Meet Elisabeth: Sleeping In

I’m sitting here on a gorgeous morning, sipping coffee from my “Rise & Grind” mug. My dog Jake was itching to get out, so I took a moment to brush off a dirty deck chair and enjoy the peace and beauty of my slightly overgrown but naturally picturesque backyard in the countryside of Monroe. It’s a new kind of luxury. 

 

There’s stuff to do, and I’m doing it, but my morning isn’t chaotic and I’m fairly relaxed. Okay, so it’s not quite sleeping in, but I woke up around 7:30, put on a mud mask, casually started prepping about 30 lbs of meat for a BBQ that we are hosting today. Making microwaved bacon, and oven baked French toast. I started writing this blog. It’s now 8:30 and no one else is up yet, but me and Jake. Writing this post got me thinking about how my day-to-day motherhood has changed.

My kids are still around, but long gone are the tender, exhausted days of half-waking to toddler kisses and tiny baby cries. I’m now the waker-upper of a 13 year old boy and a 19 year old woman in college, when she’s home from her tiny, private liberal arts pre-Med world (#humblebrag). She’s on her way to New Zealand for six months in a few weeks. Don’t get me started on the boy; we will talk about him later.

 

Their kisses and their cries are different now. Their worries and thoughts and dreams are so grown up. They are both perfect and imperfect and exactly how I hoped they would be, plus one million. With all of their hopes and struggles, I feel them even more deeply than I did with the baby cries and kisses. They still need me, and being needed is one of my favorite things. Simply put, I love caring for people. I often do that through cooking great meals for my family, throwing parties, volunteering, and showing up when people need me the most. 

I grew up in Chappaqua NY, went to high school in Woodbury CT. A terrible student with undiagnosed learning disabilities, I failed a lot. I grew a lot. I worked for entertainment companies in Los Angeles, tech companies in Silicon Valley, and now one of the world’s best research companies. Despite all the struggles, or maybe because of them, I figured out a path to success. Perhaps ironically, I have spent the past 20 years of my career in learning and development and I feel like it’s what I was meant to do. 

 

Motherhood has been a similarly weird and fulfilling journey for me, from never wanting to be a wife or mother (in hindsight, this was because of my insecurities and fear that I’d fail), to being totally immersed in it. I failed a lot. I grew a lot. Being a mom is the single most important thing I’ve ever done. Not because I made my kids; because they made me.

 

Maybe you’re a young mom, a new mom, a middle aged mom like me. Wherever you are in your mom journey, I see you. I look forward to us getting to know one another.