Sometimes I zoom to the 30,000-foot level of parenting.

From there, I can both look back, to my own memories of childhood, and forward, to what I imagine June might remember from her childhood. It’s a helpful perspective.

One thing I think about is how June might picture me when she thinks back in many years, which reliably leads to me thinking of my own parents. Though I have thousands upon thousands of memories of both my Mom and my Dad, when I think of them in my childhood in moments separate from me, this is what comes to mind first.

Not me or my parents – an adorable photo of John with his Dad :)

Of my Mom:

In the driver’s seat of our minivan, waiting. Usually reading a magazine — Redbook or Ladies Home Journal, later Real Simple. In front of the middle school, waiting to pick me up after a practice or activity. In the parking lot at ballet, waiting for lessons to be over for the day. Waiting – always with a smile on her face when I appeared at the passenger side door.

In the study upstairs, at our desktop computer, playing solitaire and watching General Hospital. This is almost always where I found her when I came home from school, where we did our afternoon debrief.

At the stove. Not so much because she was a passionate chef, but because feeding us was one of her most important daily rhythms. That work led to sitting around the dinner table together, which ranked near the top on the pile of sacred family traditions.

Of my Dad:

In his recliner in the family room, legs stretched out on the footrest, left arm stretched down to stroke the side of our black lab out on the floor beside him. This was his spot, whether reading, correcting papers for his college students, watching golf on a Sunday afternoon, or “resting his eyes.” The approving murmur, soft clap, and gentle accents of golf commentators is as much a part of the soundtrack of my childhood as anything else.

Behind the mower, clad in golf shoes for “aerating the lawn,” a disgusting pair of cut-off jean shorts, and a wide-brim straw hat, glistening from the exertion of traversing our yard under the hot June sun.

Pulling up to our house in his Ford pick-up, stepping from the driver’s seat in his impeccably-crisp Coast Guard uniform. His briefcase in one hand, the last notes of “Pet Sounds” by the Beach Boys fading from the tape deck, and the joy of being reunited with his family stretched wide across his face.

There are happier moments and sadder ones, ones where my parents yelled at me or nagged me to do something for the one millionth time. I remember those, too. But when I think back on my parents as people, these are the things I remember first.

In every “Living With Kids” feature on her site, Gabby asks her guests what they hope their children remember from their childhood. I don’t know how my parents might answer that question, but I find it powerful that, as the child, what I remember most strongly about my parents in their private moments is a combination of duty and leisure. As busy as their lives were with raising three busy children, working full- or part-time, being good neighbors and church members and civic participants, they still found time to do things they loved with no apparent guilt or complicated feelings, no need to make even their leisure “efficient” or “edifying” (see: General Hospital).

I think that example is one powerful reason why I don’t feel the need to hustle these days. By slowing down, they gave my sisters and me the chance and permission to slow down, too, both when we were children, and now, when we are the ones shaping childhoods.

So what do I hope June will remember? Me reading, of course. Sitting on our front porch. (Hopefully in a porch swing, because that would mean we HAVE a porch swing.) Being a woman of the Word – reading my Bible, spending time in prayer. Driving her to whatever sport or activity she chooses to fall in love with. Hugging her daddy. And speaking of him — I think she might remember John whistling while doing the dishes, playing his guitar, or watering our front flower beds.

The obvious answer, of course, is that I don’t want her to remember us with our noses in our phones — not so much because I am reflexively anti-technology (though John says I am), but because that memory would give her no useful road map to follow when she is grown. It’s an opaque memory, a wall, where she has no idea whether we’re gently caring for a friend who’s hurting, planning our next family adventure, catching up on work, or reading an essay. There’s nothing there for her to take away, to make her own, and though I dearly hope she will forge her own path, I believe my job as a parent is to set her some useful guideposts along the way.

Friends, I hope you have a wonderful weekend celebrating the amazing men in your lives! If you’d like to share, I’d love to hear either the image that comes to mind of your parents in childhood, or something you hope your children will remember of you. xoxo

Yesterday, we made a very big announcement at Southern Weddings: that the tenth-anniversary issue will be the last for our team. Among many other things, I’m thankful that the site will remain active as an archive, and also that the Joyful Wedding Planner (which I co-wrote!) is still available in limited quantities. You can read much more on the Southern Weddings blog as well as Lara’s blog, and I’d encourage you to do so!

Here, though, I wanted to take a little bit of a different take, and share a bit more about what this change means to me.

For a very long time – long before I worked at Southern Weddings – I have been a person defined by weddings. I wrote about weddings here on Em for Marvelous from the beginning. I interned for a wedding magazine in college. I began subscribing to Martha Stewart Weddings in seventh grade. When I was five, one of my favorite hobbies was sneaking into our church’s balcony with my Mom to watch wedding ceremonies unfold.

