I Took an Unplanned Hiatus. Here's the Honest Version of it

Taking breaks is human. So why does it feel like a confession?

Hi Friend of mine ♡

Let’s believe in the best about today. There is good IN you, and there is good here FOR you as well. And I’m convinced that your faith in this makes all the difference…

Taking breaks is human… but our society can’t help but to frown at the mother who permits herself to rest, especially for an extended time. And yes, I’m rolling my eyes as I consider my own unplanned hiatus here at the lifestyle publication that is my newsletter, Little Alchemies.

Here’s the thing about me: I am mostly incapable of pretending that the pause in my duties here did not happen by writing around it with a breezy “I’m back!” (as if we both don’t know that I was gone) and moving forward without acknowledging that gap between us. That kind of performance has never been what this space is about. And it would feel dishonest to do it now, in a newsletter that has always insisted on the honest version of things…

So. Here is the “Honest Version” of my break:

I stopped. It was unplanned and lasted far longer than I ever intended. I stopped in the way that things sometimes stop when the body, mind, and well of creative source have simply been exhausted (in more than one sense) and begin refusing to produce anything further, regardless of what the content calendar says. The words just wouldn’t come, in other words…

Since it was an unplanned event, I did not announce my hiatus. It arrived as a sudden collapse of my capacity that had been running on fumes for longer than I had admitted to myself. And then came the feelings of guilt following closely behind. Which, if you have ever tried to rest while simultaneously prosecuting yourself for resting, you know it is approximately as restorative as not resting at all.

And I sat with my guilt, which belongs to most of us, because sitting with uncomfortable primary feelings until they give up their real secondary meanings is the sort of thing that I do. The guilt that had pretended to extend from my having a rest and my untended responsibilities and commitments was actually covering for the voice underneath that has always told me that my worth is located in my productivity. That my right to take up space is contingent on my output… It says that if I stop, even briefly for excellent reasons, I will be found out as someone who was never worthy of the room that everyone else assumes.

Well, that voice is simply a liar. It has always been a liar, even if a convincing one. It is particularly effective on us mothers, especially the autism and special needs moms who already spend so much of our daily lives feeling like we are not doing enough for our child(ren) who needs everything.

I am choosing, this time, to put that voice down and pick up something truer instead:

Rest is not the opposite of devotion, even if our culture is quick to judge mothers who choose to do so. Especially us mothers of children with significant needs, where the needs are real and every pause carries the implication that someone is not getting what they require… The assumption is that a good mother is one who never stops.

But I have lived in that assumption and know where it leads: to the type of rest that isn’t chosen and the stop that is forced on us rather than permitted... In my case, it resulted in creativity that went completely silent, not because it had nothing to say, but because the vessel it lives in had been emptied past the point of production.

I do not want to build my life or this publication on that model. And I do not want that for you either.

So here, formally, I’d like to insist again that rest is a very human thing that even mothers are permitted to engage in. It requires no excuses at your return, and no confessions are due. You are free to choose rest when your content calendar doesn’t allow it and when your invisible jury hangs on ready to frown at you…

Roll your eyes at the jury (and at your own self if you must) and rest anyway…

I am glad to be back. Genuinely, in the non-performative way.

I missed this. I missed you: the still-becoming women who read these letters and occasionally reply to tell me that something I wrote finally translates what you have been living through. Finding out, in the quiet of my pause, that I genuinely missed this is the thing that now brings me back, not out of obligation, but out of actual desire.

It feels like enough of a reason to me.

See you in the next letter.

— Cheniece ♡

Cheniece Patrick ♡

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