Episode #188: Motherhood, Life, and Business—Oh My!

This week, we are discussing how to handle everything from motherhood, life, and business. We also talk about whether or not there’s a such thing as balance and how we prioritize what’s important to us.

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Show Notes:

Do you believe in balance?

Elsie – No, but there are things you can do to feel like you are on top of things like batch recording and setting boundaries.

Emma – No, there are different phases to life, so things change all the time.

How do you prioritize what needs to be done every day, week, and month?

Elsie – Make lists and have planning days.

Emma – Leave one day blank to account for extra things that come up.

How do you set boundaries with work and kids so you have time for both?

Elsie – Focus on what you are currently doing and be 100% into it. And remember “done” is better than “perfect.”

Emma – Work during hours your kids are in school or daycare, focus on your kids when they are home, do self-care time or hobbies after your kids go to bed, and respect how you are feeling (and say no to things).

How do you handle one area of your life needing more attention than others?

Elsie – Be honest with yourself about what you need.

Emma – Don’t worry about what other people think.

Listener Question: What would you be doing if you weren’t doing A Beautiful Mess?

Elsie –  Own a bookstore.

Emma – Be a fiction writer or a housecleaner.

Miss an Episode? Get Caught Up!

• Episode #187: Furnishing a House from Scratch
• Episode #186: Stranger Than Fiction – Comfort Rewatch
• Episode #185: Finding Joy in Hobbies (Deep Dive)

Episode 188 Transcript:

Emma: You’re listening to The Beautiful Mess Podcast, your cozy comfort listen. This week we are talking about how to handle all the things from motherhood, life, and business. We’re discussing whether there is such a thing as balance and how we prioritize what’s important to us. 

Elsie: Woohoo. I love the subject. I think this is gonna be a really encouraging episode. I love business. I love being a mom. I think that I resent the characterization that you have to choose one or the other, or that you can’t be great at both of them at the same time. I was watching Hook yesterday with Nova for the first time, and it’s like the perfect movie portrayal of what I think is annoying and I love the movie. I’m not saying anything bad about the movie, it’s like a 10, but the idea that your phone would make you such a bad parent, that you need to literally throw it out the window so that you can focus on your kids, is kind of stupid. You know what I mean? I think that there are so many ways to be a good parent and be passionate about your career at the same time, and I wish that more movies would let characters have that. But, I think that it’s something that I’m really passionate about and I definitely think that on occasion, we’ve had our little bullies who wanna pick at us about you should be more this or more that. But I think that it’s something I’m very, very proud of, to love my job and love being a mom at the same time. 

Emma: Yeah. There are a million different ways to do it, they’re all valid.

Elsie: Right now while we’re recording this podcast, my five-year-old is watching a movie Tangled and my husband is packing our pod in the driveway, and I’m up here recording this podcast. One minute after I finish this and push save, I will be in my car going to car pickup. The balance, it’s imaginary or it’s sort of like a thing that you have to weave together yourself. And I think that that’s normal and healthy and I wish more people would be like, I don’t know, I like the idea that it’s supposed to be kind of tricky. It’s supposed to be kind of hard through these years. I wanna have my career. I never had a moment where I completely wanted to quit working, which it’s awesome if you do. I just didn’t have that at all. So I think finding a way to do both those things at the same time is very valuable. I think that you don’t have to be an overachiever, you don’t have to have your together, you don’t have to do it all, you can just do your best. The idea of, your best is good enough, I think is a really important and healthy way. Emma, one of her strengths is being a finisher. So I think it’s something that she’s like naturally equipped at and she’s like really challenged me on, is to just do it. Just do the best you can, do the most you can in this little amount of time each day, and then just be fine with it. Have peace with whatever it is that you were able to complete. 

