You Cannot Be Everything At Once

You cannot be everything at once. I wish I had told you that. In the midst of a booming career, the beginning of a marriage, an adventure away from your support system. You were doing it all. Work, marriage, adventure, and next a baby. You can always add more. The stack can always grow. This is how it works. It is basic math. You add and add and the pile of modifiers grows and you become bigger and more important.

No one said you cannot be everything at once. Or maybe they did and we weren’t willing to listen.

Remember when you would play with your calculator and multiply the numbers over and over until the screen couldn’t hold the numbers anymore. You started to get letters and shapes and it got too complex to understand. Well that is what happens in life too. At some point the math becomes too complex. You can’t see the number anymore, it becomes gibberish. You can feel that not everything is showing, that you are losing parts of who you are. Somehow the math has betrayed you. Because just like that calculator your screen is only so big. It can only hold so much before it has to modify.

Becoming a mother broke your calculator. Not all at once. First it let you think you were getting away with it. You even figured out how to write boobs on the screen. You were having the last laugh. But slowly the screen became too full and someone, maybe it was you or maybe it was society, hit the big clear button in the right hand corner. And everything went back to zero.

Everything became scarier because you needed to put that calculator down. Your life became too big to adhere to the rules of basic math. And now you are standing looking at the next landscape. It is scary, but beautiful, because the picture is richer and it isn’t all about you and your calculations of accomplishments. You can keep that calculator nearby because you will still have accomplishments, but it is time to get out the paints and get a lot messier and a little more creative about the world you want to create. You cannot be everything at once but you will always be something and something is beautiful.

Love,

You from the middle of the mess