I Have No Fucking Idea What I’m Doing Tomorrow

I am a mom. I am an author. I homeschool my kids.

Some days I genuinely cannot believe this is my life. Other days I am hiding in the bathroom because somebody asked me a question about fractions while I was answering an email about books and trying to remember whether anyone in this house has eaten lunch.

It sucks. It is rewarding. I hate it. I love it.

All of those things are true at the exact same time, and I think that is probably the most accurate description I can give of motherhood, writing, homeschooling, and attempting to do all three without completely losing my fucking mind.

When my daughter was born, my husband and I made the decision that I would stay home with her. That was a much bigger adjustment for me than I expected. I had worked since I was thirteen years old. I worked through my pregnancy until just a few days before I had her. Having a job was so deeply embedded in my understanding of adulthood that suddenly not having one felt terrifying, even though staying home with our baby was something we had chosen together and something I wanted.

I didn't know how to simply not work. So naturally, I found side hustles. Of course I did.

I was a new mother learning how to take care of this tiny person who had completely rearranged my life, and some part of my brain was still going, Okay, but what are we doing? What are we making? How are we contributing? What is ours?

Then my son came along, and motherhood kicked my ass in an entirely different way.

Postpartum depression was horrible. There isn't a prettier way I want to package that part of my life. I was struggling. I had a colicky baby who seemed to believe breastfeeding was not a method of obtaining food but a twenty-four-hour occupation, who only wanted my left boob, and who considered bottles a personal betrayal.

I loved my baby. I also hated huge portions of my waking existence. Those things can exist together, too.

There is a strange amount of guilt attached to admitting that motherhood can be miserable sometimes. You're supposed to look at your beautiful baby and understand that every sleepless night and screaming fit and sore nipple and moment when you don't recognize yourself anymore is worth it, and therefore you should somehow enjoy the suffering.

I didn't.

I was exhausted. I was depressed. I was touched out. I felt like my body belonged to somebody else all the time, and somewhere underneath being needed constantly by these little people I loved more than anything, I desperately wanted something that was mine.

And then, during those endless late-night breastfeeding sessions, I found Kindle Unlimited.

Holy shit. Suddenly there were books everywhere.

I read more than four hundred books in a year. That number sounds ridiculous because it was ridiculous, but I was awake constantly with a baby attached to me and reading became this tiny doorway out of my own brain. I could be sitting in the dark at three in the morning nursing a baby who absolutely refused to sleep and simultaneously be somewhere completely different.

Those books gave me something back. Eventually, reading them also planted a dangerous little thought in my head.

I could do this.

Then it became:

No, seriously. I could fucking do this.

I had written before. I used to write fanfiction. I loved writing fanfiction. I thrived doing it. I knew what it felt like to create characters and relationships and scenes and have people actually want to read what I made. So why couldn't I write a book?

Part of that decision was creative. Part of it was probably stubbornness. But a huge part of it was that I needed an identity that wasn't only Mom. I love being their mother. That doesn't mean motherhood satisfies every part of who I am. I needed something that belonged to me.

Not the baby. Not the laundry. Not the dishes. Not the grocery list. Not the next feeding. Not another tiny human needing my body or my attention or my brain. Mine.

Writing became that.

Of course, nobody bothered to tell me that “writing a book” was approximately fourteen percent of being an indie author. I thought I needed to write the damn book.

Cute.

Then I discovered editing. Covers. Formatting. Distribution. Metadata. Marketing. Social media. Newsletters. Ads. Websites. Graphics. Taxes. Launches. Reader groups. ARC teams. Customer service. File problems. Retailers. Keywords. Categories. And seventeen other jobs I didn't know existed until they were suddenly all my responsibility.

But I did it. I wrote the damn book. And then I wrote another one. And another. And apparently I never stopped.

Somewhere along the way, the silly little thing I started while trying to find myself again became my career. This dream I had always carried around—the one I had been told was worthless, unrealistic, and would never make money—started paying actual bills.

Not always. Let's be extremely fucking clear about that.

There have been wonderful months. There have also been months where my royalties looked at my expenses, laughed directly in my face, and left.

I am incredibly fortunate that my husband has a career that can support our family. I know exactly how significant that is. Having the ability to build my writing career without knowing that one bad royalty month meant my children couldn't eat was a privilege, and I will never pretend otherwise. But “we could live on one income” has never meant “everything was easy.”

We made sacrifices to build this life.

