Inspo Nuggets from the Universe — Part One
AI Generated “Inspo Nugget”
I believe that if I keep my eyes, ears, and mind, and maybe even my heart, open, I will be granted “Inspo Nuggets from the Universe.” Inspo Nuggets are messages sent through a book, a billboard, a birthday card, a podcast, eavesdropping at a bar, or literally wherever and like Feris Bueller once said, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” Indeed, I try to listen for or be open to receiving the perfect message, that I need to hear in a particular moment as it gets delivered randomly from the universe.
One of my early Inspo Nuggets came to me in a book, specifically from Katharine Graham’s memoir, Personal History. It is a lengthy tome about a remarkable and influential career woman, peppered with streaks of vulnerability that made her life story a page-turning read. In that book, she used cakes to compare her life to her daughter’s life. Katharine Graham’s life was a “layer cake,” with each phase of her life as a distinct layer — college, young married life, motherhood, and then her career layer. That cake was tidy and layers are separated by a delicious frosting of choice.
Katherine Graham then compared her daughter’s life to a fruit cake. Fruit cakes are a jumbled mess (with an apology to fruit cake lovers everywhere, I’m paraphrasing her words). Everything — batter, dried fruit, nuts, weird jellied things, maybe even some booze — are all thrown together in the mix. Her point was that her daughter’s life was a mash-up, doing everything, all at once — marriage, career, and motherhood. And #IFYKYK, that life is an exhausting and jumbled combination.
I was at a point where I had stepped off the career track and was pretty dismayed about it. Staying home with the kids was maddening, you are the CEO of little tyrants always on the verge of mutiny. I say this with the deepest love and affection for my four, now grown and flown, children. There is a one-day-a-year “atta-girl”, that Hallmark holiday called Mother’s Day but the rest of the year was a frenzied dash from school to activities to weekends filled with games and birthday parties. There was never a promotion, no raise and there just isn’t a fulsome sense of accomplishment until they leave you, which is also kind of heartbreaking because, well, they don’t need you the same way anymore.
Reading about this brilliant woman who had a legendary career, with her layer cake life was exactly what I needed to hear at that exact moment. It was an Inspo Nugget in the middle of a 650-page book, in the middle of my frenzied child-raising years, that helped me take a breath, have faith that it was ok to step off a career, work on enjoying this motherhood layer and gave me the hope that a career layer could be in my future.
Happy Mother’s Day to all of the mamas in this community!
First published by me at Inside.com as part of their #ImInspiredBy contest. I called it #ImInspiredBy — Mother’s Day Edition
Image credit to Starryai.com interpretation of my Inspo Nugget Promp
