A Working Mom's Spring Curriculum

a guide to new ideas, career pivots, reads for the season, and health as a byproduct of vitality

Hello,

I fell in love with spring when I was living in Tennessee. It was never a season I had paid attention to because growing up in So Cal, there’s not an obvious Spring. Plants, trees, and flowers never really die here. They might get dehydrated because rain isn’t in surplus, but there’s always life in the plant world here. In Tennessee, the trees become bear with no leaves in sight, flowers don’t survive, and plant life takes a giant pause in the quiet of winter. The turn of the season, from fall to winter, used to turn my mood as well, until I learned a deeper appreciation for spring.

You see, after observing a slow death over a few years, you start to really appreciate the bloom of new life. Instead of the “I hate that everything dies.” conversation, we’re not having a conversation around, “I love when everything comes alive, even after a death.” Experiencing the seasons is for me, a reminder that not everything lasts forever, there’s a rhythm to life that even nature obeys, and we all benefit from a repeated form of death. Spring welcomes you to anticipate the rebirth of something new because you learn to appreciate that what you once considered death, is actually not death at all. It’s a rest for the season while something new is being reborn. I learned to love Winter, the cold, grey, quiet and slow, because I looked forward to new life, new rhythms, and renewed energy.

Motherhood and Spring have so much in common, well womanhood for that matter, but today's letter is about mothering while working. Working moms have categorically designed brains, think like 17 tabs open at once. At first glance, they all look unrelated, but the reality is, they all operate within the same browser. The more we can embrace this fact, the sooner we can stop struggling to compartmentalize like a man. Regardless, I’m here to tell you what my curriculum for spring as a wfh mom looks like because the winter was wintering and I’m ready for a bright and beautiful rebirth.

One thing I notice while operating under productivity, deadlines, timeframes, teaching, learning, helping, nurturing, wiping, making, baking, cooking, creating, cleaning, and cultivating, is the capacity for delight becomes harder and harder to maintain. It’s not because I’m flooded with misery, but because the is no grounding period cut out and multitasking becomes necessary for operations to run adequately. None of these conditions and requirements are “bad”. What is bad, however, is the inability to create pause between them all.

We came back from the dentist after 3 hours one morning this week and I felt positively drained. I didn’t do anything extenuating necessarily. I wasn’t working out or working really at all, but I was holding space for my little one in the chair, responding to emails here and there, making sure my oldest was reading when we were talking here and there, and chatting with the staff while making our next appointments. While none of those things alone are taxing, it’s the multi-tasking of it all and shifting between different parts of the brain in a matter of seconds. This is the mentally exhausting part of winter-multi-tasking when you really want to monotask so my goal here, this spring is to find compartments in the day to monotask.

Working with the intention of joy in what I do and being able to be present with my kids was always a goal.

I used to think i was only productive if I was rushing around hopped up on caffeine, doing 3 things at once. In fact, I used to pride myself on these crushing numbers in my past day job. The more hurry, the more calls, the more appointments, more and more, was always better. Then I had my second baby and that went straight out the window. I gave birth in 2020 and next thing I know I was breastfeeding on Teams meetings with executives of hospitals. I wanted to be talking with my baby, paying attention to him, making eye contact with him. Instead, I was pushing the screen up so far that the only visual was a floating head with no neck, over nodding so I could appear engaged while my breasts were out just a few inches below. I drew the line. My husband and I reevaluated (ironically right around Springtime 2021) and decided that I would quit and find something more suitable to my new life as a mom of two young boys.

Sacrifices were made; we crunched numbers and got serious about what life would look like financially. Spring is the perfect time to do this. Think of it as a spring cleaning, but for your career.

If you’re looking for a career shift, going out on your own as an entrepreneur, moving into freelance, wanting to go back to school or something where your work is now going to accommodate your life, now is the time to brainstorm.

Get realistic about finances. What can be sacrificed to support the shift? Maybe it’ll take some time, but it doesn’t mean never.

Look at realistic timelines and explore the start-up and launch time.

Reflect on what you feel you’ve been called to do and start reverse engineering about how to get there.

Think about what you want your life to look like, time with the kids, money abundance, and freedom and gather your skills asking what you can do that will work around that.

Spring is the time to realign our values and boundaries with the extensions of our lives. As women, we can get into the habit of living out of habit vs intention and this season I urge you to revisit your career with intention.