We have been a one-car family. We have been a no-car family. We have delayed payments. We have stretched money until there was nothing left to stretch. We have eaten the cheap shit so the kids could have the better food. There were times when the choice for me to stay home was hard financially.

It was still our choice. And I don't regret it.

Maybe part of the reason I am so aware of what we have now is because I know what it feels like to have very little.

I grew up with food banks and hand-me-downs. I knew what it was like for the lights to be off. I knew generators because sometimes the electric bill couldn't be paid. I knew what it was like for food to become uncertain, especially on weekends. We lost our house. We lost a lot.

And yes, I survived the absolute social devastation of off-brand Payless Etnies. If you were a kid during that particular era, you understand that I have suffered.

I can laugh about pieces of it now, but poverty isn't funny when you're a child living inside it. Kids know when there isn't enough. They know when adults are worried. They know when everybody else has something they don't. They understand instability long before they have the vocabulary to explain it.

So when I look at my life now, I am deeply grateful. Not because it is glamorous. Jesus Christ, it is not glamorous.

But because there is food in my kitchen. Because there is a roof over my children. Because my husband worked his ass off to build a career that allows our family to live the way we do. Because I worked my ass off until the stories I wrote became another source of income for our family. Because the dream I was told would never amount to anything became something real.

I know how blessed I am. I thank Jesus for that constantly.

Then, because apparently I am incapable of allowing my life to become too manageable, we decided to homeschool.

There was a glorious little period before that when my children went to public school and I suddenly remembered what silence sounded like. They would leave during the day and I could write.

Alone.

Nobody yelled “MOM” from another room seventeen times only to ask where the object directly in front of their face was. I could have lunch with my husband. I could take a nap.

A fucking nap. Do you understand?

Then we moved, looked at our kids, looked at our circumstances and the political and educational environment around us here in Florida, and decided homeschooling felt like the right choice for our family.

And because I have apparently never once met a responsibility and thought, Maybe I have enough, I said essentially: Sure. Let's fucking homeschool.

Homeschooling is really fucking hard. There. That's the secret blog post. Thank you for coming.

I sometimes look at homeschooling content online and wonder whether these people and I are participating in the same activity. There are beautiful school rooms with coordinated wooden shelves and tiny baskets labeled in tasteful fonts. There are children peacefully completing nature journals beside sourdough bread while their mother wears linen and appears to have experienced inner peace.

That is wonderful for them.

At my house, there are days when I am yelling, “I DON'T FUCKING KNOW FRACTIONS,” and my eleven-year-old is looking at me like I have personally embarrassed the entire human species while going, “Literally, bro, it's so easy.”

Thank you, tiny scholar. Teach the fucking class, then.

We don't have one perfect homeschooling method because I don't think one would work for us. We use a combination of things. Some subjects are online. Some involve worksheets. Some happen through real life. We have co-ops. We have clubs. My kids have friends. We get out of the house. We learn in ways that make sense for them, and when something doesn't work, we change it.

I actually love that freedom.

I love watching them understand something. I love being able to spend more time on something they struggle with and fly through something they grasp immediately instead of having their education dictated entirely by the pace of a classroom. I love that learning can happen somewhere other than a desk. I love that we can go somewhere and turn an ordinary day into something educational.

I love knowing my children this closely. I also occasionally want everyone to stop speaking to me for six consecutive business days. Again: both things can be true.

The difficult part is that homeschooling didn't replace my career. It joined it.

I am not only Mom and Teacher. I am still an author with books readers expect me to eventually finish. I have deadlines. I have edits. I have marketing. I have websites and graphics and emails and releases and all the other invisible work that happens around publishing.

There is no magical point during the day when motherhood closes and Author Lila clocks in. They overlap constantly.

Sometimes I write late at night on my phone because it is the only quiet moment I have. Sometimes I'm on my laptop while everyone else is eating because I told myself I only needed five more minutes, and eventually my husband has to drag me toward the kitchen table and remind me that I am technically a mammal and require food.

Sometimes the book is flowing and I desperately want to stay inside it, but someone needs help with school. Sometimes we're having a great homeschool day and I don't want to interrupt it because an email arrived. Sometimes I am answering business messages while mentally reviewing what we still need to finish for school.

Sometimes absolutely none of it gets done.

Those are often the best days. We say fuck it and go somewhere. We adventure. We learn something because we found it instead of because it was written on the schedule. I don't write. The world somehow continues spinning.

That last part has taken me a while to learn.

I spent years feeling like every day I didn't write was a day I was failing at my career. Then I would spend too much time working and feel like I was failing my children. Then I would focus entirely on them and worry I was neglecting the business I had worked so hard to build.

