More excited than ever

After writing just a couple of days, I've narrowed down my thought processes to a single pursuit.  I want to express my feelings on motherhood, makeup, dresses, and all that makes being a woman so fantastic.  I think we women often feel pressure to prove our equality to men or ourselves, and I truly believe we go about it the wrong way.  It took me a long time to see that the value in myself as a mother, partner and homemaker would always outweigh the value in any sales number i could ever produce at work.  Maybe because society tells us that that kind of work is beneath us, or oppressive to us.  Though I once bought into the same theory, I have come to realize how truly special I am to be a woman and the power I hold in the exact things that make me different from men.  Check out my other blog (http://www.1950swannabe.blogspot.com/) to really see how I want and will view myself.  I want to show my Bear how important woman are and can be when they embrace themselves instead of forcing themselves to be all things.  I hope she listens better than I did.  I believe my mother carried a lot of these values and lived by them.  I remember deliberating wanting to choose a different lifestyle when I was just starting out.  I'm not saying there's anything wrong with women who work full time jobs and take care of their families, too.  I must say, you have more energy than me.  I tried it and did it for a long period of time.  It's just not for me.  I am so happy that I can finally be honest with myself and I have matured past the need to prove otherwise to anyone.  I feel very fortunate to be able to embrace me.

First day of the rest of my life

Ok... I am now unemployed with my entire future ahead of me.  Let's see, I think I have to organize my thoughts.  That's partially the reason I started this blog.  I figure it will force me to write my ideas and ambitions down everyday.  I have so many passions: makeup, hairstyles, gardening, cooking, party planning, and of course, my Bear.  Though I don't think I'm amazing at any of these things.  Like I said...they are passions, not talents.  While I had a job, I spent most of my free time on youtube, following makeup tutorials, DIY turtorials, how to hair tutorials, etc.  I try every one that I like.  I also spend the days thinking of something yummy to cook for dinner.  I love putting on my pok-a-dot galoshes and picking vegetables in my garden.  I like getting dressed up and having martini hour.  Maybe I was born too late in the century.  I am constantly wishing I were a 1950s housewife with dinners to cook, children to raise, and coctail parties to plan.  (I would die to wear the chiffon dresses and do my hair in pin curls!)  So why can't I spend my life doing all these things?  Oh yeah, income.  There must be a way to do what you love and make money doing it, right?  People do it everyday, don't they?  I am just waiting for that big, bright idea to smack me right in the face.  Here's waiting to be smacked.....

My Start to a new life

This is it.  My leap into the unkown and scary future.  This is my first blog and I don't even know what to write or how to begin.  Let me start by telling you a little about who I am and how I came to be here...blogging.  I am a 30 year old single mother of one amazing little girl, Bear.  Before Bear was born, I was an ambitious young woman with endless career and relationship opportunities in front of her.  When I was 19, I was taking a break from school and work to "figure out what I wanted to do with my life".  I ended up applying for a secretarial job at a small office after my funds ran out and that question had yet to be answered.  It was a business ran by one man who sold car parts to car dealerships.  Turns out, I excelled at my job here.  I made about $1300 a month.  But as it turns out,  I was amazing with customers on the phone and loved the excitement of "hitting numbers" every month.  Ok, maybe it wasn't a career, but I actually loved it.  After a little over a year, I moved across the country to pursue a relationship with someone and once there, landed a job doing the same thing with a different company.  With this company, I continued moving up and eventually had a large customer base of my own.  I was managing a $6 million customer base.  Sounds a lot like a career now, huh?  In between my growth in the company, I got married, had my daughter, and eventually went through a devastating divorce.  All this being 1200 miles from home and in only about 4 years time.  So there I was, single with a small child at the age of 24.  Now what?  This is not how'd I'd seen my life unfolding.  And things did not exactly get any better with my job.  Oh, I kept pushing and selling parts and my income kept increasing.  I felt very fortunate that with hardly any college education, I was making a very good living at a job that wasn't very difficult.  I even got to the point that I had quite a bit of freedom in my schedule so my daughter didn't have to spend too much time in daycare.  But something was missing.  My personal life was and still is amazing.  I've been in a solid relationship now for about 5 years (though my mind can't seem to wrap itself around the idea of marriage now or in the forseeable future).  I'm watching my daughter grow in so many ways and she makes me happy every minute of every day.  But work seemed like... well, work.  I found myself eventually hiding from my customers.  I began to do the bare minimum for my job.  I only did what was necessary to keep the job.  This went on for years.  The job no longer fullfilled anything for me.  Where I was happiest was when I was home, taking care of my "family".  Status at work meant nothing to me.  But seeing my girl's face when I picked her up from school meant everything to me.  Getting her ready in the mornings, walking her to school, picking her up, doing homework with her, actually making her dinner every night....those are the things that I started to value more than any paycheck or promotion.  Wow... after all these years of wanting to be important in business, I found myself wanting to be a stay at mom.  The nice thing was that my style of work allowed me to do most of these things without affecting my paycheck.  What could possibly be wrong with that, right?  Everything.  I was selling car parts-a product that I could care less about!  Don't get me wrong, I think I was very good at what I did, however, I had no passion for it.  I watched coworkers getting older and still complaining about the line of business they were in.  I heard the arguments that it was still good money, it was easy, you had freedom.  Even when I heard them say it, I could hear the longing for something else in their voices.  I saw 50+ year old sales reps still pushing parts and I can't say for sure if that's where they had seen themselves 30 years prior when their whole lives were in front them.  Let me just say that there's nothing at all wrong with this business...I just saw a lot of people who had jobs... people that had never pursued their passions.  People that were still waiting for their lives to start.  Then I looked in the mirror.  I was traveling down the same road.   I had been over it a million times in my head.  What are my passions?  How could I possibly make money at that?  I need this job because it gives me the freedom to raise Bear.  How could I possibly start my own business?  I'll just keep this job.  This argument went on in my head for at least 3 years.  One day, I decided to jump.  This job was not for me.  I just knew that there's more to life than what I was doing.  I didn't want to wake up at 50 and still be doing something I had no passion for.  Sure, I had a couple business ideas in my head.  I had nothing solid, but I knew I had to get rid of the gorilla on my back (my current job that was bringing me no joy) to find out what I was really about.  I needed to answer that age old question that had been burning in the back of my head so feverishly:  Who am I?  So, I quit.  That was yesterday.  Big breath....... Now what?