Tuesday, January 23, 2024

Juggling Writing and Kids with Carrie Monroe O’Keefe #Memoir #BlendedFamily #StepParent


When I started writing about my experience as a stepmom, writing was the way I found my way through the struggles I had in the beginning.  It was how I processed the challenges we faced and how I navigated this new instant world of parenthood, blended families, and stepmotherhood.  Every night after we put our girls to bed I would go down to my office which, at the time, was also our laundry room.  I would write 800-1,000 words every night to the sound of our clothes rumbling through the washer or dryer.  I wrote for myself but once people started reading my work, I was also writing for the connections I was making.  What I was saying was resonating with people – not only those in similar familial situations.  It gave me energy, it was therapeutic, and I felt better about my world on the days that I made time for writing than I did on days I wasn’t able to do so.


As the girls got older it got trickier.  It’s hard to juggle working full-time, which I have always done, with school sports, band concerts, homework, family obligations, a dog that needs walking, etc.  Not to mention the challenges that go hand-in-hand with raising children along with other people.  Blended families, in many cases, are not easy.  It’s hard enough to parent with another human who was raised differently and has a different outlook on parenting and the world.  When you have even more people involved, people that you had no part in choosing, it’s a completely different ballgame.  You can’t just make a decision about a kid taking swim lessons or joining a club.  It requires requests in writing, it sometimes involves battles via email and text, and other times it might require trips back to court or mediation.  Parenting isn’t easy.  Parenting with four people can be downright ugly.

I think it’s really hard to live in challenging times and then to write about those challenging times.  I had to take a break from writing about my life when things got particularly ugly.  I actually self-published a middle grade novel in 2019.  It was a great escape to be able to write a story that didn’t require me to analyze what we were dealing with day-to-day.  I could very well have just stopped writing during this time but I still needed to write.  I had a story in me and took that time to get it out into the world.  Even though I wasn’t writing about my life or connecting with others through my blog, I was still writing, and writing makes me better.

I am a better version of myself when I make time to write but sometimes it’s hard to justify it when there are eleven other things on the list of to-do’s for the day.  Like many women, I will often put the needs of my family above my own.  But I believe it is our job as humans to be able to communicate the things we need for our own health.  For me, writing is one of those things. I am lucky to have a partner, and now almost adult children, who know how important writing is to me.  They understand when I say I need to shut myself in my office (upgraded to an actual room during COVID) to write and they will tell me to go do that before I fold the next load of laundry or run to Target for the eighth time in a weekend.

At the end of the day – it will never be easy to juggle all of the things.  I think the hardest part of writing is actually sitting down to do it.  I hope you all have a life partner, or friends, or family, that will encourage you to write even when there are a thousand other things to do.  Those things will never go away so the trick is figuring out how to get the writing done anyway.


Mamacadabra
Carrie Monroe O’Keefe

Genre: Nonfiction / Memoir / Parenting / Blended Family / Stepparent
Publisher: Mamacadabra Press
Date of Publication: 11/22/2023
ISBN: 978-1733629935
ASIN:  1733629939
Number of pages: 200
Cover Artist: Leah Kent

Tagline: Poof! You’re a mom now!

Book Description: 

Starting her third year of marriage, Carrie Monroe O'Keefe had already been on the roller coaster of extreme highs and lows of a newly blended family.  Thinking she could do a better job of navigating marriage, step-motherhood, working full time, and all of the things, she embarked on a year of "what if."

Settling into her role as wife and mom, she tried to find ways to do things better, see things differently, and reframe her thinking to create a better home for her family and to feel more at home herself. With humor, unwavering honesty, vulnerability, and sarcasm, Carrie finds her way through the year and to her true self.

Amazon     BN     Bookshop

 

 

Excerpt From Chapter: This House is Not a Home (Currently)
         
It’s a bright Saturday morning and I’m looking around my kitchen wondering when, exactly, I let it get THIS bad. The dishwasher has been run, but nobody has bothered to unload it, resulting in piles of dirty dishes in and around the sink. There are empty cereal boxes lined up, I assume, so I can cut out the Box Tops for Education labels…because I’m the only one who can what…use scissors? Break down the boxes for recycling? Throw away the empty bag inside the boxes that once held cereal?

