arie.at.home

consider this my Christmas card letter for 2024 🩷

how was your Christmas/December?

1) I love advice! I love asking for it & hearing stories from moms who have been down this road before. It’s so so valuable!

2) advice is so much easier to receive & more trustworthy when it’s from someone you know and trust personally.

3) for big things like sleep, nursing, and health, I love to operate on the assumption that the struggling mama has already read the articles and done the research, so the odds of me mentioning something she hasn’t already thought of/attempted/ruled out are really very low. It can be so discouraging to admit that we’re struggling with something and have 800 people recommend a solution that we already tried and saw no success with! But it’s so encouraging to admit a struggle and have a few people say “oh man I’m sorry that’s hard! You were made for this and you can do it!”

If you had told me two years ago that I would have left my office job to be a stay-at-home mama selling shampoo, I would have laughed you into the looney bin.

I have always wanted to be at home with my babies - but not because of network marketing, not because of a side hustle, just ✨magically✨

But there is no magic solution to this economy. I had to realize that no one is coming to save me, no one is coming to fight for my babies, and our circumstances weren’t going to spontaneously change for the better.

I’m taking radical responsibility for my family, my dreams and desires, and our financial future - because nothing changes if nothing changes. If you can relate at all to my story, I’d love to chat with you. Conversation =/= commitment, I’m not going to beg you to do this with me - I know firsthand that you have to want it for yourself. But I do want you to know that you aren’t alone, and you have options 🫶

I really spent the first three or four months of my daughter’s life convinced that I was a horrible mother who regretted having a baby… because the first two weeks of her life nearly broke me. Never mind that pregnancy was so very hard, never mind that I hadn’t slept through the night since 24 weeks 😅 clearly my tears made me a bad mom.

It’s still really hard for me to share this. I’m not really on the other side of postpartum anxiety yet and I’m still so afraid that someone is going to show up and take my baby away because I cried too much when she was 2 weeks old. But if I’m struggling with this, odds are good that there’s another mama out there having the same struggle, and I would sure love it if that mama got to know that she’s not alone.

Is it you? Or do you know someone struggling with PPA? Welcome to my little corner of the internet, where I’m slowly unpacking what PPA has looked like for me at 7 months postpartum. I’m praying for you, mama.

some thoughts from a formerly stretch mark free, size two mama who fell in love with her postpartum skin, even though it’s squishier and stretchier and less conventionally attractive…

Happy Hump Day! How’s everyone’s week going? Share a high and a low in the comments - I’ll go first 🥰