”Write” Into Motherhood with Asher Fogle Paul

The Momologist™

“I’ve had to learn and give myself the grace to say there are times when I can be fully present as a mom and I need to focus on that. And there are times when I can accept help and am grateful for it,” explains Asher Fogle Paul, mother, journalist, and author of Without A Hitch. In today’s episode of The Momologist™, Asher discusses the shift from full-time journalist to full-time mother and the difficulties women face balancing their careers and motherhood against societal pressures.

When Asher envisioned motherhood, she always anticipated being a full-time working mom. However, when her daughter was born, it became more difficult to balance her own needs, her marriage, her career, and the needs of her child. Asher tells listeners that motherhood required her to learn to let go and not compare herself to her peers because everyone’s measure of success looks different. She found that going freelance worked best for her in the end because it gave her time to continue writing and spend more time with her family.

Tune into this week’s episode of The Momologist™ for a conversation about balancing your passions and motherhood. Join us as Asher teaches us to give ourselves the grace to go along with the ebbs and flows in creative life and family life.

Quotes

• “I didn’t ever envision myself being a stay at home mom or not having creative aspirations. I always thought I would work full time. And then when my daughter was born…I enrolled her in a daycare around the corner from my office. We rode the subway every day together, which was like an extra hour of the day that we got to snuggle and hang out. That part of it was really great. I still loved my work, but, to be honest, it was really hard…I came to the point where I realized something had to give. At the end of the day, I felt like I wasn’t being the writer I wanted to be or the editor I wanted to be. I wasn’t being the mom that I wanted to be. I certainly wasn’t being the wife that I wanted to be. So we made the decision for me to go freelance. It was hard. It was a big identity shift that I didn’t really want at the time. I knew it needed to happen…but it was just like I don’t know what my identity looks like at this point.” (08:34-10:52)

• “It’s a position of privilege to even be able to make the decision to go freelance in that context. In hindsight, I’m grateful that we had that choice, but it was definitely a tough transition. I think it took me a long time to find my sea legs.” (11:08-11:25)

• “I felt like I didn’t have enough time with my daughter. I was a little bit miserable thinking about how much of the day I missed with her…this was pre-pandemic. The idea of working remote a couple days a week, which I broached to my workplace, they weren’t open to it. It just wasn’t an option.” (12:05-12:34)

• “This isn’t a knock on the companies that I worked for…but even in these female-dominated places there were very few people at my life stage. I knew mothers who had pushed through and made it to the other side and they had older kids in school all the time…there was definitely a little bit less grace for those ‘my daughter is sick’ or ‘she’s teething,’ ‘my mother in law can’t come in today and help.’ It just wasn’t a culture of allowances and none of my peers had kids yet.” (13:02-14:06)

• “The identity shift was huge. After I quit working, I got pregnant with my son pretty quickly after that. Writing definitely was on the back burner for a little while. It was a lot of giving myself grace. Promising myself, okay this is something that will be there. It was very hard watching people that were my peers get Senior Editorial jobs, and run publications, and write books and do all sorts of things while it felt like everyone was kind of leaving me behind. There was a process of having to let go a lot of comparing myself to other people…Everybody’s path looks different. Everybody’s career looks different. Everybody’s barometer for success looks different. There are plenty of people I worked with whose barometer for success would’ve been a stable marriage and 3 kids and I have that. There are plenty of people whose barometer was running publications and they did that. For me it was having to first off let some of that go and then also keep doing it. Even if it was just a freelance article every once in a while. I have great friends in the industry who were really wonderful about giving me assignments, not overwhelming me but giving me enough that I felt like I was still working, still involved in the industry…When the book started it became also something I could work on at my own pace…and have as a goal even when some of the other goals and benchmarks for me had changed.” (18:54-20:56)

• “I’ve had to learn and give myself the grace to say there are times when I can be fully present as a mom, and I need to focus on that. And there are times when I can accept help and am grateful for it and can say ‘okay my children are gonna be fine and I need to focus on work stuff.’” (25:54-26:14)

• “Without A Hitch is about a girl named Lottie who thinks that she’s going to marry her college boyfriend. She has her entire life planned out marrying this guy. College graduation rolls around and low and behold… he breaks up with her. She’s kind of sent into a spiral…There had been elements of that in our own stories…so she ends up working for a wedding planner and plans some of the most lavish, elaborate events for Southern wealthy clients and eventually through that journey plans her ex-boyfriend’s wedding and is forced to reckon with herself, why she had put so much of her identity in one person and kind of put parts of herself aside for that.” (35:16-36:28)

• “So many things are cultural, so many things are regional and about life. And at the end of the day obviously, as you know, there’s no real timeline. I think we all put these things on ourselves to have it all, to have it all at the same time, to have it all immediately or as everyone passed me by. I think one thing that Mary and I have talked a lot about is that there is no perfect timeline for anybody other than you.” (43:33-44:07)

Connect with Asher Fogle Paul:

https://asherfoglepaul.com/

https://www.instagram.com/asherpaul/

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