By Jolina Petersheim
Sometimes I still don’t know, and I’ve been on a learning
curve for seven years.
I signed my first two-book contract when my
firstborn daughter was twelve weeks old. I remember those days with fondness,
though I struggled with mama guilt back then. My daughter’s favorite spot was
snuggled on the nursing pillow on my lap, so I spent hours sitting on the
couch, feeding her and typing—the laptop carefully positioned on the fold-out
coffee table, her hair decorated with pieces of lettuce from lunch.
I struggled with mama guilt because I thought I should be
doing something besides typing while she slept. I remember one afternoon
watching her doing “tummy time” on the mat at my feet and thinking she looked
lonely, so I scooped her up and put her back on the pillow. I had babysat for
years, and there’s an eleven-year gap between me and my younger brother, but
motherhood was a different story.
I was responsible for this child’s well-being, and what
if what I did was not enough? So, I made sure to never put her down.
Hindsight, as they say, is 20/20, and if I could clear my
tired mama eyes and put my hands on my achy twenty-six-year-old shoulders, I
would tell myself it’s okay to have a creative outlet to pour myself into while
also physically and emotionally pouring myself out for my child.
We lived in the middle of nowhere back then
(and that’s saying something because we’re still twenty minutes “from town”),
and my husband worked nine-hour days. All I had was my little girl, on the
pillow, and this story about motherhood in all its beautifully challenging
forms.
I thought writing was taking away from
motherhood, but the truth is, writing helped me understand the
beauty of maternal sacrifice while receiving a far greater reward.
That plump baby on the nursing pillow is now almost
seven: the eldest of three sisters with fluffy hair and contagious giggles that
transform into cat fights and then teary grins. For almost seven years, I’ve
taken two hours in the afternoon to write, and in those years, I’ve learned
that to be a good mama means I must take time to refill the well before I
continue pouring out.
So, how do I do it? I don’t rightly know, but one day
that will change. My three girls will have homes of their own, and more than
likely, families of their own, and I will have all the time in the world to
type. And as I write what I have learned during these beautifully challenging
years, I will smile while envisioning my own daughters, sitting down on the
couch or at the kitchen table, using a few hours in the afternoon to fill
themselves back up before continuing to pour out.
Jolina Petersheim is the highly
acclaimed author of The Divide, The Alliance, The Midwife, and The Outcast,
which Library Journal called "outstanding . . . fresh and
inspirational" in a starred review and named one of the best books of
2013. That book also became an ECPA, CBA, and Amazon bestseller and was
featured in Huffington Post's Fall Picks, USA Today, Publishers Weekly, and the
Tennessean. CBA Retailers + Resources called her second book, The Midwife,
"an excellent read [that] will be hard to put down," and Booklist
selected The Alliance as one of their Top 10 Inspirational Fiction Titles for
2016. The Alliance was also a finalist for the 2017 Christy Award in the
Visionary category. The sequel to The Alliance, The Divide, won the 2018 INSPY
Award for Speculative Fiction. Jolina's non-fiction writing has been featured
in Reader's Digest, Writer's Digest, Today's Christian Woman, and Proverbs 31
Ministries. She and her husband share the same unique Amish and Mennonite
heritage that originated in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, but they now live
in the mountains of Tennessee with their three young daughters. Jolina's fifth
novel, How the Light Gets In, a modern retelling of Ruth set in a cranberry bog
in Wisconsin, releases March 2019.
No comments:
Post a Comment