School’s out. My homeschool kid took his last final, and my public school kid has her last one in the morning, which is a half day. By lunchtime tomorrow, it’s officially summer in our house.

Having grown up in the northeast—where school started the Tuesday after Labor Day, and due to excessive snow days usually ended the third week in June—I am still, after all these years, always vaguely surprised to realize that it’s only mid-May and the kids are done. I like it, though. My husband is on the university’s schedule, and even though I know there will be days when I’m shouting, “Everyone out of my office! Scoot!!”, it’s nice having him home more and the kids off at the same time. I like that we can usually get in a camping trip or two before the rest of the world is on summer vacation and/or the southern temps here soar to 100+.

When my kids were little, summer meant figuring out camp and other scheduling issues so that I could continue to work. Now that they’re both teens, I can simply tell them to go away, I guess. Ha! But I find myself wanting to work less, and trying to figure out how to best balance everything this season.

I spent a lot of time, over the last eighteen months or so, feeling pulled in a million directions while my daughter was sick and in and out of the hospital. On the one hand, I wanted nothing more than to be with her. On the other hand, a lot of the care she required wasn’t covered by our insurance, and I am fairly mentally ill about money on a good day; when facing down multi-thousand-dollar hospital bills and not knowing whether or not I was going to be able to continue working to pay them, I was a complete mess. And I always felt like my son was being neglected while his sister was in crisis, too. (Do not even get me started on what something like this does to a marriage. Someone please get my husband a very large trophy.)

Things got better, and then my daughter went and lived with her dad for a few months, and during that time I felt like I “should” be recovering my business, but I was still distracted and worried. Then she came home to us again, and things were wonderful, and then they were less wonderful, and then I had one of those epiphanies which would’ve been a lightbulb above my head, if I was a cartoon.

I’ve always tried to give everything the attention it needed, of course. What’s that saying, that you can have everything, you just can’t have it all at once? Even at the height of busyness in my freelancing career, I don’t think I neglected my family, not really, but there’s only so many hours in the day. So, the epiphany: Everything that’s happened has really put a lot of things into perspective for me. I enjoy having a successful career (obviously). And with my kids being teenagers, they don’t need the constant supervision that they did when they were tiny. But with my kids being teenagers, the remainder of my time with them here at home is drawing to a close. And if I learned nothing else in the last year or so, it’s that you just never know what might happen.

Could I plan to just proceed all business-as-usual this summer while the kids do their various things? Sure. I could, and I don’t think anyone (not even the kids) would fault me for it. They’ve got some activities lined up and they’re certainly old enough to entertain themselves, besides. I could do that. But what I’m finding is that I want to back off of work, some, for the summer. I want to have this time with them, go camping, work in the garden, pick strawberries, let them have their friends over and try to work while music is blaring and other people’s children are eating all our food.

I love my work. I love these times with my kids, too. The work can wait, sometimes. Last year it felt like summer got taken from us, and I feel like we have a lot of lost time to make up, now. I’m ready for summer. I’ll still be working, but maybe I won’t be taking on any new work for a couple of months. Somehow I think I’ll be plenty busy, anyway.

For all of my big talk about staying organized and learning to adapt to the ebb and flow of a flexible schedule, reality remains… messy. Sometimes I feel organized and capable and on top of things. Sometimes I feel like I am holding on by my teeth. And this week, I feel like one of those “If You Give A Mouse A Cookie” books.

I’m a day late writing this post, even. Because this week somehow started off okay but quickly went off the rails, and I don’t even know how it happened. On Monday, things were under control. I was getting stuff done. Today—Friday—I foolishly tried to take a nap to maybe catch up and it didn’t go well. I would like to blame this on the school year ending, but it seems to me that a week like this one happens every so often no matter what I do. You’d think I could figure it out, by now. You would be wrong, though.

Like I said, on Monday, things were fine. On Monday I was well-rested and met deadlines and got things done and drove kids where they needed to go. On Tuesday, there was a small wrench in the form of an unexpected kid-need which I was actually able to pass off to my husband so it shouldn’t have impacted my day at all, really, except that Tuesday was the day when it became clear that we had no food in the house and I had done no meal planning for the week.

This is called foreshadowing.

So on Tuesday, I ended up back at my desk after dinner, because somehow dinner ended up taking extra time, as it often does when dinner involves climbing into the back of the freezer and the bottom of the crisper drawer, trying to figure out something palatable which can be assembled from available ingredients.

