Next Steps

Thank you so much. Your comments and emails, gifts of shared experience, music, and love from all over the world – I honestly don’t know what to say except thank you. Seriously. You are amazing. I felt every ounce of the positive energy you sent my way. I needed it, still do, and I so appreciate you.

See? The Internets isn’t just for porn and cat memes. I knew it!

A great deal of my mental energy lately – what little left over after constantly finding new ways to creatively wrangle Olive into seasonally-appropriate clothing, I mean – is being devoted to figuring out how to build a new life for Olive and I, and what on earth that will look like in the coming months and years.

It’s an unbelievably disorienting feeling to have the image of what you thought the next 60+ years of your life would look like – growing old with someone, a house full of children, vacations, grandchildren, holidays – just slip through your fingers. I have always been honest about my marriage – it was not always easy, never perfect – but it was mine and I always thought it would be. In my mind it wasn’t an option that it would simply cease to exist.

So, these days I sort of feel like I am scrambling. I am trying to construct something out of thin air, grasping and reaching and fighting to feel some solid ground under my feet again.  A large part of this, obviously, is financial.

I have been at home taking care of Olive for virtually her entire life, barring a few months here and there. As she has gotten older I have taken on a few freelance writing projects – including my amazing gig as contributing writer to Earth911, and writing the Practically Eco column for Pure Green Magazine– but in the months ahead I will need to look harder for paid writing opportunities and make that a priority.

And of course, there is this space. I have never run ads on Sweet Madeleine, although to be totally honest, in the last few years that’s been more due to lack of technical know-how rather than some moral high ground.

My feelings about this have changed since I began blogging. In the early days I did feel like it would be selling out somehow, or commercializing a space that needed to be somehow more…pure, than that. Then in the past few years, as I took this space more seriously, it began to feel like it would be a fair exchange for something I put a great deal of time and effort into. And, well, these days it is rapidly becoming about pure necessity.

I know that this is a touchy area, and I apologize to anyone who might feel offended by me selling out to the man! But my writing will remain the same, and I am hoping that it may even allow me to do more of it –  plus, just imagine rambling around the site, then glancing to the sidebar where you see an ad for penis-enlargement pills, and realizing you were just thinking to yourself that you needed penis enlargement pills except that you couldn’t imagine where on earth you could possibly find them…I mean, win-win, right?

You’re welcome!

In all seriousness, we will play it by ear and see how it goes. Aesthetically it will suck a little of the beauty out of this site, but it will hopefully restore a little bit of my sanity and ease some of the stress I feel hunching my shoulders. So, step by step, piece by piece. Rebirth and rebuilding.

Onwards.