This is me.
Fifty years old! My generation abhorred being labeled, and yet applied them to ourselves and others with reckless abandon. Nerd, jock, stoner, freak, popular, dweeb...the list goes on and on. Of the many labels I have assigned myself in the last 25 years: wife, daughter, granddaughter, mother, driver, event planner, volunteer coordinator, homesteader, work at home business owner, cook, janitor, and a
myriad of other titles as needed, the largest over looming identity
has been sixteen years of identifying as a homeschooling mom. With the
graduation of my youngest on May 28th, that role has run its course. It
is so surreal to not be starting fall semester. It is beyond strange to not be
looking at curriculum or signing up for museum events or considering
what travel we might do that will also take us near someplace
interesting and educational.
Not that all learning stops, of course,
that will never be the case, but just that I'm not really responsible
for what it looks like going forward is giving me some very odd vibes.
I'm trying to be careful with myself and my known tendency to jump into
things before thinking or looking closely and not just jump from one
frying pan into a different fire. Which also feels weird. Oddly grown
up? It's only taken fifty years for me to consider self-limitations
before committing to whatever anyone asks from me. No real point on this
post, just ruminating a bit as I change profile pics and descriptions
in all these places on-line that have stayed the same for years before
because I had been the same for so long. The last three years have been
life-changing, most of the time not in any way that I would have liked
to be changed, but that is life itself - never predictable, always
turbulent, ride atop the waves or crash below them.
I know I say this every year, but maybe with my new-found grown-up-i-ness I will actually make it happen and post here more often. Maybe. At the very least one of the big things I want to do with my new free time (huzzah!) is get back into my shop more, so expect some bits about that, and hopefully I will have websites to share soon.
It is so much harder this second time around, in a weird way. When I started Flutterby Designs over 20 years ago, I knew nothing, and just jumped in with both feet and hands without much thought except that I wanted to work for myself so that my family could come first. I made an absolute ton of mistakes, but that central principle always came through, including when we put it on hiatus for the middle/high school years because something had to give and my work was the thing that could be sacrificed the easiest.
Now, trying to revive it is so much harder than I expected - there is so much more focus on on-line and social marketing - the last go around we were lucky to just have a website, as janky as it was, and a online shop that another work-at-home mom hosted. Luckily, no one expected perfection, we were just barely out of the days of geocity sites and a huge amount of my early business correspondence was done on AOL messenger. I still have a handful of AOL and MSN avatars I traded embroidery work for, created by one of the dozens of work-at-home moms I bonded with while typing one handed with a nursing babe on my lap. My first logo was clipart combined with Kristen ITC font and a little
half circle swoop that took me hours to make in MS Publisher and even
longer to make into a .gif using a free program one of those moms suggested. My first business cards required me taking the printed out and mocked up layout for them into the company that would be thermographing them in person, after establishing myself as a wholesale account with them. Everything was both much harder, and in some respects, so much easier. We didn't know how much we didn't know. To say that it was a different world doesn't really do justice to just HOW different it is.