On Wednesday, I was supposed to have a client call which was cancelled at the last minute, giving me extra time. Yay! Except that we rescheduled for the next day, even though I knew it would be tight. Okay, no problem. I could make it work. Then a kid appointment was also rescheduled from evening to afternoon, so even though I got that call time back, I then lost a bunch of time I hadn’t planned on, anyway. Somehow everyone got where they needed to go and my husband swooped in with take-out for dinner. Again, I was back to work after dinner, but sometimes that happens.

On Thursday, I had to spend half the day at my son’s homeschool co-op, which—combined with the rescheduled client call—made the day pretty tight for actual work, plus my daughter had a doctor’s appointment, plus at 7:00 we realized we still had no food and yet people were hungry, and so by the time I’d made dinner (spinach scrambled eggs, and now the fridge was officially empty) I was too tired to think about going back to work. I would simply catch up on Friday!

Now it’s Friday, and I started the morning with a kid doctor appointment (I’m seeing a pattern here; maybe I need to get rid of the kids…?), then a run to school, the fastest trip to the supermarket I could manage, and then back at home it was time to work. Finally. I could catch up! Maybe grab a nap! Except that after I did a little bit of work, I went to lie down for a few minutes; I hadn’t even fallen asleep when the kid who was supposed to be occupied for the day called to ask for an early pickup, and the other kid texted to ask for a bunch of stuff she needs after school, and somehow this all ended with my dog staring at me expectantly here in my office, and me telling her to stop looking at me, I’m done doing anything for anyone else right now.

The dog was unbothered, which is good. It’s possible I’m a little cranky.

So! I’m finishing up everything, and then I’ll have to decide if I work to catch up this weekend or if I leave the weekend sacred and start again on Monday. Either way, here’s hoping next week doesn’t serve up a similar the-road-to-implosion-is-paved-with-good-intentions sort of schedule.

The best part, of course, is that people who would never dream of homeschooling (spoiler: I used to be one of those people who would never in a million years dream of homeschooling) have a lot of questions. And mostly those questions pertain to my son—is he keeping up? Does he ever see other kids? Doesn’t he miss regular school? The answers are yes, yes, and not really. (When someone outright asks me if my kid is socialized—like maybe I keep him in a box under my desk—I cannot be held responsible for any snarky response I might blurt out, though.)

We’ve eased into it; our first year, he went to a homeschooling collab nearly full-time. This year, he’s gone half-time. And the coming year? I think we’re going to do a full curriculum at home, finally. We’ve found our groove. But even when people know I work full-time from my home office, it’s rare that they’ll ask how I manage it.

Apparently a supposedly unsocialized teenager is more interesting that a parent who has to figure out how to do her job and educate her kid at the same time.

The answer to “how do you do it?” is, at least right now, that I cheat… rather a lot. Utilizing an umbrella program out of the house takes some of the burden off of me in terms of curriculum programming, and it also gives me a few days a week during which I can just focus on my own work. On my son’s home days, we’re using our state’s Virtual School for online classes, which again means that the burden of curriculum programming is lifted off my shoulders. I joke that all of this is cheating, but really, I prefer to view it as smart delegation. There are plenty of reasons why homeschooling is the best environment for my son right now, and even more reasons why I can’t just drop everything and sit down with him for hours every day to try to be his Teacher Of All Things. This is the compromise; he doesn’t have to endure the shark tank that is public middle school, and I don’t have to give up my career. We’re making it work.

Well, most of the time we make it work. Welcome to May! Otherwise known as: We’re in the home stretch for the current school year. I would really like for everything to continue in the education/work groove we’ve been in, and all the best laid plans are being blown up.

See, my son is pretty self-sufficient with his online work… usually. I see myself in a supervisory role, mostly. But the semester’s almost over and he has projects and more work than usual, and he needs more help than usual. And because he’s taking classes with state-mandated EOCTs (End Of Course Tests), we have to do things like get dressed and leave the house to take him to a mandated testing site for his final exams. (Kidding! We always get dressed and often leave the house. But the EOCT thing is kind of freaking him out after a blissful year of working at his own pace at home.)