Spring to dos for a winter coded working mom stepping into spring coded working mom when the goal is monotasking.

The capacity for delight must be carved out with care. Find 2 creative hobbies. Learn to sketch, watercolor, or draw and do the task (alone or with the kids) and nothing else.

Take a break between tasks. When you finish one task, like the dentist in my example, give yourself 15 min to rest mentally before moving on to the next task. Your brain and nervous system will thank you.

Audit how you spend you work hours currently can you spend less one trained thought on a high-focus task vs more time on the task because you’re doing too much at once?

Give yourself permission to restructure: asking, what can shift with what we have going on at home and what can’t?

What are some boundaries that can support going from work mode to mom mode?

For the body I like to revisit the basics because we all know most of everything is literally the most overcomplicated. Health and wellness are basic at a foundational level.

Create a morning rhythm. Maybe a 2-minute practice before the day comes for you (stretch, open windows for fresh light, splash cold water on the face, tongue scrape, oil pull, and step outside for starters.)

The weekly solo walk or some sort of non-negotiable movement without earbuds, stroller, or agenda. Silence is hard these days, but we crave it most out of anything.

Make the weeks meals revolve around what’s in season. For the upcoming month of April we’ve got asparagus, artichokes, beets, soft greens, peas, radishes, strawberries, citrus, kiwi, pineapple, and mangos.

Create a mini-Sunday reset that’s like 20 minutes of physical order. Pick a drawer, a shelf) and keep a bag of give away or toss with you so you can also declutter.

Creativity isn’t just for the littles. If anything, a creative mom is a regulated mom which yields regulated littles.

Finding a spring creative project just for you. Maybe the Artists Way? This is calling to me personally so I may just try it for the first time this Spring.

Planning weekend micro-adventures or outdoor insp. Take a picnic outside, head to the beach if you’re in a warmer climate, take nature walks, aim for 10k steps.

Create 15 min blocks for creative flow time, that means sitting with the kids if it’s watercolor time, woahdough time, etc. Take the pause for you too.

Reading will always be a core part of my intentions for any season so of course I’m giving you somethings to sink your eyes into. I’m including ones that aren’t going to add to the noise and chaos but actually might help draw you inward.

Motherhood and Identity

• Anne Enright, Making Babies (excerpts) brutally honest, darkly funny

• Sarah Manguso, Ongoingness: on time, memory, and the self that remains

• Rachel Hochhauser, Lady Tremaine: giving us a peek into the backstory of the perceived evil stepmother of Cinderella.

Rest and Resistance

• Celeste Headlee, Do Nothing (Chapter 1: “The Cult of Efficiency”)

Spring Itself

• Katherine May, Enchantment : on re-enchanting ordinary life when life is anything but ordinary

• Robin Wall Kimmerer, “The Grammar of Animacy” from Braiding Sweetgrass in all this book offers a wide-eyed lens of how plants are part of our lives, health, and experiences of the past drawing relevance to current and evolving science. Lots of storytelling here.

My goal as you already know is seeking vitality instead of health. Vitality is and will always be an anchor for me moving forward into my 40s.

I want to reframe the question from “am I healthy?” to “do I feel alive?”. I feel like the answers will be far more enlightening for the latter than the former.

The wellness industry exhausts mothers. We’re not just looking for quick fixes anymore, we’re seeking lifestyle changes and with every swipe, we see lifestyles that are not quite like ours, but look fascinating so we try it on like a shoe and wonder why it doesn’t quite fit. These people don’t live our lives so instead we pause and reimagine how we want to exist in all the lives we live and make choices that support that vision.

Allow Spring to welcome you into seeing health as something larger than optimization. Rather than consuming more content, supplements, and green juices, check in with the grander vision into vitality. I’m talking a lot about this in the Body Lit series and you’re probably over the word vitality itself by now, but if you’re still chasing ways to optimize your health, then it’s time you let that narrative go this season. Catch up on the series here.

Vitality this spring offers energy, joy, presence, and desire.

Let’s focus on nourishment instead of nutrition as a clinical data point. Nourishing our nervous systems, resting, sunlight, connection, pleasure for absolutely no reason other than to experience joy.

At this point, we ca drop the metrics, stop tracking and start noticing.

As usual, thank you for being here, making it to the end of these letters.

Truly, we’re in this together.

Warmly,

Gi