fftf: a new cadence/reflections from the break 🌀

on adjusting slowly to new realities

Hi friends, happy Friday!

It’s been a (rare) sunny and unseasonably warm winter week here in Pittsburgh, so coming to you with a fresh burst of energy thanks to that, and my January break! Wow, that little reset was JUST what I needed. Feeling refreshed and happy with the new plans I made in my time away. (Admittedly, I have a lot to say today, so I stayed up past midnight writing this and it’s technically coming to you a day later than promised, oops!)

First things first… my new plan for this newsletter is that I’m going to move to a cadence of every-other-week until May, and then I’ll be publishing once a month starting in May and on from there while I reconfigure life with a new baby/two kids. (I’ll likely change the cadence again in the future, but this is my plan for now.)

I feel compelled to share my reflections that led to this change…

First, a brief history of this newsletter (lol): I inadvertently started it in May of 2019. I had finally committed to creating an online business around teaching cooking¹ , and the business guru I was following at the time said to “start an email list and email them every week,” so that’s what I did. At some point it became its own thing, because I like writing, love sharing about what I’m cooking/thinking about, and people liked reading it. So basically I kept writing it every week with only a few mini holiday breaks… until right before I birthed my daughter in August 2022, when I paused it². And then in May 2023 I was feeling good, and very excited about feeding my daughter Jazzy, so I resumed writing every week, because that’s what I’d always done before.

A brief confession that there’s a lot more to, but: basically, I’ve been feeling weirdly off over the last few months, and I couldn’t have explained exactly why until maybe last week.

One major culprit: I’ve realized that I think my mentality and expectations of myself (about “work,” which is currently just this newsletter, but also about what I can get done in general) have been sloooowwww to adjust to the new reality of my life as a mom. I sort of still think I should be able to get done everything I used to get done, even though my life is so different, but I really CANNOT. Being a mom/parent is a HUGE reorientation of… just about EVERYTHING in life. This sentence does not begin to capture the gravity of the shift, and you just don’t get it until you’ve experienced it.

Before having Jazzy, I think I sort of expected that maybe after a year or so, once we were out of the full-on baby phase, I would sort of “get back” to what I used to be able to do, work-wise or other, but, um, newsflash: NO! It is a whole. new. world., and I think it’s having another baby on the way that has made me realize I actually need to completely rethink all my dreams/goals/priorities/expectations of myself in the context of my current reality. (And… because I’m one of those crazy people who wants to have four kids - *if I’m lucky enough to get to make that happen* - there’s no “easier time” in sight any time soon.)

Since Jazzy, I’ve been squeezing in writing this newsletter whenever I can, either when I have my one, usually-most-of-a-day off while my mom watches her (but that is not every week), or I am cramming it in during nap times, or writing it late into the night (like tonight) - the one time of day that I can count on lengthy, spacious writing time, but at the expense of my sleep. On the weeks I have an idea, writing this can feel easy and fun, but more often in the past few months, it has felt like a slog. Which I realized is mainly because I don’t have dedicated, spacious time to write, or plan out what I might want to write about, let alone recipe test or cook like I used to. But also, when what I love to do suddenly feels un-fun, it’s very unsettling.

As one attempt to solve my “off-ness”, in the past month, I finally prioritized (and pushed through my emotional avoidance of) looking for a part-time babysitter, so I can have two days off a week - one day to work/write, and one day for all the other stuff I can’t get done with an 18-month-old (doctor’s appointments, haircuts, working out, tasks that require ample time on the computer, etc). That’s the plan I’m going to test out over the next 2.5 months, until May, when baby #2 arrives and life will turn upside down again.

Creating a family/having kids is the most important thing I’ve always wanted to do in my life, and I am happy to report that it is as joyful and amazing and precious as I thought it would be. One of the main reasons I wanted to work for myself was so that I’d be in control of my work when I had kids, and could decide then how much or little I wanted to work, once I got here³. Now that I’m here, and since I’ve been essentially full-time parenting for the past 18-months, I think what I’ve realized is that there are parts of my identity that I’ve grown into as an adult - parts that encompass my dreams/hopes/creativity, etc - that I simply must attend to & honor in order to feel like the whole, best version of myself that I want to be.

Being a parent is a role that starts at that first kid’s birth and goes on for the rest of your life (hopefully!). Parenting is a job that, for the first 18 or so years, and the first one to ten(?) in particular, is 24/7, 365, unending WORK that is always too much and also never enough, because every second of it is slipping away all the time and you already can’t remember what it was like when they were one size smaller than they are now, so how can you fathom missing any of the precious limited time you get with these tiny amazing humans?! And yet, you have to be away sometimes - whatever that amount is for every individual parent, because well, a) someone has to make money to keep the family afloat, and b) you have to somehow maintain who you are, despite the all-consuming-ness of this job/role - and you have to do it for your sanity, and for yourself - because you are a person too - and also for your kids, who are learning about how to be a whole person most directly, from you.

parenting, a day in the life: my sweet girl’s gorgeous curls in the morning, and also, the overflowing recycling bin

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And that concludes my feelings for today about motherhood 🤣. And now it is 2:01am and I absolutely MUST go to sleep. Please excuse any and all caveats that I should have added about other, much more difficult parenting situations than my own. If it wasn’t already clear, just writing about my own personal experience here. I know I am very privileged to get to make the choices I get to, and for that I am incredibly grateful. I wish that every parent got to make the exact parenting choices that were perfect for them. I also wish we had actual systems in our country that supported parents, and especially moms.

More from my break, with some recipes, in two weeks!

Love,
Jess

1. After a few years of working various food jobs in catering, personal-cheffing, and teaching in-person cooking classes out of my San Francisco apartment. This was after I quit my last “real” job at Revolution Foods, a company that made healthy lunches for schools, where I worked for three years in marketing and school partnerships.

2. Funny story - I actually hadn’t decided what to do with the newsletter… I was avoiding pausing it/making a call… till I finally I went into labor a week before my due date and wrote my final email to say “I’m pausing the newsletter!” in between having contractions on a birthing ball at 3am 🤣.

3. Don’t get me started on the fact that I was already planning on the absolute lack of any systemic family support in our country waaaaaaayyyy before I had kids. Or maybe I bought into the absolute LIE that you can “have it all/do it all” and thought it just seemed easier if you could make your own schedule. Topics I will save for another day.