In a couple of weeks, it’ll be over. And then my daughter will finish up, too, and for a couple of lazy summer months I won’t have to worry about anyone’s school work. But right now I find myself fighting the urge to respond with “What now?” when my son interrupts me for the fifth time in an hour, because he’s working on a project and really needs more support than me checking on him here and there. I’m stressed out about getting my own work done, and he’s stressed out about getting his stuff done, and I find myself reminding us both that “It’s almost over! Just a few more assignments!”

Of course, I’ll still have to work when school’s over, but at least I won’t have to try to remember how radioactive decay works, at the same time. And that’s a relief, because I just realized I was lying about not having to worry about school work this summer—my daughter’s going to be taking a summer class from home. Whose stupid idea was that?? Oh, wait. I think it was mine.

But that was seven years ago, and a lot of things have changed since then… including that many of us who were simply sharing our day-to-day for the sake of finding an outlet and community are now paid to write. Many of us are freelance writers running our own small businesses, working full-time (or more), and the fact that we write about our children from time to time is either incidental or just a fraction of the work we get paid to do.

And yet, good lord, the world is just so reluctant to let go of that term “mommyblogger.” Most of the time I don’t care; what’s in a name? I’m just doing my thing, getting my work done, living my life, whatever. But then there always comes someone wanting to take that dismissive term and use it as the cornerstone of painting every woman with a blog as a silly little moron.

Enter “The Mommy Business Trip,” which just appeared in The Wall Street Journal, of all places. Feel free to read the article, but I’d be happy to give you a summary: Teehee, I’m just a silly mom with a silly mommy blog, and I need an excuse to leave my children! So sometimes I go to conferences and get drunk with other mommies, hahaha!

I wish I was kidding.

Here’s the thing: Anyone who’s ever been to any conference in any field knows that there are always people at professional events who seem to believe they’re back at the fraternity or sorority house. There are always drunk and boorish people at conferences; this is because you can find drunk and boorish people nearly everywhere. This is aside from the fact that this entire article makes every blogging conference sound like the only way guilt-ridden mothers who are already wasting their time doing their silly little blogging can justify leaving the house.

I’m not even going to get into dissecting how insipid the assumptions in this piece are; Lisa Belkin at the Huffington Post does a pretty good job of that. Bottom line: surprise surprise, lots of women go to these conferences for their careers, and they also do things like go on vacations, sometimes, or otherwise travel away from their children without guilt. Go figure! It’s almost like moms who blog are regular human beings with complex existences, or something crazy like that.

I really only have two points to add to this whole kerfuffle (and it is becoming kind of ugly, which was maybe the point of publishing something so blatantly incendiary and patronizing?):

First, it seems like every woman who blogs about anything runs the risk of being labeled a mommyblogger. Discussion on this very topic has gone on for years, I know. Consider that according to the 2008 US Census, 82% of women between the ages of 15-44 were mothers. Most women who blog have children. (Not all, but most.) This is because most women have children. Some women blog for fun, some women blog for business. Calling that entire group of women mommybloggers just seems to… not make a lot of sense. The term alienates nearly everyone, from the child-free bloggers who feel it suggests they are somehow inadequate to the professional writer who isn’t even writing about her kids, thanks.

Second, most of the well-respected conferences attended by women who blog professionally also draw a fair crowd of hobby bloggers. This is by design; some of those hobbyists are hoping to figure out how to go pro, and some just want to see friends and hang out. Conferences make money by enticing as many people as possible, so this isn’t a surprise. It is absolutely true that some people go to conferences to “party.” But to suggest that most of these professional events—with corporate sponsors, heavily attended by professional writers who in many cases would much rather be home with their family/friends rather than traveling and working—are merely tee-hee excuses to get away from home is insulting to everyone involved.

I’m trying to think of another field where it’s so de rigueur for the mainstream media to continually assert that a specific career is somehow both contingent on a woman’s childbearing status and not really a career at all, at the same time. I’m coming up empty.

Because I am not famous, on the Internet or otherwise. I have no desire to be famous.

A lot of people look at personal blogging as a way to “build a brand” and “become a celebrity” and I think those people are delusional. First of all, the number of people who are successful at becoming some sort of celeb through blogging compared to the number of people who wish they were is… not encouraging. And second of all, I cannot imagine wanting to be scrutinized the way so-called famous people are.

