I should write a newsletter soon
a bit of a brain dump and my first post back after giving birth
“I should write a newsletter soon,” I said to some friends over text, moments before opening Substack in a browser on my phone to look at my drafts and see if any were inspiring (because you can’t write posts from the app??? Hello Substack fix this/make us an app?!) At that moment my 5-week-old baby (now 7 weeks old) was asleep on my chest after eating, I had just started antibiotics for mastitis the day before, and my husband was in bed snoring next to us (his alarm was about to go off, and he’ll ignore it for 15 minutes, thankfully it’s one of the more pleasant sounding alarms). The house is a mess.
I’ve let about two and a half weeks pass since that initial thought. I still have a napping baby on me, but I’ve gotten better at leveraging the baby carrier at home so he’s suspended in that. I’ve (knock wood) haven’t had any other breastfeeding issues, and my husband is awake. The house is still a mess. I’ve been cleared for exercise and went ahead and got my first IUD. So I guess one could say “writing a newsletter soon” hasn’t been a priority, but it has been something I’ve wanted to do, even if I don’t want to look at any of those drafts and don’t really have anything specific I want to say.
So far, parenthood (and childbirth, that’s a story for another day though) has been a big lesson in releasing expectations on what I thought I would want to do or feel about something and being okay with making a split decision in the moment. It’s been a reminder to slow down and not to sweat the small stuff, and a realization that more often than not, I’ll find myself sitting on the couch at 8pm thinking ‘where did the day go? did we do anything today???’
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