Emma: Yeah. When it comes to thinking about balance or when people say, how do you balance it all? Sometimes a place my mind goes right away is thinking about perfection. And how, the reason I’m a finisher, or at least one of the reasons, is I don’t really believe in perfection. I think it’s like a thing you aim for, and we all have an idea about it, but it’s not actually real. There’s pretty much nothing that’s perfect, it’s not a real-world thing. And in a similar way, I would say, I think balance is kind of like that, it’s something to aim for. It’s something that when you have moments where you feel like you kind of have it, then be grateful. And there are other times when it’s just not, it’s like the thing you’re aiming for because you’re not gonna make it, and that’s okay. It’s better to have something to aim for than nothing to aim for, but I think at least in some phases of life and maybe all of life, it doesn’t really exist. And if you’re looking at somebody else’s life and you’re like, oh, it’s perfectly balanced. They have everything they didn’t have to make any trade-offs in their life. Trust me, you don’t know their life, you really don’t there’s no chance that you really know what’s going on in their life if you feel that way, because I get it, I look at other people’s lives at times and think that I get it. But the truth is I don’t really know what they had to do, like what their trade-offs are. 

Elsie: No, I completely agree with that. I think it’s very, very easy to look at someone else’s life and assume that it’s easier than yours. And I think that just teaching yourself not to do that is an important part of being an adult and being just a sign of maturity, just knowing that everyone’s going through probably much worse than what you think instead of having it much easier.

Emma: And it could be easier than yours, but I would also kind of argue, so what? Like how does that help you? If someone really does have an easier life than you, the only thing you should do is ask them for their tips. Other than that you don’t really need to dwell on it at all because it doesn’t affect you in any way. If they have an easier life than you, if you wanna use that as a way to feel angry or bitter, you can, but I personally don’t like feeling bitter. Anger is okay sometimes, but generally, I don’t really live in a state of constant negativity, it’s not helpful. So it’s like why bother with that? 

Elsie: Yeah, I definitely agree with that. Okay, so one of the questions here is, do you believe in balance I would personally stay far from it. I just don’t, I think I believe in balance. I think there’s probably some good that you can find at times, but as far as a daily life and a daily schedule, my life is not very balanced at all and I don’t think that hurts me, I think it helps. So my big thing is batch working, which is just kind of by design an unbalanced life where like you have the day where you’re only doing this and another day where you’re only doing this completely other task. And I have lots of weeks where I do only one or two things, but I get so much done that it’s like enough for a month. For me, that’s the only way that I’ve ever been able to stay on schedule for my goals. So it’s essential, it’s not just helpful, it’s my path, and it works better for my brain because for me to try to have one hour a day doing this, one hour of day doing that, I wouldn’t be able to do it. I personally don’t thrive in a schedule that’s that way. It’s just too much for my brain to skip from task to task to task and have to be always changing, and I just think it’s an unpleasant schedule. And the other thing that helps me immensely to stay balanced, but I don’t know if it is balance is boundaries. So my boundaries, it’s pretty much, it’s really simple. It’s if someone has a work emergency and it’s nighttime, I don’t feel like I have to respond to it. If I’m in the middle of putting my kids to bed, I feel like I can at least finish that before I look at it and I feel fine with that, I feel nothing. And if someone texts me on the weekend and needs something, I also feel nothing about it. I’ll write back to it if I have time and if I don’t, I won’t, and I don’t think that that’s bad. Then there are lots of other boundaries like that, like logging off during a vacation and a lot of times when I’m having family time, I don’t do social media at all and I don’t really even keep my phone with me and it feels great. So, that’s a way of creating balance is having these boundaries where at times I’m sort of just doing one thing or the other.

