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We Weren’t Always This Way

ByThéa Rosenburg

A while back a friend told me, “You came up the other day during book group”—a phrase sure to stir up all my insecurities.

“Oh?” I said, perhaps too casually. “How so?”

This was a group of moms meeting, moms with young children, and somehow my name had surfaced. And one of the women who has known me since my own children were babies said something to effect of “she didn’t always do all these things, you know. When her kids were little she didn’t do any of them.”

When I heard this, I laughed. Sharp linocut tools anywhere in the house in those days of open cupboards and Tupperware all over the floor? Not a chance! Early morning band practices at church? Anything that required me to travel or do a live video call or wear a clean shirt and mascara? No way!

I cooked dinner with a baby in a carrier on my back while a toddler in the high chair swept Cheerios to the floor for the cat. I sometimes journaled; in the early mornings I did some editing for a magazine run by moms who were also jotting notes down with their non-dominant hands as they nursed a baby. For a while I ran an Etsy shop, but in that iteration I sold hand-knit baby hats—soft, forgiving things I could knit while I nursed a baby or supervised tummy time. When I began to sell enough for the shop to feel like actual work, I closed it down. It just wasn’t the season for the kind of work that required more space than the margins could offer.

Photo by Gabriella Clare Marino on Unsplash

This is one of the parts of adulthood that I find it hard to get used to: when you’re in high school, nobody lets you forget who were last year, or the year before that, or in second grade. And if you keep living in the exact same place, the way I have, you build up these stratified layers of friendships with people who knew you when you were a college student, a newlywed, a young mom, and now, a middle-aged mom of almost-adults. People who have moved a lot are probably not as surprised by this as I am.

But I’ve been surprised by the friendships that begin right now, the ones where we step into each other’s lives with decades behind us already—decades in which we did not know each other. Decades we can describe only in summaries and stories. We bring all these years with us into the conversation, yet we sometimes forget that not everyone was alongside us for them. As I write this, it sounds uncomfortably like the view of a young child who is surprised to learn that not everyone knows her name, but there it is: I was surprised by the reminder that many of the women I know today didn’t know me back then. And I didn’t know them either.

So let the record state: I wasn’t always like this. I was still a lot like this, but I didn’t move at quite the velocity I do now. I was home a lot, holding babies a lot, napping a lot.

These days, my daughters are all in school, and when they are home, they are often coming and going or doing their own thing. Gone are the days when they gathered around me, wanting me to tell them what we’d be doing each day, so sitting at the dining table, carving a block of linoleum, has proved to be a practical way to be available to them when they are home. More often than not one or two girls will come sit with me, bringing their own work-in-progress or just a few stories from their day. These moments have become invitations, a way of both inviting them in and showing them that I’ll be okay, I have good work to do, as they begin to launch their ships from our family’s shore.

But even so, I’m still working in the margins. I’m writing this draft, in fact, from the lobby of my daughters’ dance studio. Today I had a tight flight plan: a book I hoped to finish editing today, a block I’d hoped to finish carving, so I could submit the book and pull some test prints of the block tomorrow. I also had aspirations to stop by a Habit writing room and put in an hour on a book proposal I’ve been trying to pull together. But I also needed to grocery shop, pick up some prescriptions, and go to a doctor’s appointment, and in the middle of all that, my youngest daughter called from school, sick and needing to come home.

So, this is what I want new mom friends to know—especially moms immersed in those toddler years: I wasn’t always this way. But you weren’t either. We’ve both lived a lot of life before this moment, and my toddler years likely didn’t look all that different than yours do now. Back then, I tried to scatter some seeds of the work I’m doing now, but these weren’t neat, predictable plantings—it felt more like tossing a handful of seeds into the wind and hoping the Lord would guide a few of them to fertile soil. When he did, it took a few years at least for me to see the sprouts, let alone the fruit, of those seeds. I’m still just seeing leaves, but I’m trying to tend to them faithfully. I hope they’ll be followed by fruit.

When I was in my twenties, and even my thirties, it sometimes felt like we’d all begun from more or less the same starting point, and I found it tempting back then to compare my growth to that of other women. But now I know it’s apple and oranges: meeting new friends in midlife comes with the awareness that we’ve both traveled very different roads to reach this moment, so why should I expect us to respond to the moment the same way? Why should our fruit look the same?

There are seeds you’re scattering right now, friend, and though you cannot see them, submerged in the soil, some of those seeds are already taking root. There may be days when you cannot imagine the years beyond these ones, years where you’ll get to explore your gifts in unexpected ways, where perhaps your children get to participate in that with you.

Whatever shape those years take, the Lord is guiding that growth. He knows just where to prune and where to nurture. And friend, he has good plans for you.

Originally published on Théa’s Substack; reprinted here with permission.

Théa Rosenburg
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