Dirty Dancing, Sort Of.

Two months into Motherhood, I wrote about trying to understand who I was now that I had this alien baby. I likened the journey to a choreographed dance, learning new steps while incorporating a few old ones. Fast-forward 13 months, and I still find myself occasionally tripping over my own feet. Picture the Dirty Dancing music montage where "Hungry Eyes" is playing and Patrick Swayze is trying to teach an uncoordinated Jennifer Grey how to dance. She steps on his toes, can't get the timing correctly, and giggles when she's supposed to be serious. I'm barely holding it together Jennifer Grey right now. But I have hope, because if you've seen the whole movie, and I know you have, she's a spectacular dancer by the time the credits role. I mean, who can forget the final scene? Please tell me you have stayed up long into the wee hours of the night, your freshman year of college, perfecting the moves from the final scene, with the girls who live on the same floor as you. Who's with me? Jenny, Sara, Pam - you'd better raise your hands.

I've made some serious advancements in putting the pieces of my revised self, post baby, back together again. The photography gig is going really well and despite Old Man Winter, I'm booking clients. My brother had been on me for a while to update my website, something about flash (not boobies) and html and optimal viewing, blah, blah, blah. I'd been dragging my heals on working on the site because I knew it was going to take me about a billion hours to update and revamp. These days, time is precious commodity. Finally, I just bit the bullet and sat my ass down one evening after Lucy had gone to bed, and got to working on it. I was right - it took nearly a billion hours, or closer to five, which in Mommy time is pretty much the same thing, especially when working evening hours that are best spent zombified on a couch, eyes trained on The Real Housewives, or Girls, or Broad City, or Togetherness. Yes, I watch them ALL and then some. Point is, with the sacrifice of a couple prized evenings, I got the website done. And dammit, it looks fabulous.

Writing has definitely been on the back burner, but I did something today that forced me to dust off some old work, and put a new piece together. I auditioned for the Pittsburgh show of Listen to Your Mother. Gulp. At about high noon on this quiet snowy Sunday, I stood before a panel of three women, and performed my pieces. I think it went well! They laughed when they were supposed to, and they got teary-eyed, too. Both good signs that my writing, and how I told my stories, evoked a reaction. Now it's a waiting game. A fingers crossed, breath held, waiting game...

Slowly, I'm making progress at redefining who I am. There will never be a time, though, when I'm not Lucy's mama; Motherhood underscores everything. It's the nature of this blessed beast. But, I'm discovering that while being Lucy's mama is part of my everyday, it doesn't have to be my everything. I can be her mama, and be a photographer. I can be her mama, sweep some blush across my cheeks, dab on some lipstick, lint roll the dog hair off my pants, scrape the crust of god knows what off my shoulder, drive myself downtown, and rock an audition. 

The more I do for myself, the better of a mama Lucy gets. It's a win-win situation. Now someone lift up your arms, I'm going to jump into them cause - and you knew I was going to work it in somehow: 

nobody puts baby in the corner.