Emma: Yeah. I would say I don’t necessarily believe in balance because I also like batch working and things like that, but I also just think two things with that is one, I think there are different phases of life. Depending on what you choose to fill your life with, of course. And everybody gets to pick stuff, but for me, I’m currently in a phase where I have a full-time job and I have a toddler, and those are two things that I chose. I love my job. I’m really passionate about my career, and I love my son, and I love chasing around a toddler. And those are just two things that take up a lot of time for me, so my life doesn’t feel very balanced. I don’t feel like I have a lot of time for myself or time for friendships, but I also know that those are important and that I’ll lose my mind if I don’t do some of that. So I focus on that and make an effort for it so that I don’t lose my mind because you can’t do your job or raise a toddler if you lose your mind. So don’t drive yourself where you’re feeling so burnt out all the time. But I think there are different phases of life. Like sometimes when I’m a little bit feeling down or feeling like, man, I wish I had more time to write. I wish I had more time to paint or do something around my house. I really wanna decorate this room and it feels like it’s never gonna happen. I think you’re gonna have these other phases of life when your kid’s older and when you’re older and it’s just gonna be different and life’s really long and you’re gonna have plenty of time to do everything you wanna do. I feel like just telling myself that is sort of manifesting it and it’s also reminding me that you’re in a certain phase and it might not feel balanced. It’s not gonna feel balanced, and it’s fine because you chose this. I really wanted to be a mom and I really love being a mom but it takes up a ton of time. And that’s kind of the other thing that I would say is that maybe I don’t believe in balance, I don’t know. But I definitely believe in trade-offs. So I think that there are lots of things in life we don’t get to choose, right, that’s certainly a thing. But there are many things that we do choose. I’ve chosen to get married, I have chosen to build my own career and work for myself. I chose to become a mother, these are things that I did get to choose. And with each of those choices, there were trade-offs, there were things that you know, changed or things that you can’t do anymore, and things that you get to do that you didn’t get to do before because you chose those things. And so with each of those big choices, I gained things and I lost things. And there are definitely moments where I feel sad about some of the losses, but I am really secure in my choices and so I’m okay with it. And I think that that’s important is if you’re feeling any kind of pressure of like, I should own my own business even though I’m not sure I really want that. Or I should become a mother even though I’m not sure I really want that. Like really think about it because there are gonna be trade-offs and it’s okay to choose a different path than somebody else, it’s totally fine. So, make sure that you’re really happy with those big choices in your life as much as you can control them because life is very unpredictable. But as much as you can because you know, I work, like right now I work so much less than I did before I had a kid. I still work full time, and he’s still in daycare full-time, but it’s just very different because there are lots of times he’s sick or there are doctor’s appointments we need to go to and just various other things. The daycare closes because they didn’t have power, that happened last week. Very random.

Elsie: Yeah, no, I am entering the summer break era of being a parent, which is a lot different from the daycare era, and I’ve learned that very quickly. But I think that it’s definitely, I don’t know I think, it’s an illusion that you have to have this perfectly balanced schedule. I don’t know if anyone really has that. Yeah. 

Emma: And I also think there’s really no point in being upset about not having it all. I think instead just think about what’s most important to you. Think about everything that you want as more of a pyramid and not so much like a straight line, because you probably can’t have everything, I mean unless you want absolutely nothing out of life, not everything happens the way we want. So I would think about it more like, what’s my top stuff? The time that I’ve lost getting to work in my career because I decided to be a mom doesn’t really bother me. There are moments when it can be frustrating, but I’m really happy with my choice. I really wanted to be a mom and I love it. So for me, that works. But if you don’t want that, then choose something else, it’s your life and we only get to live this one as far as I remember. But, on a more practical level, let’s talk about how we prioritize what needs to be done every day, every week, every month. How do we decide on that and how do we stay on track for it? 

Elsie: Yeah, I think that this is a really good question. So, my best tip is I am extremely reliant on the list for productivity, and so over the years I’ve learned that it’s important for me to have planning days in my schedule where I spend entire days planning, especially with blog content, I will sometimes spend several days planning a whole month or a whole season of blog posts and then I can sort of autopilot and just do them in the cracks. It’s just so much easier for me to get it done because I never have to wonder what to do, I just have to do the next thing on my list. So that’s been extremely helpful for me and I think having a good planner, having a paper planner, is essential. I guess it doesn’t have to be a paper, that’s just my preference. But yeah, having for whatever your business or productivity goals are, having a list that’s extremely detailed and where you know everything you have to do, that you never have to wake up and wonder, I think it’s very helpful. 

Emma: Yeah. I feel like if I have a moment where I’m like, oh, I have an extra two hours in my workday or my weekend and Oscar slept longer or something, he wouldn’t sleep two extra hours, but you know what I mean? If I’m like, oh, what should I do? I often will get kind of frustrated if I don’t. So I like to have running lists of things that are like chores, hobbies, and work things. And if I have extra time, I can just look at the list and be like, what could I get done? So then it’s like I never feel like I’m floundering because it’s not a big deal to waste time. We all waste time. It’s not a big deal. But it can be frustrating if you’re like, I feel good when I accomplish. That’s just me, maybe that’s everyone. But I feel really good if I get to the end of my day and I’m like, you know what? Maybe I didn’t get everything done, but I left it all in the field and I got as much done as I could, and that’s what happened.

