My most recent writing class asked students to compare themselves to a fairy tale character. Students struggled to find the perfect fit. My job was to reassure them that the exercise isn’t perfect. Humans are multi-faceted, while literary characters, especially fairy tale characters, are much more single dimensional. They are often only presented as having one or two main characteristics – greedy and selfish, sweet and nurturing, brave and noble.

But we humans can be all of those things, often in a single hour.

This truth has never felt more personal to me as I made the decision to quit blogging as Vitafamiliae and rebuild a site that represented me more truthfully – as I am today.

During the baby years, life is one large hunk of needs and baby giggles. It’s precious and exhausting. For a brief season, I was a human vending machine with little emotional, physical, or mental energy for anything else. And then, ever so slowly, I had pieces again: little facets to my days that weren’t wholly about hunting kid socks. I was a writer, a teacher, and all the other things.
I once was “the life of the family,” and now I oversee all the lives, personalities, and characters in our little menagerie, including my own. As my kids grow into their personalities, our family becomes more multi-faceted. In our living and growing together, we polish each other’s edges.

This new site is a new look for the same voice I’ve always been, the same person, no longer labelled “just Mom” but now Juggler of all Trades. Daughter. Wife. Mama. Writer. Teacher. These are pieces of a whole, refining and shaping each other as they rumble around in the rock tumbler of my soul. Sometimes, motherhood bumps up against the writer – hamster deaths and toddler snuggles often pre-empt any planned writing endeavors –  or the creative tangles with my desperate need for order. So they mingle and mangle me until I am more fully the version of myself He intended – for His glory.

So here’s my invitation to join me in my barrel and bang around with all the pieces and parts that make up the whole. You’ll probably recognize all the bumping and the hollow echo that sounds a lot like your own chamber of tumbling rocks. And, somewhere in all this rumbling, I hope you find encouragement to pursue the pieces of you that make you more like Him.