Mama Sabbatical ™ (Current “working” Definition) :: The magical (though often challenging) time spent away from formal work responsibilities to focus your attention and love on your newest role and identity as a mama or female parent. Ideally, paid.
My Rebirth into Motherhood
In my last blog post for Justice Happenings (the Jillybeads 4 Justice blog), I mentioned how I would be putting the pause button on my bi-monthly posts during what I then envisioned being the standard 3 month maternity leave while I stepped back and entered the next amazing chapter of life–motherhood. When I wrote this piece, I also imagined having at least a week or more before Stephanie (my wife) and I would meet our baby (then referred to as Baby Z).
Stephanie, Baby Z & I posing under the big O at O Town (aka everything Oprah & her sponsors)
In fact, we were SO confident that our babe would be on the later side of the our due date that we didn’t hesitate to accept tickets (yep, $FREE.99) to Oprah’s Live the Life You Want weekend (would you?!) in San Jose, CA (a lil over an hour away from our home where we were preparing for Baby Z’s arrival).
As you can imagine, the 2-day event was filled with life-changing moments–2 hours of inspiration as only Oprah can do to kickoff the weekend, meditating with @DeepakChopra (oh, and 10k peeps!), and dancing my heart out as I kept feeling like I couldn’t get ANY bigger 😉
Let’s just say, I had no idea how true and profound this quote from @iyanlavanzant would be:
And this my dear friends, is not as simple as it seems. In my case, it was much more a labor of love (haha!) that required LOTS of surrendering and shifts in my mindset not only during the birth of our daughter, yet also in the days, weeks, and months to come. It’s in this vortex of bliss, tears, magic, bleeding, joy, sore nipples, complete awe, and wonderous exhaustion that made up my Mama Sabbatical™ and rebirth into motherhood.
This is the last picture taken on Saturday, November 15, 2014 prior to my water breaking. In the moment, I felt like there was no possible way, I could get any bigger while also feeling SO energized to live the life I/we want. I never would have imagined being less than 72 hours away from meeting our baby girl, Ms. Jaylin Jackson Roth.
~5ish hours prior to my water breaking!
UP NEXT :: Molding My Mama Mindset…