Who moved my cheese?! Oh. So this is what they call ‘new motherhood changes.’ Got it. Anyone relate? During a shoot today, a big humongous metaphor crashed down on me like a laughing cow jumping over the moon. Make that a laughing cow – carrying a load of cheese – jumping over the moon. Seriously. I’ve been galavanting with the good people from Life Well Laughed (affiliated with those yummy Mini Baby Bel cheeses) filming a series of webisodes that you will soon get to enjoy, be-inspired-by and have-a-giggle-at in the coming weeks. I was thrilled to take this job, as it is based on women giving back to their communities and has taken me to visit the great cities of Washington D.C. and Boston, but had no idea that it’d bring so many neurotic realizations to light. (I wish I could make this stuff up folks….)
It all hit me on our shoot this afternoon in Boston, as our producer was tediously positioning our bite-sized cheeses on the tray in front of us to get the best camera angle… then BAM!
“Stop moving my cheese!” I jokingly yelled and we all laughed. How cliche… but so true.
My mind immediately flashed to that bestselling book Who Moved My Cheese? from several years ago. It’s a metaphorical story about mice and people in a maze, and how they’re caught up in a very frustrating pursuit for cheese and how they all deal with it differently… blah blah blah. The story is about change and reexamining goals… a theme that’s harassed me this past year through my first pregnancy, daughter’s birth and a variety of unexpected career changes. (Although I’m learning to be flexible, all of my friends know that I get notoriously resistant, tense and straight-up WEIRD when it comes to dealing with change. See previous post: Giving Back Your First Baby.)
Even though I’m genuinely elated with my current freelance jobs and my new role as Mommy, I have plenty of days filled with “WTF happened?” questions. I’m guessing that all moms have them from time to time? Unproductive thoughts of “I didn’t fully reach my career potential/goals/aspirations [as an Entertainment Reporter] before I had this baby… now it’s too late” consistently invades my brain. I was the chick who, years ago, assuredly (yet naively) informed my future brother-in-law that I’d soon be working for Entertainment Tonight when he questioned what I did for a living. Ha. Cut to present day: I now play patty-cake, wipe LadyP’s cute little butt between auditions and am filming webisodes in different cities involving cheese. The strangest part is that I’m actually enjoying it all… a lot!
Back to my ‘moving cheese’ exclamation on set (making my producer jump), I realized: Having a baby equals cheese-moving no matter what your career, goals or family life entails… and thank God it does. Does anyone agree with me? If it wasn’t for my cute stinker at home, I would still be stuck with the same goals and the same day-to-day expectations that I had before-baby. Would you? I wouldn’t have been apt to change on my own, so having a baby has proven to be my big kick in the butt to force me to grow, explore and evolve. If it wasn’t for LadyP, I’d have never started this little blog, I’d have never been eligible to work with Momversation, this current gig with The Laughing Cow wouldn’t have popped up, I’d have never met the inspiring women and bloggers I’ve recently met (through these jobs)… and I wouldn’t have gotten to see the White House (for the first time!) during a 10pm drive-by after our shoot in D.C. last night! 
In other words, I would’ve possibly been stuck in the mindset that I was somehow a ‘failure’ for not reaching all of my prior career goals within the time limit I’d nonsensically established in my head. I still have many of the same career goals that I did before-baby, but I feel much more rational about them now (meaning, I won’t die if they don’t happen for me exactly when I think they’re supposed to). It took a bunch of cheese to make me grasp it, but I now realize that life has MANY things to offer besides what we think it does a lot of times. So thank you, LadyP, for putting it all into motion and making me find some new cheese to go along with my old cheese (ew, that sounds gross… you all know what I mean). LadyP, I hereby give you permission to move all the jack, cheddar and mozzarella that you deem appropriate for me here on out. Fabulousness at it’s best.
Now does anyone have a cracker?
