Flowers At Midnight: A Blog for the Resilient Woman & Mother

Hey, it's been a while. Once the dust settled after my husband's death, I quickly realized that I didn't have much time for writing. There was a little girl to take care of, a house to manage, assets to get in order, a new job to start...and it was exhausting.

Exhausting, probably one of the most common words to describe motherhood. Often finding ourselves balancing 40-hour work weeks on top of 24/7 responsibilities at home - grocery shopping, cleaning, being your child's primary playmate, their midnight company, or their personal chauffer as you shuttle back and forth between practices. Maybe you have a partner that shares those responsibilities, maybe you handle it all alone, maybe you find yourself the "default" parent - picking up the slack of the one who dropped it. Wherever you find yourself, I think we can agree that it's exhausting. Fun and rewarding, but exhausting. And yes, those things can coexist.

In the middle of the exhaustion of the past year, I missed writing. It's a hobby that easily distracts my mind from the current state of life and that I honestly enjoy. I learned through Lovely Little Widow that different stories aligned in ways I would have never thought - the girl struggling with infertility crying at a friend's baby shower, angry and sad that it was not her experience. I later found myself crying after the announcement of a friend's second pregnancy, angry and sad that death had taken away my chance for a second child and a sibling for Libby. I pathetically wondered why this is the route my life was chosen to take. You may consider these reactions as selfish and irrational, but one thing I've heavily learned this past year is that most reactions are selfish and irrational and yet it's still ok to have them.

Flowers at Midnight: A blog of the resilient woman and mother is an extension of Lovely Little Widow. A collection of my story and others - focusing on women and mothers and their experiences of loss, grief, infertility, postpartum depression, divorce, parenting and more. It's a collection of tips and recommendations that I have found helpful in navigating motherhood alone. A collection of things that I hope you may find helpful. It's a place to find community in the exhaustion, the good moments, the bad moments, and the moments when you feel completely alone. It's proof you can continue to bloom in the darkest of places.

This is Flowers At Midnight.