If you follow me on instagram, you might remember in 2020 when I participated in the 100 day project for the first time. It’s a creative endeavor and since I was home a lot with Charlie and wanted to start a new writing habit, I picked WRITING. My prompt wasn’t very specific, and so I wasn’t SUPER successful, just writing 100 days in a row, but it DID help me flex that muscle and I have no regrets.
Recently it occurred to me that it’s less than 140 days until I give birth to baby #2 and we become a family of 4 and Charlie’s life changes forever LOL. So dramatic.
But it prompted me to start my own independent 100 day project: 100 Days of Sara + Charlie. It will be the last time that we are JUST me and him, on the days when I watch him, on the days MP is working late, on the days that he’s home sick from preschool, on the nights he cries for mama at his door, on the days that I don’t see him at all.
And since I’ve really struggled with my mental health and anxiety since he was born, I wanted to try to document it all more thoroughly. Like a science project. It’s not always going to be amazing days and precious moments.
Especially with a toddler, as we go into the next 100+ days until he turns 3: a LOT of the days and moments are going to be the opposite of sweet and precious. They’re going to be HARD. He’s going to be irritating the shit out of me. I’m going to have to dig deep to find my calm and my patience and my rational brain FOR HIM since he doesn’t have one yet.
More than anything else (because I don’t really believe in regrets? I did the best I could, at the time), what I regret about the early days of his life with me, was that I didn’t write down my thoughts more often while I was pregnant the first time and in the early days of 4th trimester.
My various journals are full of brief happy entries and long, sad, sometimes rant-y diatribes when I was really struggling.
Writing is how I get through the feelings to the other side – or make it until my next therapy appointment, ha – which means a lot of the things I’ve written are NOT the good times, or warm fuzzy baby snuggle memories. I HAVE those in my memory, and documented elsewhere via photos and videos. But this time, I want to be a bit more On Purpose about it all.
I’ll be sharing SOME of these on instagram, so you can follow me there to see snippets. But since it feels pretty intimate, scary, and intimidating I guess, I don’t want to commit to sharing all of these entries publicly. Plus I don’t want to turn my account into a mommy + me thing.
So: if you’re interested in following along, you can subscribe specifically to 100 Days of Sara + Charlie here and get a once-weekly digest of all the entries. They aren’t going to be very long because so far most of them I’ve written on my phone in a notepad. They’ll be quick takes. Quick things that occur to me when we’re watching a 3rd Daniel Tiger episode, or I’m asking him for the 8th time not to bang his fork on the table even though it DOES make a fun sound, or I’m getting a very first snuggle.
They’ll take anywhere from 5-10 minutes to read because I’m forcing myself to be super honest, super quick, and not think too hard about how much, how little, how raw, how sentimental the thoughts are.
If you’re a mother, thinking about being a mother, or maybe miss being a mother to small humans, join me. If you like my writing and want to read more of it, join me. Then it won’t feel quite like I’m speaking into an empty void, and isn’t that just the thing we wall want? If you want to listen, I want to share. And if YOU want to share, I want to listen too. Join below + let’s have this convo.