The joke in blogging is that you know you’ve arrived once you get a hateful, trollish comment on a post. Once someone cares enough to tell you how very wrong you are, that’s it! You’ve made it. Can you imagine the amount of vitriol famous bloggers are subjected to on a regular basis? No thanks. But more importantly, I think once a writer attains some level of attention for their personality, it becomes hard to avoid becoming a caricature of oneself.

I’m the first person to exaggerate for comedic effect, so it’s not that I think people have to be 100% truthful all the time or they’re not being authentic. That’s not what I mean. I just mean that what starts out as interesting personality can quickly become a persona… and that can, over time, become something else entirely.

A few examples I’ve observed:

Blogger 1 (B1) built an Internet presence on all things lovely and kind and calm. This is because B1 is truly lovely and kind and calm a lot of the time, and certainly aspires to/enjoys all of those sorts of things. But as B1’s popularity grew, B1 confided that it felt like nothing else was allowed. What had been personal, originally, was now a heavily edited version of reality. It had been scrubbed and lacquered and made Internet-shiny. B1 never had a bad day, or an unkind thought, or made a mistake (at least according to the blog). B1 was constantly praised for being authentic, even though the blog supposedly representing B1 was a sanitized, sculpted representation that had gone from slice-of-life all the way down to fairy-tale-with-a-molecule-of-reality. It turns out that people love that stuff. But B1 often felt trapped in a story that had taken on a life of its own.

Blogger 2 (B2) built an Internet presence on being clumsy and awkward and bumbling but lovable and well-meaning. B2’s readers ate it up; it’s relatable and feels completely down-to-earth. And it was, probably, in the beginning. B2 was more than willing to expose foibles and flaws, and it was affirming to hear that this was brave and human and understandable. Eventually B2 essentially treated a real-life mishandling of events the way it would’ve worked as a story on the blog—”Oopsie! Who could’ve predicted this?”—and was surprised to discover that in real life there are often consequences for poor behavior beyond, “Wow, that was hilarious.”

Blogger 3 (B3) is a humor blogger known for championing a particular cause in the midst of the jokes and truth-is-stranger-than-fiction. Inexplicably, while cracking jokes online one day, B3 bashes a cause related to the one publicly held dear, and when questioned, keeps making jokes. It’s “okay” because B3 has personal experience with that cause! Later a few inspirational tidbits from B3’s followers are thrown out as a show of “support,” but the original slam is never recanted because hey, it was a joke.

I think these are the sorts of things that happen when your presence online has evolved into a persona. It compromises your ability to just be a regular person. Is it impossible to be interesting and craft stories about your life—even just a part of your life, not necessarily everything—and have a following and still remember that you are not your blog? I’d hate to think so.

But I can tell you that I’m really, really glad I’m not famous. Personas are cumbersome things to maintain, and they tend to come with hidden costs. Once you’re famous, they’re hard to get rid of, too.

The post in question is here, and at the time of this writing, it has over 20,000 Facebook likes, about a hundred “shares” (which I’m able to see; who knows how many I can’t), 80 comments, a whole mess of tweets, etc., etc., yeeha, woohoo, and all of that. I even had a local friend call me this morning to say that she’d seen my piece “all over” her Facebook feed this morning and was delighted to be able to say, “Hey! I know her!”

I don’t know; maybe this sounds like a regular day, to you. But to me, even as someone who’s been writing online for nine years—making a living for most of that time, mind you—this is more attention than any single piece of my writing has ever gotten before.

It’s completely wild. And weird.

There’s no shortage of “how to make your post go viral!” instructional pieces out there. Supposedly that’s the goal, though I’m not sure why. While I want to continue doing what I’m doing for as long as I’m willing and able to do it, I have no dreams of “making it big” or becoming famous or anything like that. My goal when writing is never notoriety; I have something to say, and I hope I’m able to say it to the best of my ability and people will connect with it. I have a modest following on my own blogs and decent traffic wherever clients pay me to write for them. For me, that’s plenty. The idea of trying to make a post become uber-popular is lost on me. I don’t see how one attempts that without completely losing the authenticity that tends to be the thing that makes a piece of writing share-worthy in the first place.

Still, I’d be lying if I said this wasn’t kind of exciting. It’s obviously great to hear so many people saying, “Yes! Exactly!” I wrote that piece intending to reach parents who didn’t really understand the camaraderie and other perks of marching band, and instead (or in addition), I reached a giant audience of former bandies who were delighted to agree that band is simply the best. And that’s cool.

