One of the ultimate moments the pieces of my life intersected was in December of 2009.  And I mean literally intersected.  I was about 7 days out from the due date of our first little one (Katharine) and after a night late at work, I came home and started feeling like it was time for a baby.  Jon and I waited for a few hours and then headed nervously to the hospital with our bags packed.  The hospital sent us through triage and let me know that although things were close, I wasn’t in labor.  So, we headed home and tried to relax….anticipating what was to come.  During the night, I awoke to what was more “labor-like” pains.  As morning approached, things kept progressing but given the false alarm we had the evening before, I wasn’t convinced that it was for real.  So, what else to do but keep working (from home at least).  This was my pattern.  I had been on a tear of working 65 hours a week for at least a year so I didn’t even think twice about it.  I had so much to do before I had this baby!  So, I worked all day…writing market research plans, deploying marketing initiatives, cleaning up email….all the while, in labor.  As the day went on, my clock was ticking and I just kept working.  Time kept moving, labor pains kept increasing….and I kept on working.

Needless to say, the work had to stop at some point, and ultimately so did the labor.  About 36 hours after our first hospital trip, at about 10pm after a long-day working from home we headed to the hospital again.  Under seven hours later, little Katharine Elizabeth Snavely entered the world on 12/30/2009 at 4:56am.

This moment of becoming a mother was something like I had never experienced before.  A moment of true love with tears of joy and a purity in the moment that rarely, if ever, existed in my life before.  Since her birth, I have experienced my life more purely than I had ever been able to before.  It is amazing the perspective a little person can give you.  Katharine helped me to realize that life is about choices.  That the choices that I had made before, such as working through labor the last day of my pre-kid life, had often been determined by my historical patterns.  That instead of truly making an active choice, I had often times been letting my past experiences dictate my current reality.  In a sense, becoming a mother opened my life up to me again by enabling me to choose to enjoy it versus just live it.

There is so much more to becoming a mother than this story.  I hope to share stories of motherhood here, and how it has helped me to enjoy my life, to learn, and to love in a way I never imagined.  Our second, Matthew Thomas Snavely was born 2+ years later in Park City, Utah – the place we had moved to to when Katharine was just 3 weeks old.  He was born to a mom that was much more balanced than the woman who wrote market research surveys through active labor with her first child.  He was born to a woman who had let the pieces of her life intersect while not allowing any one of them dominate the other.