Everyone in my house is sick.
Including me.
And if you've ever had three children, a career, and a household to manage while fighting off whatever microscopic villain has made itself comfortable in your home, you probably understand the particular chaos I'm describing.
There are thermometers, medicine cups, interrupted conversations, and an impressive number of things that apparently cannot be located without asking Mom.
My husband is wonderful. We navigate the chaos together, adjusting wherever we can.
Still, there are certain rhythms of motherhood that don't particularly care whether you're feeling well enough to participate.
The little ones need comfort.
Work still has responsibilities.
Life, rather inconsiderately, continues.
And somewhere in the middle of all of it sits a dream I've been quietly building.
She's the Vibe.
A business. A creative outlet. A collection of ideas that spent years living in my imagination before finally finding their way into the world.
Lately, I've been thinking about the rather peculiar relationship between ambition and time.
Specifically, when did we decide that the seriousness of a dream should be measured by how quickly we achieve it?
We celebrate the grand opening.
The announcement.
The moment someone finally gets to say, I did it.
But we're considerably less interested in the ordinary Tuesdays that make those moments possible.
The interrupted lunch breaks.
The ideas typed into a phone before they're forgotten.
The evenings when creativity shows up, but energy doesn't.
The moments when someone makes a little progress on something nobody else can quite see yet.
Those aren't particularly glamorous.
They also happen to be where an extraordinary amount of building takes place.
And I've become rather fond of that idea.
The back burner still cooks.
There's something almost poetic about it.
In a kitchen, the back burner isn't necessarily where we put something unimportant.
Sometimes it's where we put the thing that needs time.
Something that can't be rushed without losing a little of what makes it good.
Of course, businesses aren't soup, and I won't pretend that every delay is secretly a beautiful lesson in patience.
Sometimes progress is frustrating.
Sometimes I want to accomplish far more than the day will accommodate.
And sometimes I'd simply like an uninterrupted afternoon to work on something without a small person urgently needing a snack.
Preferably a snack they haven't already rejected twice.
But there's a distinction I've been learning to appreciate.
Moving slowly and standing still are not the same thing.
One describes a pace.
The other describes a position.
And somewhere along the way, we've become so accustomed to celebrating speed that we occasionally forget to recognize movement.
I'm building She's the Vibe while raising my children, continuing my professional career, and living a life that existed long before I created a logo or opened a shop.
That life isn't an obstacle I need to overcome before I can become successful.
It's part of the reason I wanted to build something in the first place.
I love being a mother.
I value my career.
I love writing, creating, learning, experimenting, and imagining what this little business might eventually become.
And I am increasingly uninterested in pretending these parts of myself exist in competition.
They require different things from me.
Some demand immediate attention. Others can wait until tomorrow.
Not everything can occupy the center of my attention at once.
But that doesn't make the things waiting in the wings any less meaningful.
There's also something I hope my children eventually understand about watching their mother pursue something of her own.
I don't need them to remember every product I created or every late evening I spent working.
I hope they'll remember curiosity.
The willingness to try something unfamiliar.
The excitement of having an idea and giving it a chance to become real.
And perhaps, most importantly, that adulthood doesn't require us to stop becoming.
We can grow into our responsibilities without growing out of our imaginations.
We can be deeply committed to the people we love while remaining curious about the people we're becoming.
Those things are not mutually exclusive.
Which brings me back to the back burner.
I don't know exactly what She's the Vibe will look like in five years.
I have ideas, certainly.
An almost unreasonable number of them, actually.
Some will become products. Some will become stories. Some will change entirely, and a few will probably remain scribbled in the margins of notebooks I insist on buying despite already owning plenty.
That's part of the pleasure of creating something.
Not knowing every detail of what it might become.
And maybe that's what I want to remember during seasons like this one, when the house is sick, the calendar is full, and my ambitions are moving at a pace considerably less dramatic than my imagination would prefer.
A dream doesn't become less meaningful because it has to share space with real life.
Sometimes that's precisely where it becomes meaningful.
Not in the perfectly curated morning routine.
Not in an uninterrupted eight-hour creative session.
But somewhere between the responsibilities, the laughter, the exhaustion, and the ordinary little moments that make a life.
I'm not waiting for my life to begin so I can pursue my dreams.
I'm pursuing them in the middle of a life I already love.
And for now?
The back burner is doing just fine.
One woman. Many vibes.
Practical. Pretty. You.
