Origin Story
I found out I was going to be a mom in a very dramatic way. I was 25 years old. My eggs had been retrieved, fertilized, frozen, and implanted in our first round of in-vitro fertilization. Then we got the call to let us know that it was unsuccessful. We were sad, but after four years of monthly disappointments, we knew how to play this game. We put our Pollyanna faces on—at least we still had 11 embryos left--I took a brief reprieve from the awful progesterone shots that are as thick as peanut butter, and we started preparing for the next round.
Then, a week later, I got another call at work. After all the complicated testing we had been through, they had misread the most simple, most common one—the pregnancy test. I was pregnant after all! They needed me to come in immediately for a progesterone shot.
Sobbing uncontrollably, I called my husband, who thought at first that someone must have died. I pulled myself together enough to share the news, then hung up and ran out of the office, still crying. I shouted over my shoulder to the receptionist, “I’m leaving for the day,” and then I ran to the hospital. Since it was February in Rochester, MN, this involved running like a tear-stained rodent through the underground tunnels that connect everything downtown, so you don’t have to go outside when it’s 20 below. I scurried to the clinic, got my shot, and finally had time to process what was happening. I was going to be a mom!
It’s been about two years since I started How She Moms, and I realized I haven’t shared the origin story. So I thought I’d start from the beginning and tell about my motherhood journey and what How She Moms is all about.
Once upon a time, I was a young magazine editor who wanted to be a mom. And it just wasn’t happening. Unexplained, inexplicable, infuriating infertility. Then, finally, as I shared in the intro, I was pregnant. Despite the awful progesterone shots, which I took daily until after the first trimester, the pregnancy went just like my daily email updates said it should be going. I tracked his growth from lima bean to brussels sprout to bell pepper. I was delighted when I first felt him flutter. I laughed when he got the hiccups. I loved watching my belly protrude further and further, rippling with his movements.
The birth itself had some scary moments, but we both came through it, and David and I finally held our much-anticipated little Jonas in our arms. We were ecstatic. So this was motherhood.
Fast forward four years. I now had two little boys and another boy on the way, the second two, thankfully, without IVF. This time, I was well acquainted with motherhood. In fact, I was drowning in it. My house was a mess; I was just getting over morning sickness; I hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in years. This was not exactly what I had envisioned as I was injecting progesterone those many years ago. We were in survival mode. I didn’t want to just survive. I wanted to thrive.
Knowing what I know now, after five kids and 13 years of motherhood, I understand that survival mode is just part of the cycle. Sometimes, surviving is winning. But at that point, of course, motherhood itself seemed like the embodiment of Thoreau’s famous phrase—quiet desperation.
After my first son was born, I had gradually tapered off my job at the magazine, first editing just a quarterly magazine from home, then editing a monthly column and writing a few articles now and then. By this time, I had stopped writing for the magazine altogether. I was a full-time mom, but I realized I was treating it like a job, not a career.
I had waited so long for this, and I wanted to be good at the career I had chosen.
Sidenote here: Whether you have another career as well, or whether motherhood is your sole career, it is a career—one that you keep, in different forms, for the rest of your life. But it’s a career without much formal training. You can’t get an official bachelor’s degree in motherhood, let alone a master’s or PhD.
I realized that if I wanted to get better at this motherhood/household management career, I needed to create my curriculum.
I also needed a title. And so, my career as the CEO of Archibald Inc. officially began. I opened my laptop and created a new file called, of course, Archibald Inc. I then created folders for each department of our small corporation: Finance, Culinary Arts, Janitorial, Education, Recreation Management, Facilities Management, HR, Administration, etc.
Another sidenote here: I know that not all of these departments are motherhood-related. Managing a household and being a mom are not the same thing. But in my case, I am the household manager as well as the mom, and I’m guessing that most of you at least share household management responsibilities as well as being a mom. Since How She Moms and Manages Her Household does not have the same ring to it as How She Moms, I’ve rolled it all into one.
I knew I couldn’t tackle all the departments...
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