Elsie: Yeah, and very similar to that, the seasonal bucket list helped me to prioritize my family life. When you come up to a weekend and you say you have an extra afternoon or a few hours to fill, you already have ideas ready to go for that. And you can just do one, just choose one and do one, I love that. I think that when you don’t have good planning, or at least for me, when I don’t have good planning in my life, it’s very easy for me to be unproductive. 

Emma: Yeah, same. Extremely easy. I also have started this thing, so like you, I’m really relying on the list. I have them on my phone and the Notes app. I also really like paper also my preference. So I have the get-to-workbook weekly planner, where it’s like you can see the whole week at once. I think I’ve talked about that on this podcast before. But anyway, what I’ve started to do in the last few months is I leave Friday pretty much blank because I kept noticing that things kept rolling over, not because I didn’t try, but a lot of times it’s something random came up that like I needed to pick up Oscar early or an appointment that I was going to take longer than I thought it would or whatever. And so a lot of tasks would end up rolling and so I would get frustrated a lot and now I feel a lot less of that frustration because I just leave Friday mostly blank, and a lot of stuff ends up over there anyway, so it’s still a full day. But it feels like I’ve solved my frustration because sometimes you just need to identify what’s bothering you and just change the way you do things so that it can work better for your life.

Elsie: Yeah. No, that’s a very good tip. How do you set boundaries with working kids so that you have plenty of time for both? 

Emma: Yeah, so I feel like at the age he’s at right now, we mainly rely on our daycare, so I think of daycare as like, those are my work hours, and if daycare is canceled or he’s sick and he needs to come home, then I never make myself feel guilty for stopping work and going and taking care of that. Obviously, if I have a major deadline or whatever, I can always ask Trey to do it. He’s very willing and can do it too, unless he has some major deadline. But I actually usually don’t have a lot of deadlines lately. That happens more in heavy sponsorship season, which is not right now for us I never make myself feel bad if I need to go pick him up early. And then for us too, we don’t really maximize the daycare time that is available, we take him from nine to five, which works for us. We could take him earlier and a little bit later he could stay, they have really long hours. Some people are like nurses who have 12-hour shifts and different things like that. We kind of picked hours that feel good to us. So it means I get a solid two hours of playtime with him in the morning based on his wake-up time and a solid two hours of hangout playtime, which does include bath time and dinner, but all that before his bedtime at night, and to me, that feels really good where I’m like, all right, I get these really nice four hours and then we get our whole weekend, and then the rest of the time I try to work and then once he goes to bed, that’s when I can do a hobby and hang with my husband or just do some elaborate skincare, which I like to do.

Elsie: Yeah, so my tip for this is to remember that these are the busiest years of your entire life If you have kids, especially the daycare, grade, school activities, sports, and things like that. These are very busy years, and I think it’s okay not to be doing everything that you would like to be doing during these years, because obviously it was, hopefully, a priority to become a parent and be a parent, and now it’s like it’s a part of your life that takes up a lot of time. So for work mode my current strategy, I’m kind of just trying to be a little more like Emma, and my strategy is the done is better than perfect, I just complete things. I stay with my list, and I’m just like focusing while I’m in my working hours and my mom mode hours, I just don’t think about work during that time. So I kind of compartmentalize. If I’m not on my phone and I’m not on my computer, it’s really easy for me to just hang out with my kids and do the cute things that they wanna do. They like really, really wanted me to watch Aladdin 3 yesterday, and I’m like so proud of myself that I watched half of it. It took a lot, I just don’t think that a movie like that should have a third sequel three. But, they love the sequels and they loved it, and they wanted to show me what Aladdin’s dad looked like and stuff, and now I know. So I just think that letting yourself pretty much have two lives. You know what I mean? That’s how I think of it. It’s like I have my work life, I put everything into it, and then I have my mom life and I put everything into that. I don’t know. It feels like it’s functioning at this phase. It feels pretty good. 

