About a year into motherhood, I found myself employing my bravest friend-making skills on women nearly twice my age. As a new mom, I desperately needed perspective, and a lot of the playdate conversations felt like two drowning people trying to save one another. Our dialogue sounded more like a sponsored post full of affiliate ads for baby gear than a heart-to-heart. I wanted something different. The outcome of those first, slightly awkward requests for coffee have been dozens of beautiful conversations that have come at just the right time. As I join mothers around the country in kicking off a new school year, one such chat I had with my friend Norah over six years ago continually comes to mind.
I met Norah through my work I do with school authorities in SE Alberta. She taught in a classroom (while her children were young) and then eventually became a principal for nearly a decade before returning to school for a doctorate in early childhood. A few times a year, she met me for lunch between her online classes, and her story of leaving the classroom to be a stay-at-home mom and then finding her way back into education later was compelling to me. Fresh from the intense, twenty-four hour neediness of my first newborn season, (and about to enter my 3rd newborn season) I felt restless to “do something” with the handful of hours a week my children were in preschool. Something more than doing laundry, cleaning the house and wandering the grocery store aisles. Maybe I would return to my career the following year, or take a writing course, or go back to school.
“Here’s the thing,” I said to Norah. “I feel like every season I have to reassess what’s possible, and what appeals to me. Life keeps changing. I keep changing. I try a new routine for a few weeks, then the baby is sick or we travel, and I have to start all over again. When am I going to figure out what I want to be when I grow up and settle into it?”
Norah smiled at me over her coffee, sky blue eyes dancing, white bangs swept across her forehead like she’d blown into the cafe on a gust of wind. “That is one of the special joys of being a woman,” she told me. “We get to reinvent ourselves. All the time.”
I watched her, preparing for her to break into a laugh, searching for some signal of intended sarcasm. Surely she couldn’t be serious. But after a few moments, I realized: She means it. And she made it sound magical, this shape-shifting. She made it sound like a secret power.
More than a little dejected, I stared into my empty mug. “The thing is,” I mumbled, “to me it just feels exhausting.”
This summer, I resisted all of my Canadian productivity-obsessed programming and leveraged quite a bit of privilege to carve out time for two things I desperately needed: rest and play. As my third child was about to turn three, I felt a level of weariness and discouragement I’d never encountered before. I needed to take my few hours of childcare and do something completely absurd: go paddle boarding, wander a local bookstore, make it that yoga class (that I’ve been continually canceling).
Now as I head into fall, restored but still very much the same person, I am asking myself the age-old question—How do I make time for the things that matter to me? Like finishing a book I started two years ago? Spending 1:1 time with my children? Excelling in my career? Leading writing workshops? Caring for my body, my home, my marriage and friendships?
Looking at the raw materials of my life—my energy level, the needs of my children, and the dynamics of our family schedule—I can see that it’s time to reinvent myself again. After years of pushing my personal wellness aside and eventually freeing myself from expectations altogether, it looks like I’m going to be setting that alarm clock and rising early this fall, in hopes of pouring some time into myself in those early morning hours before anyone has the chance to call me Mama.
Systems that worked before aren’t guaranteed to work again. Your needs change, your children’s needs change, as do the circumstances of the world around us. When this happens, I try to remember the look on Norah’s face when she spoke of the magic of self-reinvention. I resist my innate wiring to view such a transition as failure and try to view it as an opportunity, a gift, a special joy of being a woman.
If autumn opens up a small corridor of time for you, I pray you allow yourself to find a shape for your life that feels expansive. Say yes to what this version of you needs most—whether it’s taking a long walk, signing up for a class, wandering the grocery store, or asking an older, wiser woman out to coffee.
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