage, I kept thinking about my dad, who passed away over three years ago now. I think he would have been so proud of where we’ve landed, and the way my brother and I ended up here (not out of conventional or convenience, but fueled by desire and commitment). And it’s sad that he hasn’t been here to see the fruition of the arduous work of parenting. It’s one the hard parts of this wild nature we spring from: it ends, sometimes quite suddenly, and for this the living is that much sweeter. There’s a fierce compassion to it all which holds me and all the feelings that come up during these passages. The joy and the grief will eternally live together. I can whisper into unknown to him that we’ve made it, not totally, but at least to the place where our roots can hopefully grow deep. Sometimes there are answers. Since his passing, I’ve associated those floating, ethereal seed pods with his presence. Yesterday the GPS routed me strangely leaving the city, and I went with it. While stopped in traffic, I looked up and there were hundreds of those fluffy pods floating above us. It felt profound and silly all at once - kind of like this life we are living. A question for today: what if I am already doing everything exactly the way it needs to be done? We put in a contract on a beautiful house in our neighborhood and it was accepted two hours later (at-price no less!). At first, I felt numb and confused. Wasn’t I supposed to be elated? The next day I spent a lot of time feeling super anxious and sad. When I checked in, I realized two things: 1) I’m not ready to move again and leave our current home (but alas, we’re getting the boot), and 2) all the money (the DC housing market is insane) brings up so much scarcity. My brain tried to figure out all the ways I could earn more money. Instead of being fun, this just felt like more pressure. By the end of the day, I felt like I made a mistake years ago but not sticking with a steady 9-5. If screwed it all up. After a few days, I’m starting to relax and get more excited about this new opportunity. I’m also trusting that we’ve taken care of business (and will continue to) exactly the way it needs to be taken care of. I mean, it couldn’t have been any different, right? All of this highlights that subtle but essential difference between self-care and self-improvement. Self-improvement reinforces that I’m never enough, while self-care affirms my worth and helps me use this abundance to help others. (With that, please donate to @thrive_dc today - such a wonderful, caring organization, link in my bio) PS - thank you to @ammers for my fabulous new headshots! Hello all! Did you know today is Do More 24? It's a full day of philanthropic goodness. It's a chance of us to recognize our abundance by sharing with others who need to be supported. In our culture, we are terrified of vulnerability. We try to act strong, pretend we can do it alone, and look down on others who can't cut it on their own. As a result, we all feel lonely, depress and anxious. We have forgotten the basic truth that we are stronger together and that my salvation is wrapped up in yours (and vice versa). It can be scary to let go of what is "ours," especially when we feel afraid that our good luck and fortunes will run out. I believe we can create a true feeling of abundance by giving as much as we get. Please consider donating just $26 to Thrive DC. This small amount gives 30 days of hot showers to Thrive's clients. Imagine getting a hot shower after a night of sleeping at a shelter? Pretty revolutionary, right? (Link to donate in my bio) I volunteer and serve on the board of Thrive because they are an organization dedicating to caring for DC's growing homeless population. In this quickly gentrifying city - which I contribute to - where housing prices are astronomical, it's important to me to support organizations that care for those who are getting pushed out and struggling to merely exist. Supporting Thrive DC isn't everything, but for me, it's an important start. I hope you can contribute a little or lot, depending on your capability. Please share with friends/family. Thank you so much! I had my first Mother’s Day with this guy (at least with him outside of the womb)! We spent it beside dolphin-filled waters in South Carolina. Yes, these holidays are created by card companies. But, I think we need these designated moments to pause, reflect, and appreciate our life milestones. Having Jonah has been a trip beyond all trips. On the surface, I haven’t slept through the night in more than nine months and have bodily fluids on my clothing most of the time. Inside, I feel the rightness of him being in my life and of everything organized around this squealing, wriggling, quickly-growing babe. Mothering him is a very profound joy, one that is matched with deep grief for all I’ve given up to be here. I have such a respect for the mothering that we ALL do for each other. It’s so powerful and so often undervalued. I have such big dreams for how we can cultivate this superpower more and more. It’s what our world needs to heal and it’s already within each of us. Self-care unlocks it and shows us how to use it to change the world. It’s time harness it. We need it for Jonah, for me, and for you and yours. Micah and I are in full-fledged house-buying mode. Wow, what a crazy process! Especially because we didn’t chose this (our owners want to sell our rental, which is a lovely house but needs SO much work), but again, it seems like our relationship is less about making choices and more about going with the flow. We spent all morning on Sunday with our realtor looking at homes, toting Jonah around to each one. Micah had been sick all weekend (again!), but he was a trooper. We saw one house that we really liked, and when we got home, I was so anxious to discuss it with him. However, he told me he needed to rest for a while first. Jonah was down for his nap, so what was I supposed to do with my anxiety? Eat half a bag of Cheetos and numb out on social media? I wanted to. Luckily, my new watercolor set had just arrived. I spent the next half hour playing with the colors, drinking tea, and listening to music. Rather than depending on Micah to calm me down, I used this downtime to calm myself down and take a bit of space around this big decision. A little later, when Micah was ready to talk, I could approach our conversation in a more grounded way. Once again, a little focused self-care saved me! I know so many of us are dealing with decisions that feel too big to ignore. In these moments, taking a little time for self-care can feel totally illogical. It feels like giving up. However, in my experience, making decisions from a place of anxiety NEVER turns out well, while letting things work themselves out usually leads to pretty awesome results. Our work is to be disciplined enough to take time out until we feel calm enough to move forward. I think that’s a pretty great recipe for creating a beautiful life. Happy eight months of life sweet boy! It’s an eternal joy to be your mama. I’m learning so much from and with you! I’m learning how to worry less about tomorrow and, instead, spend that energy getting the most out of each day. Want to hear more about this? I’m sharing a few ideas for using self-care to increase your capacity for effective and creative living today in my newsletter. Sign up on my website (link in my bio). 💗 Last weekend, Jonah and I met my friend and her baby daughter for a walk. The weather was amazing and it felt great to get out of the house (no one told me I would spend so much time inside with an infant #napschedules). As we walked through the spring blossoming afternoon, we got into a long, winding conversation about racism, feminism, capitalism, how self-care could fit into those and, mostly importantly, how we could take more personal responsibility for finding solutions. We spoke a little about our babies, but they mostly bobbed in their carriers and let our words pass over their heads. Before I became a mother I thought other mothers got together and just talked about being mothers. Because of this thought, I always felt a bit excluded from the get-go and often felt less than (I mean, what problems did I have compared to a mother?). Then, I accidentally crossed over into the other side of things. It’s true, my daily actions are mostly concerned with feedings and naps. However, my mind is so hungry to apply what I’m learning to the bigger picture of how to create our world anew. This feels like the ultimate gift to the future generation, and one that all of us can take part in. Within it, I definitely don’t feel “more than.” Rather, I see the unique joys and challenges of not having children more clearly, and in contrast, the beauty and pain of my own experience. I wish we talked about all this more - how secretly divided mothers and non-mothers can feel, how it’s so easy to romanticize or demonize the other experience out of insecurity, and how dominant culture wants to pit us against one and other. I believe that joining together as women - whatever life experiences we are having - is what makes us strong. Because, in truth, I think we are all mothers, and deeper, that none of us are. Rather, we are stewards of each next generation and must live with, and create from, the weight of what we will hand over to them.