Emma: Yeah. And with the boundaries thing, I don’t even know if it’s a boundaries thing, but I feel like for me since I am an introvert. So my workday, I mostly spend alone obviously today Elsie’s bothering me because we’re on the podcast here, just kidding. But a lot of my work days, I spend completely alone because I just work from home and I create my recipes and I photograph things and I write and whatever, all my work stuff. And so a lot of times I feel like I’m lucky in that I get to recharge my being-alone battery while I’m at work. Which is kind of just double dipping in a way, it’s so nice. But when I do have a week where daycare was out or Oscar was homesick or whatever, or a couple of weekends back to back, we did a couple of family trips back to back recently, which was really fun and a huge priority for me. But also I could tell that my introvert battery was running low. And so I think it’s important that you tell, if you have a partner, tell your partner all your friends like I have a really supportive group of friends. And I had one friend who invited me over to make jewelry, which is my love language, but I was just feeling like I needed to be an introvert. I could just tell that I was like, I’m not gonna have anything to say because I’m just feeling depleted and want to stay home. And in the past, I would’ve felt kind of guilty about that, but currently, I just don’t because I’m like, I don’t have room for this guilt in addition to just being exhausted, so I’m just not gonna do it, and I also feel like I’ve built this supportive friends. I know that all my friends and my partner understand me and understand if I’m like, Hey, I gotta stay on tonight. I’m just tired, which I think is what I text, and she was like, I understand, cool. So it’s so nice. It’s like, thank you for not like pressuring me out when I frankly cannot deal with that right now. I just need some time alone to chill. 

Elsie: There’s always next week. Yeah, I love that a theme of this topic is becoming kind of like ignoring or shutting out guilt because I think that guilt can be such a burden to carry, whether in work or in parenting when frankly, it doesn’t help. It doesn’t help anything. It doesn’t accomplish or achieve anything. It doesn’t make you better at anything. It just feels horrible. So finding ways to untrain our minds, that’s taken me a long time, but I think the more you can shut it out and kind of remind yourself that it’s not helpful, I think it’s really great. 

Emma: Yeah. I agree. 

Elsie: Okay, so the next question is, how do you handle when one area of your life needs more attention than others? I think this is a really good question. This is something I’ve been through recently. My husband has had a gigantic success in his business that came really hard and really fast, and it changed our dynamic, it changed our parenting balance. And it sort of changed his free time quite a bit over the past year. So, I kind of haven’t been working less. So we’ve had to be more strategic about how we share our parenting responsibilities. So my advice for this is a lot of times it’s a season, it’s like you’re going through a time, you’re going through a launch, a season, a project, a release, whatever. Starting a business and it’s really just like a temporary thing. So I think being honest first and foremost with yourself is important. I can be like the biggest liar to myself about time management things. And I think if you lie to yourself, then you’re gonna lie to everyone around you, accidentally. So you first have to be honest with yourself and then with your partner, and then obviously with your business partner, your bosses, whatever. For me, it’s Emma, my business partner. 

Emma: I’m the boss! Just kidding.

Elsie: Actually, she did put herself down as president and me as vice president on some paperwork that I saw. So I think that she is my boss a little bit. Technically according to the government.

Emma: That’s just forms where they’re like requiring, you know something and I’m like, well, President’s probably gonna, you have to fill more stuff out. It’s more of a burden. It’s what it really is. 

Elsie: No, no. We’re definitely 50/50 partners and she’s definitely more administratively active than I am. 

Emma: Yeah, sometimes. I feel like I really was, and then I also had a kid, and now I’m a lot more like, Hey, I need your help with this, or I can’t get this done, or whatever. Because it’s like, you run out of time for stuff. 

Elsie: But anyway, being honest with each other about what we need, I think has been extremely helpful. You know, and it is a little awkward, I think that we all wanna be like a hero and we want everyone to see that we’re hard workers and that we’re putting in the time and all of that. But I think that being able, to be honest when you need to do less or when you need to…

Emma: You need an extension. You’re like, I cannot meet this deadline. 

