This is not a Canva tutorial.  I muddled my way through Canva, using mostly trial and error, and I have created a total of one hopefully share-able graphic.

Dan is really good at computers. I’m not. Ever since I met him, he’s taken on the role of 24 hour on call technical support person. There is no computer-related matter too small to warrant my seeking his expertise. Even if he doesn’t have the answer, he has a special talent for Googling the exact right question with the exact right phrasing, that I have yet to master.

It is not unusual for women to experience postpartum anxiety. It is my understanding that this anxiety revolves around the baby or some aspect or aspects of motherhood. I, on the other hand, feel fine about the baby. It’s my blog that is making me anxious.

I want to write. I want to submit my writing. I want to journal. I want, I want, I want… Oh yeah, I want to sleep. I want to feel like myself again. I haven’t worked out since before the baby was born (just a few more days till I’m allowed!) and I haven’t been away from the baby for more than a couple of hours, and even then it’s only to go to acupuncture to try and fix my face.

I have zero time for 99.9% of the ‘I wants” because caring for a a newborn and a toddler is no joke. If I were a normal person I would be like, “My blog can wait. Everything can wait. My life is chaos right now.” But no, not me, I have to think of a thousand things I could be doing but am obviously too lazy/lame/undercaffeinated to actually do. Doesn’t matter that I ate my dinner left handed tonight while breastfeeding the baby and intermittently jumping up to get Sweet Pea more honeydew which I just didn’t have an extra hand to cut into toddler-size pieces and I felt bad because the chunks were way too big for her little mouth. Doesn’t matter that the hours between dinner and anywhere between 10 and midnight are a chaotic mess of nursing, bathing, storying, diaper changing, nursing, stuffed-animalling, rocking, bouncing, door cracking (just the right amount), nursing,  burping, nursing, oh yeah did I mention nursing. Somewhere in the middle of the parenting shenanigans I manage to sneak in glass of wine, a coconut popsicle, and a conversation with Dan that is more than an exchange of information about our offspring.

So obviously now is the perfect time in my life to beat myself up about the dearth of Pinterest-ing graphics on my blog and because PicMonkey frustrates me I need to learn to make said graphics on Canva RIGHT. NOW.  After multiple attempts to create such a graphic, each of which lasted a total of 10-15 minutes due to one interruption or another, I got a free 30 minutes today to continue on my mission. When I finally, finally hit “save and publish,” the image that saved to my computer was not the same as the one I saw in Canva.

I wanted to throw my computer. I was ready to give up. I was desperate to call Dan, but he was at work. And once he gets home, there’s hardly time for either of us to take a shower, let alone for him to help me with my stupid (but somehow urgent) Canva graphic. But how much time was I going to invest in this stupid project? I could not deal with the idea of wasting even more of my precious time.

Until I realized it wouldn’t necessarily be a waste because I might actually learn something. The beauty of the baby needing to nurse while I was in the middle of hating Canva and before I completely gave up on it was that I had to step away from the computer. This allowed me some time to let some ideas on possible fixes float into my brain. I’ve always known that it’s important to give your mind time to “marinate” when you’re doing anything creative, but it never occurred to me that problem-solving a computer issue was a creative endeavor. Except duh, of course it is. Not only is Dan a computer genius, he is also one of the most creative problem solvers I know, which is so not a coincidence.

So I futzed around with Canva for a bit and I figured out what the issue was. BY MYSELF. Perhaps my two year old, with her obsession with doing everything BY HERSELF, has been a good influence on me. And just like that, a possibly share-worthy image was created, self-esteem was boosted, and a lesson in perseverance and independence was learned (even if it was at the tender age of 35).