Welcome to Wannabe Stepford Wife. This little blog is just about me trying to be the perfect wife and parent and businesswoman. In other words its going to be pretty much what pops into my head on the day I post while I am striving towards "having it all."
Don't you just hate the phrase "having it all" What does that even mean anyway? I think the idea for women to "have it all" is pretty unrealistic. Even some of the most organised/powerful/rich people might let us think they have it but do they really? If you are one of these people please let me know the secret now so I can stop all this nonsense immediately.
A little about me:
I'm a stay at home mum and FIFO wife. We have two young boys aged nearly three and 6 months. I'd like to consider myself a bit of a mumpreneur, but realistically I get so frustrated with success not happening overnight that I tend to get really enthusiastic about things in the beginning and then quickly lose momentum.
A few years ago I started a blog all about personal finance after being in a bit of a pickle ourselves and overcoming it. I thought people would flock to it and initially they did, but what did I know about running a website or writing a blog? Turning it from little old me into the empire I dreamed off just wasn't happening and I eventually struggled to find inspiration, especially when I helped quite a few people out ( for free) and never got so much as a review on my page. People wanted pieces of me but they didn't want to pay for it or put in a bit of effort to return the favour and give me a leg up in the online world. I also had a little boy constantly demanding my attention and two dogs that needed regular walking and attention.
I stuck at the website/blog thing for over two years. Paying people to mentor me, jazz up the site, set up ad space to no avail. I felt surgically attached to my laptop writing post after post, wondering when the hell the money was going to roll in, or even enough money to break even on what I had spent or to be able to pay someone else to blog on my page from time to time and free up some of my life for fun stuff. Despite me plugging away it didn't happen for me and I recently made the decision to shut down the site and just really blog for myself. Kind of more like a journal than focusing on it as a business. If it works out well great but if it doesn't at least I didn't spend money on websites, marketing blah blah blah. To be honest I'll just be delighted if anyone reads this let alone comments or I manage to generate enough traffic to earn a little passive income on the side.
It hasn't all been awful. My writing does earn me money every now and again. I have had success in having one of my stories published in a magazine, ( retold by another writer) earning money on a writers site reviewing different places as well as recently being approached to write an article for a really big Australian blog which was pretty a big honour for me. As for the blog? It was earning me zilch. I think the most I ever made from it was $400 ish using a system that I had spent THOUSANDS on learning.It's not like I wasn't working my butt off to make it happen either but I realised that I could earn WAY more money do other things with a hell of a lot less work. More on this stuff later.
In short it was time to re-evaluate what I was doing and why. I realised I was spending way to much time trying to be the next version of something rather than just being myself. Trying to compete with someone else like that was exhausting. Deep down I just really wanted to be a good person. A good mum and wife and friend. Someone my kids and hubby could look at and say "Mum/Wifey/Bestie you are inspirational. I am so proud of you." Someone people talked about for having a positive impact on their lives. You know, kind of like Oprah or Ellen but without the talk show.
I know, I know, the kids are essentially babies but I still had this want, this NEED to be able to have them look at me when they were teens with a sense of awe on what their mother was able to do and have them be inspired little people. Of course the other big factor was to be able to create some sort of income from home so I can stay at home with the boys but still have some sort of identity outside of "Mum" and take some of the pressure of my hardworking hubby. ( I say hubby but we actually haven't got married. We got engaged then decided to put our $$ into savings, our house and our children instead. One day we will do the official thing but that time is not now.)
Anyway back to my desires. I had to sit back and ask myself how I thought I could achieve these kinds of goals. I had to dig deep and try to work out what made me tick, what i was passionate about and how I could effectively manage my time. I came up with a nice big list and it led me here, to download about it. To document the journey so to speak and have a space to write about the things I want to without any real pressure to continue, or box myself in to a particular subject realm. So, if you are here, still reading, welcome to my journey and I hope I can inspire you in some way, shape or form or you can find some answers to your own problems in life or maybe you can solve mine! Either way thanks for sticking it out this far into my first post and I'm hoping and praying you'll come back for the second. Oh and if you have any suggestions ( no franchise/pyramid scheme business spiels please) I'd love to hear how I can fulfil this positive impact existence.
Until then,
EJ x
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