My Substack Anniversary

Write like a mother

Writing is best seen as a lifelong lab experiment, where one can either play and delight in the process of trial and error or hide away their work into an unshared notebook of mere data collection.

We must ask if we think the world ought to know and be inspired by our work or if it was meant to be lost outside ourselves.

Do we need to share our writing? No. Do we believe the world can benefit from sharing the messy, vulnerable, and even mundane lives we expect? I believe, yes.

In the voice of Bilbo Baggins, today is my Substack birthday! Not one hundred and eleven years of course, just the one. Actually this was started June 30 but we shall see if I can post it sooner?

Motherhood Minute was born in between midnight nursing sessions with my daughter and somehow getting time in our small business office to type out sentences as she napped in a play pen.

I could no longer balance my journal on the armrest of the nursery chair. The majority of my writing was taking place in the Notes app of my phone at night and they were shorter essays because my life as a mother had no longer allowed time to sit around waiting for inspiration.

Even now I write this in fragments: 10 minutes before sleeping, 5 minutes before my child runs to my arms after she eats, and in the car before work.

I had a very pretty website blog at the time that required a massive amount of effort to publish anything. Graphics of different sizes needed to be made, formatting was only happening on the desktop, and there was little to no social conversation happening.

Substack has changed writing for me.

At least I have always written this way and it’s changed publishing for me.

I have long loved shorter forms of writing but never thought of a newsletter format. Blogs were what people did, right? Published authors were the only writers being read online.

It’s not an exaggeration to say my journaling work with author Amie Mcnee (her instagram is inspiredtowrite) from September 2020 all the way to June 2022 led me to believe I was allowed to show up in whatever space I wanted using whatever format felt right.

Literally years of finding creative community support on Instagram to break down my internal narratives and just write. They aren’t gone just sitting around like broken down Amazon boxes I haven’t taken out to the bin.

I started this Substack full of readiness to be like everyone else (so I assumed.) You would get dedicated posts on particular parenthood or work topics certain days of the week. I would post at least once a week. It would be polished.

Motherhood Minute just like motherhood and small business is not polished. Lord help me keep it messy and meaningful!

My life is a tangled and beautiful spiderweb covered in dew every morning. I am showing up vulnerable and ready to show you that the boxes must be torn down and constantly removed. It’s for my own mental health journey; this writing is in order to serve myself first.

Some things I’ve done along the way:

• Added paywalls to pieces I spent considerable more energy and research on.

• Removed paywalls out of guilt and loneliness because no one was reading my favorite pieces I’d worked hard on.

• Added paywalls after 40 days time.

• Removed paywalls to my favorite pieces from the past.

• Ditched any attempt to format newsletters nicely.

• Added email intros to myself at the footer to invite readers to work with me.

• Created months full of guest writer series when I knew those months would be too hard for me to write in anyways.

• Occasionally published Notes, but quickly found that it felt better to share other people there than myself.

The lab experiment must be shared and enjoyed or we will truly go mad here.

If we do not allow joy and flexibility in format and change (or disregard) niches as we evolve as real people do then Substack will become another social media app to abandon.