Reinventing Ourselves (All the Time)
By Adrienne Garrison | September 2023 Newsletter
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About a year into motherhood, I found myself employing my bravest friend-making skills on women nearly twice my age. As a new mom, I desperately needed perspective, and a lot of the playdate conversations felt like two drowning people trying to save one another. Our dialogue sounded more like a sponsored post full of affiliate ads for baby gear than a heart-to-heart. I wanted something different. The outcome of those first, slightly awkward requests for coffee have been dozens of beautiful conversations that have come at just the right time. As I join mothers around the country in kicking off a new school year, one such chat I had with my friend Ceci over six years ago continually comes to mind.
I met Ceci through the nursery school my daughter attended, where she’d taught (while her children were young) and then eventually became the director of for nearly a decade before returning to school for a doctorate in early childhood. A few times a year, she met me for lunch between her classes at our local university, and her story of leaving the classroom to be a stay-at-home mom and then finding her way back into education later was compelling to me. Fresh from the intense, twenty-four hour neediness of my first newborn season, I felt restless to “do something” with the handful of hours a week my daughter was in nursery school. Something more than walking laps at the YMCA and wandering the grocery store aisles. Maybe I would return to teaching the following year, or take a writing course, or go back to school.
“Here’s the thing,” I said to Ceci. “I feel like every season I have to reassess what’s possible, and what appeals to me. Life keeps changing. I keep changing. I try a new routine for a few weeks, then the baby is sick or we travel, and I have to start all over again. When am I going to figure out what I want to be when I grow up and settle into it?”
Ceci smiled at me over her coffee, sky blue eyes dancing, white bangs swept across her forehead like she’d blown into the cafe on a gust of wind. “That is one of the special joys of being a woman,” she told me. “We get to reinvent ourselves. All the time.”
I watched her, preparing for her to break into a laugh, searching for some signal of intended sarcasm. Surely she couldn’t be serious. But after a few moments, I realized: She means it. And she made it sound magical, this shape-shifting. She made it sound like a secret power.
More than a little dejected, I stared into my empty mug. “The thing is,” I mumbled, “to me it just feels exhausting.”
This summer, I resisted all of my American productivity-obsessed programming and leveraged quite a bit of privilege to carve out time for two things I desperately needed: rest and play. As my third child turned one, I felt a level of weariness and discouragement I’d never encountered before. I needed to take my few hours of childcare and do something completely absurd: go kayaking, wander a local bookstore, sit in a folding chair and stare out at the lake.
Now as I head into fall, restored but still very much the same person, I am asking myself the age-old question—How do I make time for the things that matter to me? Like finishing the novel I started four years ago? Homeschooling my children? Leading writing workshops? Caring for my body, my home, my marriage and friendships?
Looking at the raw materials of my life—my energy level, the needs of my children, and the dynamics of our family schedule—I can see that it’s time to reinvent myself again. After years of forcing my writing into the small boxes of childcare and eventually freeing myself from expectations altogether, it looks like I’m going to be channeling my inner-Ashlee Gadd and rising early this fall, in hopes of pouring some of myself into my work before anyone has the chance to call me Mama.
Systems that worked before aren’t guaranteed to work again. Your needs change, your children’s needs change, as do the circumstances of the world around us. When this happens, I try to remember the look on Ceci’s face when she spoke of the magic of self-reinvention. I resist my innate wiring to view such a transition as failure and try to view it as an opportunity, a gift, a special joy of being a woman.
If autumn opens up a small corridor of time for you, I pray you allow yourself to find a shape for your life that feels expansive. Say yes to what this version of you needs most—whether it’s taking a long walk in the woods, signing up for a class, wandering the grocery store, or asking an older, wiser woman out to coffee.
Enjoy the last of summer stone fruit with Sarah’s Chicken + Peach Skewers.
C+C Faves
Helpful Things to Say to Someone With a New Baby by
is 100% on point.“How could you think to wish for such a beautiful and challenging life? How could you even begin to categorize all the heartache and wonder and sleeplessness and joy and worry and hope that comes with living?” // MASH: Your Future Life Awaits by
Why yes, we’ll take jumbo hair clips in all the pretty colors.
This tumbler will take you from morning cold brew to afternoon Topo-Chico. We’re also partial to this elderflower tonic water.
Fall goal: upping our vegetable game with this cookbook.
Books on our (collective) nightstands: What About the Baby?: Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction, Nobody Will Tell You This But Me, The Hotel Nantucket, 5 Traits of a Healthy Family, None of This is True, Pilgrim: 25 Ways God’s Character Leads Us Onward, Yellowface, Practicing Presence, Tom Lake, and our Exhale book club pick, Let There Be Art.
“This is not my first rodeo. I’ve been attending back-to-school nights for years, starting with preschool. But this one feels different. This one feels like the teacher is speaking a different language. Like the classroom is filled with different air. Like everything is about to change.” // Over the Fence by
School supply upgrades we love: highlighter tape and bento-style lunch boxes.
This cheeky sweatshirt for the Ken in your life also makes for an easy Halloween costume. (Anyone else dressing up as weird Barbie?)
Books on our kids’ nightstands: Little Pilgrim’s Progress, Your Brave Song, A Whale of the Wild, A Wolf Called Wander, and The Big Awesome Sketchbook for Kids.
“New tools are confusing for all of us, and there is no right or wrong way to use them. But when I find myself using a tool for reasons other than delight, creativity, exploration, intimacy, seeking, or sacred response … I know it’s time for me to step back and question my relationship with it.” // A Life Without Instagram by
The kids are onto something with their bejeweled (and so, so comfortable) Crocs, but if the garden shoe look isn’t for you, Crocs makes low wedge platform sandals, too.
Feta pasta is making the easy meal list along with muffin mornings (using these cute paper liners).
Zion Caravan Tour—worship music performed in-the-round—would make a great date (or double date).
Current mom uniform: high-waisted running shorts (or this skort), technicolor era sunnies, and the aforementioned Crocs 😉.
“I set the loaf onto a piece of parchment paper and think about how both bread baking and parenting require me to take a leap of faith. To control what I can, to hold the outcome loosely, and hope for the best.” // The Thing About Kneading by
Hello, simple pleasure: a bra that doesn’t feel like a bra.
p.s. Essay + poetry submissions for the Winter Collection 2023 are open through September 8! Paid Substack subscribers can submit here for free.
Podcast Recs
ICYMI, our latest bonus ep is live! Don’t miss the C+C Story Slam (a.k.a. our version of open mic night).
In this episode of the Deep Questions podcast, Cal Newport and Laura Vanderkam tackle a collection of questions about the struggle to make time for the various things that matter most from career to family to hobbies.
Upcoming Workshops
Destination Known: Exploring Setting in Narrative Essay with Adrienne Garrison // September 10
Essence to Everyday: Appreciating Good Art, Taking Good Photos with Jennifer Floyd // starts September 20
Brave Space: Writing About Real People with Adrienne Garrison // October 8
Essay Edit with Molly Flinkman // Ongoing
From First Draft to Final: An Essay Video Revision Series with Molly Flinkman // Download
Exhale enrollment re-opens at the end of the month. Sign up for the waitlist here, and we’ll send you three creative pep talks.
Know someone who would love Coffee + Crumbs? Feel free to share our work with a friend!
The highlighter tape!! What a wondrous thing!
What a fabulous reframe! Seeing reinvention as a gift, not a burden!