The Longest Shortest Time

On Aging Out

Many thanks to everyone who responded to my question last week on what to do with this project now that my daughter has officially aged out of my self-imposed two-year age limit. I have been giving this question a lot of thought over the past few months and I think I’ve found the direction I want to go in. Because so many of you have been such dedicated followers of the podcast and blog I want to share my thought process with you.

I started LST a year ago mainly as a way to figure out how to process what had happened to me during a complicated childbirth and its aftermath. I hoped that by presenting my story honestly, I might be able to draw some other new moms out of the woodwork for commiserating. You did commiserate. In higher numbers than I ever could’ve anticipated. To date, over 40,000 people have listened to the podcast. And I feel a sincere closeness to those of you who send me your deeply personal stories, or talk to me for the podcast, or comment on this blog regularly.

Another reason I started LST was because I hadn’t worked in an entire year and I wanted to exercise those muscles again. I had begun to feel an emptiness for not having produced anything in so long. It’s a funny thing to say, considering I had just produced the ultimate creation: a human life. But I had spent the previous decade working on project after project with tangible results—results that were usually published or aired for public consumption. LST has allowed me to regularly put out a product (and one I’m proud of!) for a hungry audience and that has been extremely satisfying.

When I started out, I knew that I’d eventually have to get back to working for money and I decided I’d give myself a year to see if LST could be my way of doing that. Anyone who podcasts for a living will tell you that rule #1 is to keep your episodes on a schedule or you will lose people. I started out airing LST every two weeks, hoping to generate interest and funding potential. Believe me when I say, I have explored every possible avenue for funding and have come to the conclusion that I am not going to be able to make a living off of this project. There are too many variables to name here, not the least of which is the fact that I am still mostly an at-home mom. That is a choice I am happy with. But when the frequency of the podcast slows down it is almost always because I am helping Sasha through one illness or another, or sometimes a few all at once.

The other reason things have slowed down is that, like I said, the time has come for me to start working for money again and I am pleased to say that I started doing so last month (more soon on what I am doing). I feel like my energy has been renewed—like I am a few steps closer to the person I was before I had a baby. Not that I ever want to fully be that person again. I wholeheartedly do not. But there are things I miss, and it is so exciting to be able to work my brain in a way that I love and that is so different from the way your brain works when raising a child. When I started LST I was not ready to be working my brain in that way because my brain was mush. But I am so ready now and I feel that I am a more patient mom because my work/life balance is not so heavily weighted to the life side of the scale.

As you can imagine, between the work and life there is not much room for labors of love.

That is what LST is and honestly, for now at least, that is what I want it to be. I feel less stressed out about the project when I don’t feel pressure to turn it into a business that will support my family. And so I can’t promise that I will put out a podcast episode every two weeks or once a month or on any kind of schedule, really. I don’t want to walk away either because I feel like I get as much out of this exchange as you do. What I’d like to do is produce an episode whenever I feel like I have something to say. There is too much media out there about parenthood as it is and I don’t want to add to the clutter. When I put in the time required to make a podcast episode, I want it to be meaningful and heartfelt and I want you to feel like we made a real connection. Whether the topic will continue to always be about the first two years of parenthood, I am still undecided. (Thank you to those of you who suggested keeping this site for early parenthood and starting a sister site for later years. So flattering! But as you can see, that is not going to be practical for me.) What I can promise is that when I do an episode it will be about something that genuinely interests me.

I plan to keep the blog going more frequently than the podcast, as I have been all along. I’ve been enjoying the conversations surrounding books and I will try to update our We Can’t Stop Reading list on most Fridays. I’ll also keep posting about mama books and resources that I find helpful. And I’ll post about relevant developments and struggles (or short longest shortest times) in my life, though I must admit I am at heart a very private person and as much as I share here, there is a whole lot that I keep to myself. I also try to maintain a certain amount of privacy for Sasha—you may notice there aren’t many pictures of her face on the blog—and I try to only tell stories about her that I think won’t be outrageously embarrassing to her if she reads them when she’s older. Which kind of limits what I can talk about, too.

Probably more than you wanted to know about what’s been sloshing around my head of late but since I asked the question I thought I’d give you my answer, as cloudy as it may be. In summary: Please stick with me into toddlerhood. It will without a doubt be full of all kinds of LSTs. And I’m sure I’ll have more reflecting to do about those crazy little babies (did I ever really have one of those?) along the way.