Step one was always GET A JOB! Now, I at least have something to hold me over. I found a hostessing job and am on my way to an interview for a “real job”. That’s not to say that restaurant jobs are not real jobs. Trust me, after 5 years of serving, I can tell you… It’s work. But, it’s not what I went to school to do- and that is the ultimate goal.
Now that I have an income, I can find a place to live! I really miss coming home and cooking dinner or sitting on my own couch with one of my own glasses filled with my own wine. I mean… I did sell my couch… But that’s irrelevant, right?
I am late for my interview… Took the wrong trains and got held up by construction. The problem in New York- you can never anticipate everything. You can never be too early. It’s impossible.
I am so thankful that it’s Friday. That is the reason I don’t want to hostess. I absolutely cherish my weekends. It’s silly and makes me feel like I don’t work hard enough. I love them mostly because of a guy, but in this mass confusion I call my life right now, weekends make sense. I have downtime when the rest of the world has downtime. We do normal date-like things and I always have a lot of fun. Yes, I’m happy because of a guy three days of the week, but the key point here is: I’M HAPPY!
Author: Room to Regulate
Room to Regulate started as an emotional release – I was tired of giving space to all the heaviness that comes with being your family epicenter – when I'm not regulated, no one is regulated. I wrote it all down. Every overwhelming, anxious thought. I sat with it. Then I built around it – because my story isn't unique.
I have ADHD – late diagnosed, of course, the Millennial Mom special. Our anxiety manifested in different ways. We were unlabeled, mislabeled, re-labeled. We held it together through our 20s. Many of us excelled in our careers, and then came motherhood.
For a long time I thought the exhaustion, the mental load, the constant recalibrating was just what motherhood felt like for everyone. Don't get me wrong. Whether you are neurodivergent, raising a neurodivergent child, a house full of neurotypicals (do those exist?!), married, unmarried, working, or not – parenthood knocks the wind out of you. And when you're an information seeker, the "why" rabbit hole is endless. It took a while to understand that a lot of what I was carrying wasn't a personal failing — it was a structural one. The systems around us — schools, workplaces, insurance, policy — were never built as an ecosystem. They were built as individual systems. The byproduct of that puts families with the most structural need at the highest risk for falling through the cracks. The hardest parts of my days were the predictable result of that gap, not evidence that I was doing it wrong.
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