Happy August!

Once upon a time, there was an overgrown girl, a thirty-two-year old woman actually. She was a wife and a mother and a daughter and a sister and a friend and an author and a blogger. And this woman had a conversation with a man, the man she loved, her Husband. Together, they realized how much she had been through, they had been through - good and bad - in the last five years. In the last five years, this woman had gotten pregnant and miscarried, gotten pregnant with her first daughter, given birth to her first daughter, purchased her forever home, watched her Dad grow ill, gotten pregnant with her second daughter, lost her Dad, found a literary agent, welcomed her second daughter, sold her first book, renovated her forever home, started a blog, published her first book, gotten pregnant with her third daughter, moved into her forever home, signed with a new agent, welcomed her third daughter. And in the midst of all these monuments, these milestones, this woman just lived her life, her good and complicated life, facing endless bouts of doubt, dreaming endless dreams, experiencing endless joys.

This woman? She felt two things: phenomenally blessed and exquisitely exhausted.

And so. On a Monday, the first day of August in the year 2011, this woman woke up and decided something. She decided that she would take a month, one little and big month, and stop. Surrender. Let go. Instead of blogging every day and worrying about content and comments, she would breathe. She would lose herself in the blue eyes of little girls and the white pages of big books. She would write and write and write some more, feeding her fiction, bringing to life a quirky creation named Clio. She would roast root vegetables and stir cucumber cocktails. She would cuddle her Husband and tickle her babies. She would take trips to the zoo and the carousel and the museum. She would sit a bit more, and stretch a bit more, and sleep a lot more.

And of course this woman would worry because that was her thing. She would worry that her friends and readers would be disappointed, that they might miss her words. But when she thought about it some more, she knew better. She knew that maybe, just maybe, they would understand, and maybe even respect her for slowing down. Maybe, just maybe, they would revere her for being more real than robot. For admitting that she too had limits. And a desire to soak it all up; the summer sweetness, the sunny smiles, the stuff of the season.

This is what she hoped at least.

_____________________________________

Happy August, all. See you in September!

What have you been through in the past five years? Do you forgive me for pressing pause for an entire month? Do you have any plans to slow down for the rest of the summer?