Some people eat when they are stressed. Others turn to coffee, alcohol, or cigarettes. Some people choose to ignore their stress, hoping it will all go away. While I have been guilty of all these things in one form or another, my go-to solution for dealing with stress is cleaning and organization.
There is something therapeutic about sorting, organizing, and scrubbing. Bringing order to my physical surroundings offers me a measure of control when it feels like everything else in my life is falling apart at the seams.
When I started this blog in early 2016, I sat with it for five months while I decided what the topic of conversation would be about. For five months, I paid the hosting fee for a blog that didn’t exist while I struggled with who my reader was. You see, two significant things happened in my life in 2016:
1.My Grampa passed away.
2.My youngest child came out as transgender.
Not in that order.
I wrote them in that order because out of the two, my Grampa’s passing away was the low point of my year. Losing him devastated me in a way I was unprepared for during a year that was already hard.
Having a transgender son is not devastating, even though that first year was difficult and full of adjustments. I learned this news right as I was preparing to launch my blog, which threw me for a loop. Should I write about this? Would people want to hear about the journey of a middle-aged mom in the middle of a life-changing situation? For five months, I sat with this idea, ultimately deciding that the time wasn’t right. It didn’t feel like my story to tell then, and I felt too emotional about the whole thing.
Instead, I decided to write about organization. Not only was it a topic I knew very well, but it was also a method I was using to get through this challenging time in my life, grieving the loss of the daughter I thought I had and adjusting to having another son. I started writing about self-care because I quickly realized that was something lacking in my own life, and I felt I was probably not alone in that area. And I wrote about bullet journaling because that is the tool I use to manage both topics.
What I wasn’t writing about was the upheaval going on in my life behind the scenes. Looking back, I think I made the best choice I could have at the time, but I think some people could have benefited from hearing about those struggles and challenges. In fact, I’m sure there still are.
So from now on, I will start sharing about this journey on the blog. Eventually, the older posts will disappear, and this will become the first post on the blog. Thank you for being here while I circled the thing I couldn’t write about until I was ready to write about it.
A lot of the information I found online last year was geared toward parents of young children exploring their gender. There was very little for parents of teens or young adults, especially those caught entirely off guard. One of my long-term projects is to eventually write a book (there, I admitted it out loud and in public) so that other parents in a similar situation know what to expect: the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Feel free to ask questions if you have any. Don’t worry that they feel too personal or invasive. I had a lot of questions at the start, and I didn’t know where to go to ask them. If I don’t have the answers to the specific questions you ask, I can point you to somewhere you can find them. If you feel more comfortable asking them privately, click the contact link at the top of the page. I promise I’ll read and reply to each one.
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