One month from today I will be thirty-nine.

It didn’t hit me until this afternoon when I was thinking about this year and how challenging yet how wonderful it has been. I had incredibly high hopes for this year and even penned those hopes in a piece titled, This is…38, where I detailed 38 intentions for 38 years of life. In true-to-me form, this is about the time each year I start, ironically, reflecting on whether or not I was able to achieve all of the intentions (goals) I set for myself to assess my level of success.

But as we close this year – I just want to be grateful. And content. And okay with not having achieved everything I set out to be intentional about in the first place. Because…this year brought about many things that were not on my “agenda” of intentions yet they’re some of the most treasured and amazing things to come out of this circus show of a year.

For starters, the Managing Motherhood series launched and, as of yesterday, has provided a platform for twenty – yes, twenty, eek! – working moms across North America (with other countries coming in 2021) to share their stories of what motherhood means to them as well as the struggles and challenges their journeys have been shaped by – and how they have persevered and become who they are today. This series was always a goal of mine from the moment I started this blog but conceptually I never expected it to unfold and come to fruition like it has.

In order to start the series – I needed working mamas willing to contribute. One of the first women I reached out to was the wife of one of my husband’s colleagues – well, sort of. It’s an industry thing. Nonetheless, I found myself charting a different course when the pandemic hit. So, the woman whom I remembered as the most stylish at the company Christmas party last December because she wore the most fabulous hair piece as an accent to her holiday getup, was the woman I sat across at the only open air restaurant I knew of at the time, in mid-May, as we discussed what I envisioned for this series…and asked her to be the first feature. Thank God she said yes. More so than that, Dalia has since become one of the brightest spots of this year – and one of my dearest and closest friends.

Another working mom who became a part of the series has also become a dear friend and I have never even met her – dare I say it – in person. Yet somehow we have managed to talk weekly – at times, daily – and we now co-host an every-Friday #MomHustle live on Instagram where we discuss a topic and explore what is working for us in the midst of our motherhood chaos while toasting to another week. Danielle is such a force. Her drive, passion, Type A badassery and her general disposition for being freaking awesome has helped make this year such a year of growth and development. She also has a connection to the industry in which my husband and Dalia’s work in so I can’t say that didn’t help in drawing the three of us closer together as we’ve now all become friends and are working on a collective project that will launch in 2021.

Lastly, 2020 brought me a partnership with my daughter and a venture into business that I never imagined. In October, we officially started our own company, Cottontail Creations Co., as a way to build a legacy together. I’ve always loved planners, journals and journaling, stationery and writing thank-you notes…so it’s only fitting that the business we’d start would be that of a paper company producing the items that fill our cup. My daughter is designing some blank journals for teens while I am doing the same for adults. We have a test group for our planner starting after the New Year and we hope to have a line of stationery ready when our site launches in February. We started our little foray into this space with the launch of our first product, the #workingmama coffee mug, that honors all of the working moms in our lives + gives back to an organization that means a lot to us, Dress for Success. While this has been a dream of mine for over a decade – and legitimately for the past five years – I never imagined this would be the year it all came to fruition.

Some of the best things that occurred this year were never even on my radar. And yet they have been the most rewarding. I still look forward to reviewing the intentions I set for the year as there were many I accomplished but the unexpected outcome of quarantine life has me excited to see what twists 2021 will take. This year may have been a lot of things – and to honor those that have lost their lives to this virus, I feel every bit of duty and obligation to live out my life to the fullest, for this year has taught me so much about the preciousness and fragility of life.

As I close out this last month of being thirty-eight and prepare to enter the last year of my thirties, I am ready. I am excited, I am humbled, I am appreciative and I am intentional about continuing to be content in the life that living throws me. I’m sure I’ll make thirty-nine goals for next year, to honor the journey I’ll be on, but I am *hoping* (sans pandemic) that life decides to pitch a few more curve balls my way so that I can become even more nimble, and flexible, at discovering what I am truly meant to do on this Earth. And to live thirty-nine unencumbered from the notion that our goals can be defined in numbers and years to begin with…

– Confessions of a Corporate Mom