Furthermore, generally speaking, the more people who read your writing, the more people who are going to drop by to tell you that you are the most egregiously wrong dummy-head who ever walked the earth. And so far I have received a handful of very kind email, a ton of encouraging comments, and really only two people who wanted to take me to task for being wrong. Given the exposure the piece has gotten, I like those odds. A couple of dissenters is fine. One might even argue they’re good for keeping the ego in check.

Why did this post get so much attention? My initial answer to that question was “I have absolutely no idea.” (Sorry, this isn’t a how-to post.) Thinking about it now, though, I think it was a lot of luck, a subject that hasn’t already been done to death, and a timing fluke. I know our band program just recently had their big banquet, and I suspect it’s either the same for other programs or people are coming up on it pretty soon, too. Spring is here, seniors are graduating, people who’ve been involved with marching band for years are feeling nostalgic as the end of the school year draws closer. None of that was planned, it just worked out that way.

When the initial elation wore off, I’ll confess that my glass-half-empty brain then went, “… oh crap, what if the next post doesn’t get as much attention??” I worried about that for about thirty seconds before I realized that, you know what? The next post is unlikely to get that much attention. This was a good post—I’m proud of it, don’t get me wrong—but its popularity had a lot more to do with circumstances and timing than anything I did. And that’s okay. If I succumb to the pressure to try to make the next post similarly popular, I can guarantee you it’ll be a stilted, self-conscious mess.

So I won’t. I’ll just do what I do, continue to enjoy my modest but loyal following, and if another fluke like this happens, great! If it doesn’t, that’s okay, too. I’m in it for the storytelling. Some stories are more popular than others, and that’s fine.

On the other hand, I don’t have an administrative assistant or virtual assistant, and I know a lot of freelancers who do. For me, dealing with mail and paperwork isn’t a big deal—it doesn’t bother me, it doesn’t take all that much time—so I do it myself. These sorts of decisions are really all about what makes you feel most comfortable.

New freelancers often ask me if they need to have a lawyer around to review their contracts. This question is not so very different from considering your taxes and your mail. Do you feel comfortable handling it yourself? If the answer is “absolutely not,” it may be worth having a lawyer look things over for you. But the average freelancer is going to be signing a lot of contracts, and most of them won’t be terribly complex, and so most can learn to handle this process themselves with a bit of coaching and experience.

Let’s start with a disclaimer: I’m not a lawyer, nor do I play one on the Internet. When faced with a wall of legalese that seems impenetrable, yes, absolutely enlist the help of a lawyer. But your standard come-write-for-us contract is likely to only be a couple of pages, and it’s something you can easily learn to navigate. Here are some issues to bear in mind when taking on new work.

You want a contract. Contracts are good! They protect both the employer and the employee, when written properly. You will be offered various sorts of freelance gigs where someone will wave their hand in the air and insist a contract “isn’t necessary.” That should set off alarm bells for you. Without a contract, you could be left unpaid, or your work could be misappropriated in some way. You want that contract.

You want the fee designated, as well as any kill fee or special circumstances. So Company X offers to pay you $Y for a monthly column, and your contract says so. But what happens if you turn in your column and then they don’t run it? What happens if they don’t like it and ask you to change it? That should all be covered in the contract. A “kill fee” is usually something only addressed with print publications (though I’m seeing it more for online outlets, as well), which is basically a promise of payment even if your piece is somehow preempted or canceled in favor of something else. Ideally you get paid $Y any time you turn in work, but if the contract stipulates some circumstance in which they don’t have to pay that full amount, that should be fully detailed. If the company has the right to ask for revisions, those circumstances should be detailed as well—what would cause that to happen, how much turnaround time you’d have, etc.

Know your rights as an at-will employee. Every freelance contract I’ve ever signed explains that I am an at-will employee, which is a fancy way of saying that the company can let me go at any time and I can break the contract at any time, and no one gets to get cranky about it. (This protects the employer from you trying to sue them or collect unemployment against them, but it also protects you from being trapped in an arrangement if it’s no longer working out.) However, the contract often does also specify a few additional rules on how that will work, like that you have to give 30 days notice to terminate, etc. Whatever those additional rules are, make sure they go both ways: if you have to give a certain number of days notice if you want to quit, they have to give you the same (or pay you for that time period), too.

