Pause.

I got to see one of my favorite people on the planet last week. She makes my heart happy. And she makes me laugh. And she makes me smile. And she has been doing that since we met over some sort of cake escapade in the hallway of our freshman dorm. She's known me through the worst time of my life and was certainly there for some of the best. And I don't see her as often as I would like and I don't even talk her as much as I would like but she is in deep down in my heart, where only a handful of people reside.

I mention her because I have been thinking about the conversation we had: the one in which we both admitted to feeling like our lives were on pause - as we intentionally and with full awareness navigated raising our children as stay-at-home moms. The irony here is that our lives are certainly not on pause - they are on go, do, go, do, go, do. And she has two tiny people under the age of 3! And its living - no doubt, everyday. More accurately what is on pause are our passions and dreams and work - and I have to wonder, if for the two of us, that is such a wise thing.

It was in the car ride back home that I was struck by the thought - "Yes, of course, my blog, it's called pause and I never really knew why...but now it all makes sense...that this feeling of my life on pause is so perfect...because it is...and that's exactly where I need to be in order to figure out what the next step is for me...and maybe that next step is just being comfortable with the pause and making the best out of it...and embracing it...and not fighting it..." Let's just say that line of mental acrobatics got me all the way back home from Sacramento.

With this hazy clarity, I committed to myself to change the about blurb on this blog. Do you know how hard it was for me to type stay-at-home mom in relation to something about myself? I just realized - I hate the term stay-at-home mom. The reasons why are endless. And full-time mom, ooh I so don't like that one either. Mothers who go back to a job or a career either out of choice or necessity are certainly not half-time moms - I am pretty sure no matter what you do, you are full time.

So that is what is going on - my Women's Studies minor self and for a time opinionated Feminist self are holding on for dear life, fighting against the words that haven't changed, the roles that are differently complicated and my participation in the cliches, that I once promised myself would never be me. It was the promise of a naive 19 year old, but it was the promise that I would do it differently or not at all.

Pause is therefor my attempt to do it differently, with a more mature outlook and the reality of actually being a mom and a wife and a creative and a visionary. It will be bumpy and not perfect but it will be me, figuring out how to embrace what is and keep plugging away at what will be.