Guest Post: Mutterings & Musings at Mom-Blog

Today’s awesome post is by Courtney, owner of Sunflower Seeds Jewelry. We met because I won a necklace from her and it is a wonderful piece, beautiful and lovely crafstmanship. You can also see her stuff at Etsy or her fan page on Facebook. And please be sure to visit her blog, Mutterings & Musings. Without further ado, a post most moms can relate…

So many hats.

Mom. Wife. Therapist. Proprietor. Blogger. Special Needs Advocate. Down syndrome Guru.

Of the things mentioned above, I only purposefully attempted to obtain a couple of them. I wanted to be a wife. I wanted to be a mother. I wanted to work as a psychotherapist. Little did I know where my path would eventually lead.

A thousand three years ago, I was a young professional married woman. I was in my final year of graduate school. On November 5, 2006, I found out I was expecting my first child.

That is where my “Intentions” diverge from my “Reality”.

The child that I would give birth to nine months later was not the child I had anticipated that November morning when the little plus sign appeared. The career that I was working towards was not to be.

In May 2007, I finished my masters’ degree in Mental Health Counseling, bought a house, and began my first post-graduate full-time job. Six weeks later, my daughter was born.

With a surprise.

With an extra chromosome.

I made the difficult decision to stay at home with Lucy. She was born with a congenital heart defect and I did not want her in the daycare setting. I did not want her Early Intervention therapies to be administered to her without being able to capitalize on the “family training model” on which the program is formed.

My hats were going to change. I went from a career focused wife and expectant mother to a stay-at-home special needs mommy in the time it took a pediatrician to tell me “we think the baby has Down syndrome”. I gave up debating between the merits of cognitive behavioral therapy over classic psychoanalytic approach. I learned new words. Complete Atrioventricular Canal. Trisomy 21. IFSP. IEP. Brushfield spots. Karotype. PT. OT. SLP. I learned that Gortex is used to close holes in infant sized hearts.

After a while, though, I started to find my footing in this new reality. I started to remember who I was, before I was Lucy’s Mom, EI therapist, advocate, teacher, chauffer, and medical care coordinator. I started to feel the urge to carve out my own niche.

The first thing I did was return to work. Extremely part-time, but working none-the-less. I found an ideal gig that allowed me to work as a private practice psychotherapist, while my sister watched Lucy. I should insert here, that by this time, I was expecting again. Just to keep it interesting, right?

Around the same time, I stumbled across two hobbies that would eventually blossom into so much more than I could have imagined.

I began making jewelry for myself while Lucy was just a wee little lass, before my son was born. I tend to run a bit on the anxious side (great selling point for a counselor, dontchya think?) and really needed something to keep my mind and hands busy. I had tried a bunch of different things, but nothing really scratched that itch for me until I began beading. Once I found it, though, I was hooked. It was everything I was looking for. Crafty. Relatively inexpensive. Creative. Stylish. And closely related to shopping, which was a rarity for me with a 75% loss of salary, a child, and another on the way. I loved making pretty things for myself. I loved learning technique.

A few months after I found my beading hobby, I also discovered the cathartic, humorous, comforting joy of blogging. I have loved writing for as long as I can remember, but years of college and graduate school had taken me away from writing anything that wasn’t research based. Though my blog was established on a whim, with no true purpose in mind, it soon became clear that it was going to be the vehicle by which I shared “the ups & Down(s) of life”. The more I wrote, the more I realized I had a lot to say about what it means to be the mother to two children, including one with special needs. My posts aren’t always about Down syndrome. Sometimes they aren’t even about my kids. But to me, that is the purest representation of having a child with special needs. A lot of the time those needs are the topic most in discussion. However, life is life, and huge portions of my day are spent without even thinking about Ds at all. I hope that my blog reflects that. I talk about all the aspects of having a child with Ds that affect me. At the same time, though, I talk about me. Just me. Or just Brodie. Or wine. Or books. Or music. Once, I even posted about my beading hobby.

What a journey that inspired! Long story short, my jewelry was well received. Thus the birth of Sunflower Seeds Handmade Jewelry.

So here I am. Courtney, the Wearer of Many Hats. A mom. A wife. A therapist. A blogger. With a handcrafted jewelry business that I run from my couch in the evening hours after my kids go to bed.