Understand ownership, royalties, and licensing. My knowledge of things like book contracts is somewhere between slim and nonexistent (for something like that, which I suspect is a lot more complicated, I’d definitely urge a lawyer consult), but when you’re talking about writing online, I know that most boilerplate contracts are going to try to claim that your writing for them becomes the property of the employer. Be careful. For one thing, you probably don’t want to give up ownership of your writing. What you want is to grant the employer a license to use your work. In most cases, you’ll be granting a perpetual, royalty-free license—you’re saying that after the payment terms of the contract, they never have to pay you again for the use of your work. But again, be careful about the terms of this usage. If the contract says the employer is granting a royalty-free license to reproduce your work in any medium, your online columns could then be compiled into a book you do not own, with no royalties ever due. Generally I try to make sure the terms grant rights to online usage only. Just pay attention to how this is worded. The more rights you’re giving up, the more it should cost.

Don’t be afraid to ask questions and/or negotiate for changes. Don’t find something you don’t like in a contract and then turn down the gig because of it. Ask if the terms can be modified. Do be ready to walk away if you need to—if the terms are unfair and they won’t budge, you don’t want that job, anyway—but this is a negotiation, so go ahead and advocate for what you want/need. I have ended up turning down jobs because they refused to modify the contract, yes. But I’ve also had lots of new employers hear me out and say, “Oh, of course. We can change that.” You don’t know if you don’t ask.

Get a second opinion if you need one. I was in this business for years before I felt confident that I really understood contract language and what was reasonable to expect. It can be daunting! And there may be cases where you don’t feel like you really need a lawyer to review the contract, but you’re needing someone to help you through it. This is a perfect time to hit up a mentor or a more seasoned freelancing friend to say, “Hey, can you take a look at this with me?” Part of what some businesses rely on when they come up with contracts that really aren’t favorable to freelancers is the assumption that you both 1) won’t quite understand what they’re doing and 2) won’t bother asking anyone else. Sometimes contracts also bring along NDAs (non-disclosure agreements) in part, I think, to try to keep folks from getting feedback from others on the contract terms. Just read everything carefully and know that sometimes even under an NDA you can still get feedback if you need it. (For example: it may say you can’t disclose any terms of the contract to anyone, or it may stipulate certain terms. Read it and see.)

Bottom line? Don’t be scared of contracts, but don’t sign them blindly, either. Protect yourself.

This is a good thing. The only drawback is that it can make it kind of hard to say, “Here! Here’s a thing that will help everyone make this life more successful for themselves!” The best I can manage, most times, is a “this is what works for me” or maybe a “most freelancers I know find that….” No magic formulas, here.

But today I got to thinking that surely there are some pieces of advice which are universal in this field. I think there are. The only question, really, is whether these will make you a better freelancer or just a better human in general.

1) Get enough sleep. Freelancers tend to fall squarely into one of two factions, either the “work regular business hours without fail” or “work whenever you feel like it, stay up all night if you dig it” camp. I don’t really care which method works for you—I try to stick to regular business hours, but sometimes schedules change—but whichever path you choose, make sure you’re getting enough sleep. Being well-rested makes you a more pleasant human, as well as more attentive and mentally acute. It also means you’re less susceptible to viruses and a host of stress-related ailments. If you feel like you work better at night, great! Just make sure you’re also sleeping (at some other point). Those people who insist they’re “perfectly fine” on four hours of sleep a night are lying liars who lie. Most people require 6-8 hours/night to maintain optimal health. [Note: And before you ask, no, I love coffee as much as the next freelancer, but coffee is not a substitute for sleep.]

2) Read books. I happen to think everyone should read, for all sorts of reasons, but if you intend to make your living as a writer and you tell me you don’t read (usually masked as “I don’t have time to read”), I am judging you. Reading makes you a better writer. And the Internet is full of many words, but there is simply no substitute for the mental exercise of working your way through a hefty book every so often.

3) Put down the book (or computer) and go outside. The temptation to succumb to the writer-in-the-cave stereotype can be very strong, particularly on busy days when the weather outside is abysmal. I’m a homebody by nature and I often don’t waaaaaant to get dressed and go out and deal with the world. Some days, it’s true, I just don’t; I stay in my office and I work and the world doesn’t end or anything. But I try very hard not to let that become a habit. In order to write about the world, one usually has to participate in it to some degree. Take daily breaks for your sanity, of course, but go out and live so that you have a life beyond your desk and chauffeuring your kids around.