Elsie: Or when you’re just struggling. For me, my moving months have been kind of bad, and Emma’s very understanding about it. But I think I also feel like I will want to naturally pay a little bit of reckoning at some point and make up for it. 

Emma: Yeah, I don’t really care. 

Elsie: Well, anyway, I think that communication is really important and it does start with being honest with yourself because you know you can’t be everything all the time and don’t lie to yourself that you can.

Emma: Yeah, and I think too, you have to be honest with yourself, talk with your partner or whatever your support system is, and make sure everybody’s aware of what you’re needing and what’s going on because if you’re just having major deadlines at work and you don’t talk to your partner that might not be so great, obviously. But I think in addition to that, once that’s all in place, you really have to kind of sometimes put blinders on and just let people think, whatever they’re gonna think about you. People who are not in your inner circle and not in your support system because people are gonna make judgments about you and you just gotta let that go. Some people think that women shouldn’t have any full-time childcare, they should just stay home with their kids. And that is a belief that they are welcome to hold. But you, if you have chosen to stay in your career, you’re gonna have to let that roll off your shoulders and just ignore it. Or like a small example, this really doesn’t matter, but especially since Elsie’s been moving, but just generally too, we’ve been doing a lot more food blogging and we’re loving it, but we’ve had some comments here and there that’s like kind of missed the crafts, wish you didn’t do so much food. Why are you doing so much food blogging? And I think it’s fine. People are fine to ask questions. It’s really not that negative, it’s just more, to me it’s like well, you don’t totally know what’s going on with us and that is fine because we haven’t let you in on it. But I’m gonna keep my head down and keep doing what I think is best for us in our business because that’s what I’ve gotta do. And we’ve decided this and we’re intentional about it. And so that’s like a small example, but in a similar way. 

Elsie: I’m doing the opposite. I’ve been trying to tell them we have three writers. One of us is on maternity leave, one of us is moving and one of us only writes food. 

Emma: So guess what’s going to be there? Hey, I craft a little bit.

Elsie: No, I know you do. I always wish that I could be more honest and that people could just understand, but that’s a hard thing about communicating with an audience instead of with a person. The memo just gets missed.

Emma: Yeah. I think too, like those kinds of comments are really very minor and not even necessarily negative. So what goes in my mind more is if you have a family member who’s maybe judging you for keeping your career after you start to have children or just different things that people go through that I actually don’t have in my life, but it’s like it’s really hard to feel like you’re supposed to do it all, but there are only 24 hours in the day, we all live with that reality. It just is what it is. So we have to choose what we want, what’s important to us, what’s important to our families. And we gotta have to let other people have their judgments or make their assumptions and just let it go because they don’t know. And you’ve made your choice, so enjoy it.

Elsie: No, yeah, I definitely agree with that. I think that that’s good advice. Can’t be everything all the time. Also, I think that changing, one of the things about being a blogger for 15 years that’s been very consistent, is a comment that will be like, I liked you better before. For 15 straight years, we’ve received that comment at all times, and we will continue to always, and I think that that has to be a thing that you just in life that you kind of have to give more weight to people who want you to evolve and change, and a lot less to people who want you to stay the same. You know like in high school when you write in the yearbook always stays the same. It’s actually a pretty dumb thing to write. Never change to a high schooler. 

Emma: Yeah, I’m sure I wrote nothing smart in any yearbook I ever wrote in. But I think too, if you want to grow and change, then you’ve gotta just make that choice and then other people don’t get to make the choice for you. They just don’t, they can say their comment, they can, whatever. But you are in charge of your life and if you want to continue to grow and change, then that’s all there is to it. You don’t even need to take in this other stuff, it’s just flies buzzing around your head, ignore it. But I think too, it has to do with what people are enjoying. As for us it has to do with what they’re enjoying from us and a couple of episodes ago, if you missed it, we were talking about hobbies. And one thing we mentioned right at the top of the episode was how David Bowie created an album right before he died. And I love David Bowie, I’m a huge fan of him and it’s not his most well-known or well-received album, he died shortly after, so I’m sure no one would leave this comment because oh my God. But someone could have been like, oh, I liked you better in the seventies. But it’s like, what makes him an icon to me is that he did continue to grow and change and put out work, and inevitably some of it will be better than others. And I don’t even know what his favorite album was that he created, but I could probably guess what his fans like or whatever. But I wanna be that person who keeps making stuff and keeps growing and changing, and I don’t really care if other people love it. I want that to be a part of who I am because I think it’s beautiful and important, but it’s not very balanced and it’s definitely hard, and I think you kind of have to ignore other people along the way to make that happen.

