Podcasts… Nerve Wracking!

I added podcasts to my website on WordPress. So if you want to hear someone hemming and hawing, ummmmm, you could listen. But I recommend you wait ten more podcasts if you aren’t my sweet patient Aunty Jean who loves everything I do.

I started the podcasts as a way to read my book* aloud day by day (because really, how would a single busy mom read a book, she is always either driving, cooking, working, or cajoling a kid to put on his shoes). But the book now doesn’t feel like it meets the needs. Single parenting is just HARD, and I needed so much help and inspiration when my kids were home, so I wrote the book I needed, and used pieces I wrote back then but never published.

But the pandemic is a hard slap to my ideas and writing. What would I know of raising kids and home-schooling while trying to work in the pandemic? It is like adding 4 more kids to the single parent’s already overwhelming life. And I just don’t know if I have worthwhile words for that.

But perhaps that is the point? We don’t know what to do with ourselves, how to connect, how to support. I often don’t know what to do at funerals. My cousin’s husband died last summer of a quick prostate cancer. It took him in less than 18 months. I travelled back to Illinois to be with my family and attend Larry’s funeral. I woke up the morning of, took a nice run in the corn fields in town and felt calm and centered. But when it was my turn in line to talk to my cousin Suzanne, I burst into tears and couldn’t say a thing. I was a balling mess of scrunched up red faced tears. I was so overwhelmed and ashamed at my response to HER pain. I was embarrassed, of course.

But I was there. I tried. I was authentic. I voiced emotion, if not words to her pain. Later, I got to give Suzanne and her kids thoughtful heartfelt words and stories about Larry. I got to improve on my presence.

That is what I am hoping to do with the podcast then, be authentic and be a voice that tries to provide peace and ideas for calm, growth, and encouragement. Will it feel awkward? Yes. Will I mess up? Yes. But we do it anyway… We all just need to keep on trying and reaching out to connect. This is all new. We are not experts. We are just fumbling around, still, at this new life.

Thank you for being here with me. Thanks for being there for your self, and for your single parent neighbor, student, daughter, coworker, friend. Thanks for finding a way to be present with THIS.

*The book is “21 Days to Some Inner Peace for Single Moms, Re-framing the Chaos: Be Present”. Available on kindle and paperback.