4) Remember that everything is important, it just can’t all be important at once. Whenever we talk about the myth of balance, it seems to end up with everyone bemoaning how there’s never enough of us to go around, and something is always getting short shrift. (Where I come from, that’s called… life.) Don’t be afraid to either devote yourself fully to a task to the exclusion of other things (chase the kids out of the office while you finish an assignment, or turn your phone off while attending an event with the kids) or to multitask (answer emails while sitting at soccer practice) when needed. See what works. And if it didn’t work—or did work once, but doesn’t anymore—don’t be afraid to reevaluate and try a different approach. There is no moment where it all clicks and you shout, “Eureka! Life is in balance!” There are moments of balance, yes. But life is inherently unbalanced and it’s easy to get caught up in trying to change that. Whatever you’re focusing on is important, right now. Do the best you can and then move to the next important thing. Don’t try to “do it all,” just do the best you can.

5) Take risks. I am a cautious person by nature and risks do not excite me as much as they terrify me. Freelancing has taught me that what doesn’t kill you either makes you stronger or makes you grow as a person or gives you a good story for your blog. So. Pitch yourself to that client you thought you’d never have the nerve to approach. Put your heart on your sleeve sometimes, even though you know it might get broken. Go join a local group or club even though you’re not sure it’s for you. Let your kids fail—I don’t know about you, but for me that’s one of the hardest risks of all—and then while you pick up the pieces together, remind them that you love them, anyway. When you fail, have a brief wallow, think about what it taught you, and move on to the next thing.

See? All of these are good for life in general. But if you want to apply them to freelancing writing, they’re good for that, too.

The worst thing about the home office is how you can easily move from work to other activities, and between them at will.

(Both of the previous statements are true, by the way.)

I’ve been grappling with the advantages and pitfalls of working from home for years, now. Some parts of it I’ve totally figured out—at least for me—and I can say without reservation, for example, that I’ve pretty much got the whole science of getting dinner into the crock pot in the morning down to a science. I’m also pretty good at fitting a couple of loads of laundry into my day, and it not only gets the laundry done, it means I have to get up from my computer and stretch and walk around a bit. Win-win.

What I think I didn’t start really considering until recently was how it’s not just having the physical office here at home that makes things kind of blurry. I mean, yes, I’m working here and not somewhere else, but I’m also writing about my life, my family, my kids… it feels like everything that matters to me is kind of all knotted up together. That’s nice, sometimes, but it can also be confusing. And a little scary.

I’ve been fortunate in that freelancing has allowed me the flexibility to tend to my family in ways that conventional jobs either couldn’t have or wouldn’t have. If I’d been working in a cubicle when it became clear that public school was no longer working for my son, I wouldn’t have been able to make the decision to homeschool him. Well, I couldn’t have done it and kept my job, anyway.

When my daughter was hospitalized, everything else got put on hold, and when I was able to work, I did, and when I couldn’t, I didn’t. Again, I’m pretty sure I would’ve been fired from any “conventional” job given a similar situation.

In the months since my non-work life has more or less returned to normal [hang on, I have to go knock on all the wood in the world...], I’ve been trying to figure out how to get my career back up to speed, and it’s been hard. Harder than I expected. Stepping off the big hamster wheel presents its own challenges when you try to jump back on, of course, but there’s a lot of things making it even harder that I hadn’t considered.

I feel different, now. I am different now. As someone who makes a fair chunk of my living off of writing personal memoir, I was wholly unprepared for how the big events in my personal life might change my perspective on what I’m willing to write about on a daily basis. And it’s not even so straightforward as “these issues are no longer fair game” or “now I’ll talk about what I didn’t before now.” It’s much more subtle, and sometimes I’m not even sure what my new boundaries are, or should be. It’s like starting over, in some ways. It’s deeply uncomfortable, this not being sure of myself, anymore.

My carefully erected rules and boundaries about managing home life vs. work life have all been obliterated. I’m starting over, there, too. Some of this is good; I struggled for years with letting work bleed over into my entire life, and now I do things like really take the weekends off. That’s healthy. But it also means that sometimes I need to be doing more work, pushing harder on certain things, and I’m unaccustomed to that now.

