How I Became the St. Louis Working Mom: Part III
When I last posted to this series, we were getting ready to move from St. Louis to Charlottesville. There was much to do in the two months I had to prepare for the move. That, and Mark moved without us so I was playing temporary single parent while trying to sell the house, keep it clean, learn all that went with a new job, manage the kids’ schedules (and prepare them to move) and oh lordy, Thanksgiving and Christmas were in there, too. I was definitely in high gear during those two months. I started sloughing off all I could, calling the Post to tell them I would no longer be able to do the features I was contributing to the print version of the paper (pieces on shopping and fashion that required me to go out and pick up items from stores and bring them to the Post to be photographed). That was the first thing to go. I stopped cooking, too — we ate out almost every night for a few reasons — there was just the three of us, I didn’t want to mess up the kitchen and it seemed that every evening we had to be away from the house to allow a Realtor to show it. Then, I gave up the Shop Talk blog — I needed every minute I could get and while it broke my heart to stop, I had to give them enough time to find a replacement writer, so gave my notice and drafted my final post. Finally, I stopped blogging on STLWorkingMom for about a month, writing a post to explain my absence and letting the reader my readers know I’d be back.
Somehow, we all made it through the move. The house sold, we packed up, I went on “vacation” until after the new year, we arrived in C’ville and set up shop. I started blogging again soon after, gratefully discovering Waldo, befriending Jennifer and settling into the local contingent of the blogosphere. Yes, my first Charlottesville friends were bloggers. How better to learn about a new community than reading its blogs?
I have kept my St. Louis readership — just as I’ve kept my St. Louis job and friends. Several people asked if I was going to change the blog to Charlottesville (or C’ville) Working Mom and frankly, I just haven’t seen the need. (Also, there’s a great new blog called C’ville Working Moms that takes care of that!) I also know that URLs need to stay the same if people are going to continue to find and follow you, so www.stlworkingmom.com is not going anywhere. People know my story and in fact, I think being a two-city working mom might just make this blog a little more interesting.
So that’s the story. I think that even though we have no plans to leave Charlottesville, I’m always going to be the St. Louis Working Mom. Thanks for reading and — if you are the person one of the readers who have followed this journey from its earliest days — thanks for hanging in there and for following me 800 miles!
The End