There is no version where everybody gets one hundred percent of me at the same time. That math does not work. And apparently neither do fractions, so don't ask me to prove it.

People love talking about balance, but I don't think my life has ever looked balanced. Balance sounds like everything receives the correct amount every day.

My life works more like triage. Who needs me most today? Sometimes it's my kids. Sometimes it's my career. Sometimes it's my husband. Sometimes, although I am historically terrible at remembering this option exists, it is me.

There are weeks when I write like crazy and school looks more independent. There are weeks when homeschool takes more of my attention and the manuscript barely moves. There are days when dinner is thoughtful and homemade and days when dinner is whatever can be assembled without requiring my remaining three brain cells to cooperate.

There are days when I feel like I am absolutely crushing this life. There are days when I am convinced I have failed at every role I have. Usually neither assessment is completely accurate.

I think that is the part of this I wish we showed more often.

My life is not a Pinterest-perfect homeschool life. I don't wake up every morning with a beautiful lesson plan, write five thousand words before breakfast, educate my children through an enriching series of hands-on activities, maintain a spotless home, prepare a nutritious dinner, spend quality time with my husband, and then peacefully read before getting eight hours of sleep.

If you know someone who does that every day, don't introduce us. I don't need that kind of negativity in my life.

What we do have is a real life.

We yell sometimes. We fight sometimes. I get overwhelmed. The kids get overwhelmed. Someone gets frustrated over school. Someone needs a break. Someone says something shitty. Sometimes that someone is me.

Then we apologize. We talk. We try again. We laugh. We learn.

That is part of the education too.

My children are watching me build something while I teach them. They're watching their dad work hard at something he is incredibly good at. They're watching us make mistakes and solve problems and occasionally have no fucking clue what we're doing.

I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing for them to see.

I don't want them growing up believing adults possess some secret manual that magically appears when you turn eighteen. I want them to know that most of adulthood is looking at a situation, saying well, shit, gathering the information you have, and making the best decision you can. Then changing it when you learn better.

That's what we've done with our family from the beginning.

Staying home was the right choice. Public school was the right choice for that season. Homeschooling is the right choice for us now. None of those choices needs to become a universal argument about what every other family should do.

I am not here to convince anyone to homeschool. God, no. I'm still trying to convince myself I understand sixth-grade math.

I also don't think choosing public school means someone loves her children less, choosing homeschool means someone loves hers more, working outside the home makes someone less present, or staying home makes someone more devoted.

Families are different. Resources are different. Children are different. Parents are different.

What works beautifully for us could make another family completely miserable. And what works beautifully for another family might make me completely miserable.

There is freedom in admitting that. There is also freedom in admitting that being grateful for your life does not require pretending it is easy.

I can know how fortunate I am and still be exhausted. I can thank Jesus for what my family has and still occasionally cry because I am overwhelmed. I can love homeschooling and hate homeschooling on the same Tuesday. I can love being a mother more than I know how to explain and still desperately need parts of myself that have nothing to do with motherhood. I can love my career and sometimes resent that it needs something from me when everyone else already does.

Gratitude is not a requirement to shut the fuck up about difficulty. That distinction matters to me. Especially because I came from a life where so much of what I have now once felt impossible.

There is a younger version of me who would look at this house, this family, this career, these shelves of books with my name on them, the ability to stay home with my children, and probably think we had somehow become rich.

She wouldn't see the spreadsheets. She wouldn't see the late nights. She wouldn't see the royalty months that sucked or the sacrifices or the years it took to build any of this. She would see stability. She would see food. She would see home.

That matters to me more than I can really put into words.

I don't know what the next version of our life looks like. Maybe we'll homeschool all the way through. Maybe we won't. Maybe my publishing schedule will eventually become beautifully reasonable.

That one seems unlikely, but Jesus performs miracles.

I don't have a master plan for making motherhood, homeschooling, and writing coexist peacefully. I don't have a morning routine that will change your life. I don't have the secret planner, curriculum, productivity method, or color-coded system that makes all of this easy.

Some mornings I barely know what we're doing after breakfast.

I just keep showing up. I teach what I know. I Google what I don't. I write when I can. I close the laptop when I need to. I apologize when I get it wrong. I try again tomorrow.

And somehow, in between the books and worksheets and deadlines and adventures and arguments about fractions, we're building a life.

It's messy. It's loud. It's hard. It's ours. And I am so fucking grateful for it.

xoxo,
Lila