Speaking of recycling, there’s a bag of recycling on a stool waiting to be taken out on our “next trip” out of the house. It’s been there for three days and we have, in fact, left the house several times in those three days.

The clincher, though, is the kitchen table. Our puppy has a best friend that lives next door. He comes over to our back deck door and barks for Sullivan to come out to play. They wrestle, run around, investigate, bark at each other, bark at passersby, lay down to rest, and then start over. When they’re out and I’m working or writing, I bring my laptop up to the kitchen table so I can check on the dogs from time to time.

At this very moment, I’m sitting at my kitchen table and surrounding my laptop are:
     
        One little girl’s black shoe.
        One little girl’s gold shoe.
        One little girl’s pink slipper.
        The Nancy Drew book we’re currently reading.
        Large bag of colored pencils.
        Pair of my husband’s dirty socks.
        Empty napkin holder on its side.
        The art project brought home by my littlest little girl.
        Pad of paper with my work notes scribbled on it.
        Three place mats (one was a casualty of yesterday’s juice fiasco).
        One black marker.
        Work documents of my husband’s.
        A partially completed drawing.
     
My kitchen table isn’t even big! How, or perhaps a better question is WHY, is there so much sh*t sitting on it?!! And does anybody else find it a teensy bit disconcerting that there are two shoes, a slipper, and dirty socks on the table at which we EAT OUR MEALS? Anyone???

If I told you about the kitchen counter, you’d have a nervous breakdown, which I’m on the verge of, but I’m trying to hold it together. Here’s the deal. We do not have the little girls this weekend, so we should be able to get everything organized, cleaned, and put away, but there’s more…

My husband is in school. He was in school last night and again this morning. Also, have I mentioned he has a small business on the side that he’s owned since he was 18 years old? After he bolts from school today, we’ll be frantically preparing for his trade show tomorrow. Any ‘free’ time otherwise used for sanity-saving-house-organization will instead be spent on trade-show-preparation-in-hopes-of-finding-new-clients. Ugh.
     
Our dog is even looking at me with disgust. Yeah…YOU’RE one to talk, Sullivan…I believe that pile of firewood on our back deck is YOUR doing. It looks like the frigging Blair Witch Project out there.

I take issue with a disastrous house for many reasons.

      A – When it’s disastrous as it is now, I feel totally out of sorts and stressed.
      B - It wouldn’t be like this if some people didn’t refuse to put dishes in the dishwasher, unload the dishwasher, hang-up their coats, put away their shoes, and so on, and so on, and so on.
      C - We don’t have the square footage to allow for unusable space…and as far as I’m concerned, this kitchen is NOT USABLE.
      D - It’s FREEZING outside which keeps us INSIDE this war zone of a house.
      E - I believe our home is supposed to feel safe, and cozy, and comfortable, and lovely, you know, as opposed to chaotic, dirty, cluttered, and filled to the brim with crap people haven’t put away.
     
Therefore, on a day I technically could have slept in, I’ve been up since 6:30 trying to get this house back in order. I’d rather be sleepy from a late night and an early morning than be CRAZY because the house is so awful. For me, sleepy is less dangerous than crazy.
     
Which brings me to the real question: is this my gig from now on? Husband in school, swamped at work, busy with small business, little girls here half the time, so while they’re willing and eager to do chores, it only happens every other weekend, leaving me to take this on and be sure this house is in fact a home and I AM in fact sane? No, seriously…REALLY?
     
Chalk this up to a question for which I did NOT want the answer.


About the Author:

Carrie Monroe O’Keefe started blogging about her life by sharing stories of marriage, stepmotherhood, and how to navigate it all on mamacadabra.com in 2012. People said they loved reading the posts, so she kept writing. In addition to blogging, she released her middle-grade fiction book, The Whole Truth, in 2019. 

Carrie lives outside of Minneapolis with her husband, two daughters, and dog Finlay. 











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