Some of my “crunchy shell” (as I like to call it) has been worn away, and I need to toughen up again. Because I feel unsure of myself in a way I haven’t for years, I’m second-guessing my choices, analyzing every correspondence (particularly those related to gigs I don’t land) for clues as to what I’m doing wrong, and generally becoming neurotic. Okay, fine: more neurotic than usual. It’s not healthy, it’s not helpful, and it puts me in a place where progress is hard to come by.

Here’s the point: the solution, in that weird space where everything feels like it’s not going quite right and career is taking a backseat to home which is still, somehow, making accommodations for your career, is to get some outside perspective. That can be hard to come by as a freelancer unless you’ve heeded the advice I’ve been giving here for years to view your fellow freelancers as colleagues rather than competition. This is the place where you reach out to someone you trust and admire and say, “Hey. I don’t know what I’m doing. Help?”

I did this today, and thank God I’ve always tried to surround myself with people smarter than me. (Just to be clear, I think I’m pretty smart. But some people prefer to be the smartest one in the room. Not me! I’d rather have folks I can keep learning from, so there you go.) I reached out to someone I trust, and they took the time to advise me, and I’m grateful for that. I still need to figure out a bunch of stuff, but I think I’m on the right track.

Just because you’re a freelancer doesn’t mean you’re an island. Surround yourself with good people, and if you lose your way, ask them for directions.

Now that I’m an adult, I know that that song is a pretty good metaphor for life, if you’re not careful. Heh.

So here’s my current bucket: I’ve decided to paint my office. This causes me plenty of anxiety already, because my office is currently just the way I want it, and there’s a lot of stuff that has to be moved and taped in order to paint, and I won’t be able to use this space for a few days, and when would be a good time to not have access to my office, exactly? Never? But it’s okay, because I have my laptop, and really, I can work anywhere, so I need to just chill out and settle down.

The first issue I ran into was the color. I’ve been living with a dreary brown (not of my choosing) for nearly six years. I thought choosing something better would be easy. That was before I started looking at paint colors, though. I described this on my personal blog as “falling down the rabbit hole” because that’s exactly what it felt like to me: as someone who tends not to be overly visual/observant, to start surveying an entire palette of color possibilities and trying to imagine how it would feel to be surrounded by any of them was overwhelming, to say the least.

But it turns out that the color-choosing is the least of my issues.

Was there ever a home renovation that didn’t feel like the first domino in a very looooooong line toppling over? Maybe it’s just me…?

So here I am, looking at paints. I ordered a bunch of paint chips to tape up on the wall, so that was the first step and I feel like I’m on the right track. But…

… looking around at the walls sparked a spirited conversation with my husband about whether or not the closet in here needs painting. He says yes. I say “I’ll just close the door.” But he’s right, it’s gross in there and I should paint it. Though that should be painted white, not whatever color I go with. Of course we just put shelves in there and unloading the closet is pretty much my worst nightmare. Fabulous.

… if I’m painting the closet it occurs to me that I should probably consider whether the bathroom off of my office needs painting, too. The paint in there isn’t too bad (it’s fresher than the office walls, I think), but it’s very dark and it’s a tiny bathroom and… yeah. I should probably paint in there, too. It needs to be lightened up for sure. And that’s a whole ‘nother project. But that’s okay, it’s just paint! Paint is easy!

… now I’m trying to decide if the paint colors I’m considering will go okay with the carpet in here. Of course the carpet is pretty disgusting. But we’re not replacing the carpet right now. No way, no how. As long as it’s not a situation where it clashes terribly, it’s Good Enough. For now.

… the shades on the windows in here are pretty ugly, too. Do I buy new shades? Do I care? Probably I don’t care. I’m sure I don’t. Mostly.

… my office is right off of the kitchen. The kitchen which desperately needs renovation. Do I try to make sure the paint I choose works okay with the colors in there, even though I hate some of the colors in there? Even though I know a kitchen renovation is the sort of thing that may happen after the kids finish college (i.e., far in the future)?

… at what point, exactly, do I curl up in a little ball and decide that really, the brown in here isn’t so bad after all…?

So there appears to be a hole or five in my office renovation bucket. But I just remembered that I can probably take the paint and other expenses of reno as a tax deduction, so that cheered me up considerably. (Uh, not if we renovate the kitchen, you understand. But the office stuff.)