Book Launch: The Conversation Journal

Being a wife and a mom is hard work. We’ve fought for women’s rights and so our lives have more freedoms and liberties than that of our grandmothers and yet our job is still hard. Human beings are tribal, we seek connections and community. We often form these tribes and communities around shared experiences and life circumstances - our personal stories.

I started making the Conversation Journal so that I could better connect with one of my 5 children. It occurred to me that there might be other mothers and fathers out there that would also want to connect with their kids in this way so M and I decided we’d share our Journal with everyone. I also feel a calling to share my story and experiences as an encouragement to other mothers out there who may struggle with some of the same things that I do or have struggled with.

My initial intention wasn’t to sell the journal to others. M likes to be artistic and so do I. A journal that represented us wouldn’t have been able to be a simple spiral-bound notebook. I began designing pages that I intended to print and glue into a spiral notebook, but the number of pages grew and grew until I realized I had designed an entire book for us. M saw my work and while I sat at my computer wondering how I was going to glue all the pages into a notebook she “You made us a book, we can share it with my friend and her mom. I’ve been telling them about our journal and they want to do one too.”

From there the path seemed simple. Upload my designs at no cost to myself to CreateSpace, Amazon’s self-publishing service. Once published I could then order myself a copy and share the link with M’s friend, end of story. My darling daughter was very excited about this idea and went straight to school to tell all her friends that her mom had written a book and they could all get one. I came to the school for a visit a few days later and got bombarded by a half dozen girls who all wanted a copy of the journal to do with their moms. 

A few days later I was talking to a mom friend about a conversation I had with D and she marveled at my genius. I of course knew it wasn’t genius and that I have little to no conversational skills, so I told her about another mom who had given me my idea. I then proceeded to tell her about the village of other mothers who I regularly hounded with questions about mothering skills. She said she wished I had recorded those conversations so I could share them with her.

I laughed when she said that, but it planted the seed for the podcast. Everything ended up way bigger than my initial intention of gluing a few pages into a notebook, and that is extremely scary to me. However after reading Kobi Yamada’s book, What do You do With an Idea, I am pushing forward through my fears. It is important to know I am not pushing past my fears, I wish I was past them! I am smack dab in the middle of my fears and slowly going forward.

I am standing out here on my own admitting that I don’t always know what to do as a mother and I have to ask other mothers for advice. I can’t always sit down and have peaceful and meaningful conversations individually with my five kids. My confession, I may be a seasoned mom with little kids, but I am not an expert. I need help and I need to ask other mothers for advice and help.

If you like what you read and you want to interact more I’ve created a group just for you on Facebook. We can share our struggles and ask for advice from other parents who have been there and share the same vision of having deeper longer conversations with our kids.