Seminar

I'm going to a seminar and I feel great.

I'm dressed in something other than my husband's extra-large t-shirt and the sweatpants I've been wearing all week, and I feel like a million bucks.

It is the very first time, since my daughter's birth, 5 years ago, that I'm going to be mingling with adults and the words ''play date'' have not been spoken.

Ok, I'm exaggerating, but this much is true. I never thought going to a web optimization/internalization and social marketing seminar would get me all fired up!

But it did!

It's the first seminar or anything of the sort (that had nothing do to with child birth or breast feeding) that I was attending in the last half decade.

On my way over there, I feel great. My hair looks good, I'm bopping to my jams and I'm processing various business opportunities.

I feel alive again.

http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=1499

In recent years, the lack of sleep, baby talk and me talking about myself in the third person... “Mommy needs to take a time out right now”.....have made me start to doubt my abilities in the ''work-place'' (I'm putting quotations because my house could also be considered a workplace!).

What's particularly scary for me is, theoretically, I have never been in the ''work-place''.

After I graduated from my second undergraduate degree (my first being a general science baccalaureate and my second a teaching degree), I moved here to Lafayette, got married and got pregnant 3 weeks later.

For the past 5 years I've been wiping butts and refereeing fights between irrational, unreasonable toddlers.

So, the thought of getting out into the big bad world scared me.

Until now. until this seminar.

I feel confident. I'm asking the right questions. The panel members seem to be genuinely interested in what I'm trying to accomplish. I'm a rock star (lol..as much a rock star as you can be in a web optimization/internalization and social marketing seminar).

The point is, I was not intimidated.

Quite the opposite, I felt surer of myself then I think I've ever felt in such an environment.

It finally dawned on me that maybe, these past 5 years, of staying up all night with fever and ear infections and of damage control after one kid picks the other one's toy, have made me a more confident, strong-willed person.

I guess that's what you call life experience.

And, experience is something I'm starting to have!