Your own brand of bravery and my ‘secret’ book project

I’ll share more about my project in a minute, but I’ve been wanting to write about the topic of bravery for a good while. You see for years I’ve considered myself to be really quite wimpy. I’ve done a few things in my life that others would label as ‘brave’, for example moving country six times, moving house innumerable times more, and taking chances on people and things with very little planning. But there are things that completely terrify me.

Pregnancy comes to mind. As some of you will know by now, I’m currently pregnant with twins. At time of writing I’m sitting around 12/13 weeks. We’re super excited for the babies, and they’re all I think about all the time just now. But I’m anxious, and I was also really anxious in my previous pregnancies with my boys. In this particular one, this makes sense to some extent because I had some really ugly symptoms for several weeks in my first trimester, plus three minor strokes that sent me to hospital for a week (thanks extra hormones plus undiagnosed, surprise hole in my heart.)

The thing is, there are plenty of women out there who simply seem to fly through pregnancy. Their weekly bump shots look actually glowing and happy, and they seem to have their entire nursery organised and purchased by week 8. Meanwhile here’s me, googling every ingredient of everything I’m eating, avoiding deodorant (sorry hubby) and face creams altogether for the first trimester, and dreading going to the toilet each and every time.

And I’m not trying to normalise this by the way, I’ve just gotten so frustrated with myself over it several times already. I’ve thought about how, as a person who really values her faith, I must be rubbish for still feeling so scared despite my trust in God, and how so many book and film characters are so brave. Now this brings me to my point (and I now have a mild suspicion I have actually said this before, but bear with me anyway.) You see Gimli the dwarf in Lord of the Rings? He’s always struck me as crazy brave. He’s small and actually rather unwieldy, but doesn’t seem scared of anything at all. Yet this is exactly it, he’s NOT scared.

Bravery, I’ve come to realised, isn’t about doing things you’re not scared of to begin with. My various moves weren’t me being brave, because I didn’t find them intimidating bar my last house move which involved a lot of research into local schools and nurseries. Having more babies isn’t necessarily a brave thing to do for everyone, because some of you may just feel really okay about the whole process. I fall into the category of woman who is anxious until she holds her little ones in her arms, and that makes me doing this again brave. It’s my own brand of brave.

And things I’ve done to emphasise that bravery this time are, for example, choosing to do things for the babies because I want to rather than letting some subconscious fear of ‘jinxing’ things (which I really don’t consciously believe in anyhow) convince me otherwise. For instance, next week, God willing, once my dating scan has been and gone in a, hopefully, uneventful manner, I may just start my Amazon wishlist for the babies. I like using their list because it means I can pick out what we actually still need (not much) after two boys, and I get a freebie for buying a thing I was going to buy anyway. I’ve also started learning how to knit, so I can make the babies some cute little hats for hospital. Ordinarily, I’d just be sitting freaking out, but I’m trying to choose positivity as much as possible. Positivity and, like I mentioned earlier, my faith.

Which brings me to my next point, which now feels like an afterthought unfortunately. I’m working on creating this blog to make an income after my maternity leave is up with the twins. The reason behind it is simple: I’ve freelanced for a lot of marketing agencies and bloggers in recent years, who are all doing just that… but having me write their content for them. So I figured, why not have a go myself and write about topics I’m personally interested in. Then I thought further and decided to write down the process in a sort of diary format, alongside the statistics of how everything’s going along the way. My hope is that ‘Mama’s Got Time’ (working title), will be ready for publication some time next winter, and that it’ll help other mums (and dads) work for themselves so they ‘have time’ for their little ones.

I’ll keep you posted on how it goes. But again, doing this, while not as scary as other things, is a little out there for me, so it’s my own wee brand of brave. What’s yours?

PS: Unrelated, but we recently bought our kids a Yoto Player so they can listen to some of their favourite books (and give this tired, preggo mama a break) and it is AMAZING. Genuinely so much better than I could have ever anticipated. I may do a proper review of it and the books we like on it later on, because you should definitely get one, too.