Well, now it’s public and I can finally admit the main reason I’ve had so much trouble keeping up with blogging, writing, emails, and really all forms of pretty much everything. After many years of creating fictional people to populate the pages of my stories, it’s time for me to make a real person to populate my home! Yes, my husband and I are expecting our first come summer, so it’s been a few months of near-constant nausea and almost as much sleeping. While I’m still very tired, I’m finally starting to come out of the fog a little, so I’m going to do my best to stay on schedule–after all I intend to keep on writing and publishing as I raise kids. But I do know that it will look a little different. My priorities will be shuffled. Writing and publishing will always be important to me, but right now taking care of my baby will just have to take precedent at times.

What does this mean for the blog? Well, it means my goal is still to blog twice a week, Mondays and Thursdays, but there will be weeks it doesn’t happen one or both days. That doesn’t mean it’s not my goal, it’s just that I realize it’s not my primary goal. So if my family needs a little extra time or if my brain is all pregnanty and just can’t get there, it’s okay.

That’s not easy for me. The deeper I get into this time of needing to rest, the more I realize how much I idolize productivity. I was raised to have a good work ethic, which is a tremendous gift, but that, combined with my perfectionism, sometimes makes me feel a false sense of guilt about not doing things I can’t or shouldn’t do right now. It makes me feel bad about myself when the kitchen hasn’t been cleaned in a couple of days and I’m behind on my Patreon assignments. When I’m laying in bed half awake and sick watching Psych reruns, my highly developed sense of performance-based value tells me “you’ve failed.”

But that just means that now is the perfect time to begin the fight to push past those lies. To remind myself that having a giant pile of laundry in the living room for a few weeks isn’t the end of the world. That if I have to adjust my writing and publishing expectations for the year, nobody but me will even know, let alone care. I used to hate the advice “Just do your best,” feeling like it was a cheap copout to get out of aiming high and reaching the mark.

But like many things in life, it depends on how you take it. Sure, someone looking to get out of their responsibilities might misuse the “Just do your best” mantra, but deep down I know I’m not that person and probably never will be. I value responsibility and hard work and productivity. My problem is not valuing these things too little, but valuing them too much. I still don’t see anything wrong with aiming high. But I also know now that there’s no shame in missing the mark. It doesn’t make me any less of a person in God’s eyes, or my husband’s, or the eyes of anyone who truly matters. It just means I’m human, and I need to rely on God and his grace every step of the way.

It’s going to be a new adventure, navigating following my passions and my calling for writing while not letting it overwhelm the more important callings I have as a wife, a mother, a member of a church and a community. But it’s an adventure I’ve always wanted. I hope that, on the journey, I will learn a little more grace and patience for myself.