Elsie: Yeah. I think the goal to always keep evolving and sort of like following your own inner compass and having your own strategy that you’re comfortable with, that you chose on purpose feels really good to me, so good chat. I loved this episode. This is making me feel happy about life.

Emma: Wonderful. 

Elsie: Okay, so we have a listener question from Jennifer Kosmono. What would you be doing if you weren’t doing A Beautiful Mess? Okay, I’ll go first cause the answer kind of sucks, and I know you’re gonna make fun of me. Okay, so I love doing A Beautiful Mess and I’m so glad I’m doing it. And I’ve shared a bunch of times I wanna be an artist in the future, and that too. But this is just like a total second reality, this is a total alternative reality, okay. But the thing that I still have in my heart that will never go away is that I still wanna have a retail store.

Emma: Oh my God.

Elsie: I know and the desire for it never dies, it never goes away. I just like desperately, desperately want to have, I don’t know, it changes through the years, but more recently, it’s like a bookstore. That has a lot of candles and a little bit of home stuff. Like a cozy bookstore. Yeah, and I think I’ll always want that and I will just spend the rest of my life trying to fight off the desire to open another store because I’ve done it and it really did not make me happy doing it every day, but I still just, I don’t know, have the craving to try again. What about you Em? 

Emma: Yeah, so before I was really all in on A Beautiful Mess. I was already food blogging. I had two food blogs before I started. One was called From Scratch and one was called Food Coma. So I feel like if we hadn’t started blogging together, I probably would’ve kept food coma and just kept going with this. So I probably would still be a food blogger, but that’s a lame answer because I am a food blogger just in a different way. So it’s like, oh, you do the same thing, but with a different name, cool. 

Elsie: Think of a different answer that’s more interesting. 

Emma: Well, I don’t know if this is interesting, but as everyone knows, I really wanna be a fiction writer, so I would hope that I could have a career like that. But I wouldn’t mind if financially, I needed to supplement it in other ways. And one thing that I really loved, in my twenties, I used to clean apartments and houses when I lived in LA, and I actually really loved that job, I still think about it sometimes because when you think about it, it kind of plays to some of my strengths, which is I like being alone and working alone. I’m not necessarily great at cleaning, but I am a good finisher and I’ve always liked the satisfaction of walking in and like it’s dirty, and then by the time you leave it’s like clean and it smells nice and everything’s in its place, you know all of that. 

Elsie: You could be an audiobook mom.

Emma: Yeah. So I’m like maybe I could clean houses and apartments and also write fiction and between those two things, make enough to live my life or whatever. I feel like that’s what I would do if I had to start over. I don’t know, alternate universe type thing. 

Elsie: Nice. I sometimes enjoy watching cleaning videos on TikTok.

Emma: Oh yeah. 

Elsie: And they do make it look really fun. 

Emma: Yeah. Mrs. Hinch all the way, love it. 

Elsie: That’s cool. Yeah, I don’t think anyone would’ve expected that. That’s cute. So, it is time for our famous segment, A joke or a fact with Nova. Hey Nova, this week do you have a joke for us or a fact? 

Nova: I have a joke. 

Elsie: A joke, okay I’m ready. 

Nova: Why didn’t the skeleton go to school? 

Elsie: Why? 

Nova: Because his heart wasn’t in it. 

Elsie: That’s a good one. Thanks for the jokes. Bye Nova. 

Emma: Thanks so much for listening. If you have any questions or podcast ideas, please email us at podcast@abeautifulmess.com or you can call and leave us a voicemail the number is 417-893-0011. We’ll be back next week with a deep dive into some of our favorite summer things.