I’ve had a hand — sometimes very heavy, sometimes just the lightest touch — in pretty much every friend and family member in my life who has gotten married in the last fifteen years, and each time it has been a joy! I have always thought there are few things more magical than a wedding day, and nothing in the last ten years has convinced me otherwise.

So to say serving as the Creative Director of Southern Weddings for the last nine years was a dream job is a little bit of an understatement. It has been one of the greatest joys of my life, and truly the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. I feel incredibly, incredibly lucky that this actually happened to me. It just as easily could have not.

But it did. In addition to my day-to-day responsibilities in the office — choosing weddings to feature, writing about weddings, developing products for brides, and producing photoshoots (all dreamy-enough things on their own!) — my work had two incredible additional perks.

First, I got to travel extensively around the South, seeing amazing places through an incredibly intimate and unusual lens. For someone who loves to travel and loves getting a glimpse into “local life,” this was heaven! Not only have I worked in almost every Southeastern state, including Texas, West Virginia, Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, and all the usual suspects, but I have seen them in a way that I never would have been able to otherwise.

I spent the day on a family-owned polo farm in South Carolina. I twirled across the lawn of Biltmore House at 6am, before the gates opened to the public. I rose off the ground in a hot air balloon in an Asheville dawn. I got as grimy as I’ve ever been in my life at an abandoned flour mill. I’ve worked a full day from the roof of one of the tallest buildings in Raleigh, imagining what it might be like to live a city existence. I’ve led a prize-winning cow through a cornfield and into a shot. I’ve been dressed to the nines for a gala at The Breakers where stilt walkers handed down glasses of champagne. I’ve traveled to Grand Cayman twice to speak about my company. I had my pick of vibrant, floral backdrops at the iconic Greenbrier in West Virginia. I even got to theme an entire shoot around one of my favorite TV shows of all time, for goodness sake!

The second was that I got to work with and learn from the most incredible, big-hearted vendors you could ever imagine. That includes pretty much every “big name” wedding photographer in the Southeast (as well as many talented folks based elsewhere!). It also includes some of my best friends, as well as strangers who became dear friends along the way. It includes TV celebrities and my own younger sister :)

In addition to forming relationships, I have learned SO MUCH from every person I’ve ever spent the day shooting alongside. They are a big part of what has kept my job fresh. I would have been happy doing my exact same job for another ten years.

Given all this, I suppose it’s understandable that one of the first questions family members had for me when they heard the news was whether I’d look for another position in the wedding industry. My answer was simple: I never considered it. There are so many reasons for this, but here are three.

First, I think it would be nearly impossible to find another wedding team that includes such amazing people, that is salaried, and that shares my heart for weddings — namely, that wedding days are magical, and also that they are only the beginning to an even more magical lifetime together.

The second is a bit harder to admit. While it’s absolutely true that I would have happily done my job for another ten years, after nine, I’m excited about applying my skills in a different way and also trying something entirely new. Going forward, I will serve as both the Creative Director and Chief of Staff for Cultivate What Matters, the sister brand to Southern Weddings. As the Creative Director, my position will look similar to what it did as the Creative Director of SW: I’ll concept and produce brand photoshoots and add to the visual aesthetics of campaigns.

Chief of Staff is a fancy way of saying I work with our CEO on projects that benefit our growing team (like implementing a new 401k provider – y’all know I was excited about that!) as well as helping to shape larger business decisions. Some of this I have been doing informally for years, but a lot of it is new and challenging, and that’s exciting even as it’s sometimes hard and overwhelming.

Finally, as much as I will always love weddings, I find the work we do at Cultivate extremely meaningful. As I wrote here, my job allows me to share the gifts God has entrusted to me, work alongside amazing people in an incredible environment, and to see the fruit of my work every day. I couldn’t ask for much more.

Thanks for allowing me to reminisce and offer some additional insight into this huge change in my life, friends. It is a joy, as always, to share with you. And never forget: whether we’re virtual or “real life” friends, I’ll always be available to offer wedding planning advice, ooh and ahh over your gown, or walk you through whether or not you need a videographer. Some things never change :)

Thank you, too, for indulging all of these beautiful photos I’ve worked on over the years! Here are the very deserving credits:

Biltmore photo by Henry Photography / apron photo by Davy Whitener

On the occasion of June’s second birthday, I finished a draft of a post but never sent it out into the world. Though I knew what I what trying to say, I couldn’t find the right combination of words to express myself, and I didn’t want to be misunderstood.

