Dear creative new-mama self of the past,

Do not despair.  You have an infant, and you feel like your whole ability to get a single task done is shattered beyond repair.  You thought you wouldn’t change after having children.

You were wrong.

But how amazing to be wrong!

Let me back up.  Your whole life, you struggled to get writing projects over the finish line the way you wanted.  You’d write stories, know you wanted to mold them into something better, but they would fizzle. You had time though.  There was always time to work on this, time to edit that. You wrote articles and essays most weeks, but the longer projects stayed largely in your mind, waiting for the time when you could finally sit down and get them all out.  

Then children came.

You’d think that this would be the end.  But how wonderful to be wrong!

You are in the infant stage now though, so you can’t see further out.  What you see is the endless sleeplessness, the inability to do any one task without interruption, and nap times that in theory could be put to “use” for writing, but in reality are a heaving, gasping moment to take a breath before diving back underwater when the baby wakes up.  Useful tasks be damned. You zombie out.

From here, it looks like that’s it.  You can barely crawl from bed to go to work, and by the time you and baby get home from pickup, your creative juices are zapped.  

But then something happens.  You start slowly to get yourself back.  The nights get just a little more sleep pumped into them.  You find your new balance. You carve out the time to write.

But it’s different now.  Now, you know what lays at the end of your carved-out time.  You know that this is it. This time you’ve created to write is all you have, so you have to make it count.  You write with headphones turned all the way up, banging your head to the beat, forcing the words out so fast, knowing this time right now is all you’ve got for the next few days.  Every feeling and thought inside of you has to make it out onto the page, imperfectly-written though they may be.

You write a whole book in six months.  The book that was hibernating inside of you, you sputter out like a baby horking up her milk, but you do it.  You get an agent. Someone buys your book. And suddenly, you’re a mama with two kids and a job and……an author, with more words welling up inside you each day that you carve out time to release.  

I know right now, new mama self of the past, it seems like this baby has sponged your creativity away.  

Just wait though.

You just might find it’s even better than before.  Now you write with purpose. Now you write like you might not get another chance.  Now you write like there is never time, because there is never time.

You’re going to be okay.

Just hang in there.

Love,

Hayley

(PS my book comes out on Audible next Spring!)