That draft began with the sentence “Being June’s mama has felt like the easiest thing in the world.” Here’s a bit more from that never-posted post:

Being her mama has felt like the easiest thing in the world, the easiest role to slip on, because it’s me. I am just myself. Being her mama is who I am, who I was created to be – not in the sense that it is my ultimate purpose, but in the sense that when I was created, I was given everything this little girl would need in a mama. She needs ME – my attention, my presence, my gaze, my arms – and that, I can give her.

That’s not to say I haven’t acquired skills and grown as a mother along the way, or that June doesn’t need anything from anyone else (I have, and she most certainly does). What I meant was that I don’t need to do or be anything special to be a good mama to her – in fact, it usually looks like me doing a whole lot less. Sitting and watching. Reading. Playing. Laughing into her eyes. Inviting her into my chores. Walking beside each other.

Photo by my friend Traci Huffman

I hesitated on this post in part because it’s so different than the narrative I usually hear — which is that the most important things are always the most challenging, and that motherhood is the hardest but best work there is (similar to marriage).

Of course, there are moments in motherhood I find quite trying, and others when I second-guess myself. I’m not perfect. But I also don’t expect myself to be, and perhaps that’s the key difference. Right now, if I show June that I love her, if I keep her safe, if I do something to help her grow… I consider the day and myself an unqualified success. Full stop.

That’s kind of where I ended my original draft, but I still felt unsatisfied, like I hadn’t quite captured what I was trying to say. But then, in a re-read of one of my favorite books, I stumbled upon a passage that so perfectly encapsulated my thoughts I nearly leaped out of bed. I’m including the bulk of it here, even though it’s long:

YES! I am the standard!

This may be an obvious point, but I think one important reason being a parent seems easy to me is that I’m not measuring myself against an unreasonable “other,” a polished amalgamation of social media highlights or anything else. Being a “good enough” mother — my standard — isn’t about aiming lower or doing less. It’s about making sure that everything I do or don’t do, everything I try to learn or get better at, comes from my own sense of what’s right for my child, my family, and my unique situation. And remembering that if I’m living up to my own standards, there isn’t anything more to want.

Happy Mother’s Day, friends. I hope you’re able to give and receive love from the ladies who’ve meant the most to you this weekend!

P.S. I loved this post so much, too.

I’ve been going over my survey results recently (as you may have noticed!), and one of the most frequently-requested topics was… fitness. You very kind ladies wanted to hear about my fitness routines, and to that I say: LOLOLOLOLOLOL. There are many things I feel I’m qualified to talk about, but fitness is probably not one of them.

I don’t have a great track record, after all — at least post-pregnancy. Before June arrived, John and I had a good routine going: we ran a few times a week, would take long (20-30 mile) bike rides on the weekends, and played tennis with friends. I also once used up a full 20-class pass at Pure Barre and for a few months I became a ballerina again before scheduling issues got in the way.

Currently, my main exercise comes in the form of a brisk walk as many evenings as possible (usually 5/7 in warm weather months!). We also hike maybe one weekend a month, and June and I go for a walk amble many afternoons, as well.

Noticeably absent from that list? Anything approaching strength training, and anything that results in heavy breathing. So clearly there are holes in my fitness routine that I look forward to addressing when our kiddos are a little bit older and/or we have a little more room in our budget for babysitters.

BUT. Just because I can’t at this stage of my life completely overhaul my routine as I might like, that doesn’t mean I’m completely stuck. Little by little progress can add up, and I’ve learned I’m most likely to make that progress when it’s easy, for better or worse.

Recently, reading The Tech-Wise Family gave me an idea. Here’s the quote that inspired me:

As popularized in Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s fascinating book by the same name, nudges are small changes in the environments around us that make it easier for us to make the choices we want to make or want others to make. Nudges don’t generally make us do anything, but they make certain choices easier and more likely. They don’t focus so much on changing anything about our own preferences and ability to choose well; they simply put the best choice right in front of us and make the wrong choice harder.”

Longtime readers may recall this is very similar to the idea from The Happiness Advantage that inspired our guitar placement to great effect.

Once again, I put the best choice right in front of myself: I moved my free weights to the floor of our master bathroom. Then, while June takes her nightly bath, I work my way through a few arm exercises: bicep curls, tricep curls, and other-things-I-don’t-have-a-name-for-including-raising-my-arms-out-to-the-side. I do each until I can feel the burn, and then I move on to the next one. Nothing too fancy.

I’m going to be in the bathroom for those ten minutes anyway, the weights are already there, and so there is almost literally NO WAY for me to avoid doing those arm exercises. That’s the kind of workout I need! I’m proud to say I’ve already moved from two to five pound weights :)

Have y’all ever used this trick to form a habit? It’s a good one!

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