When you're a mom who just wants to take over the world, is all

A well-timed package from my friend Emily.

I'm almost positive I've told you this before: that within about five minutes of King being born, I realized I wanted to do  E V E R Y T H I N G.

It was an acute awareness of the potential energy stored up in all my mechanisms. I knew I wanted to make things, help people make things, create spaces for people to make things.

It hasn't let up. If anything, it's somehow become more intense. With every new idea I have, or project I say yes to, I become more convinced that life is great, things are moving in the right direction, and also that I'm crazy.

There is no larger mission set by any of the projects I'm doing. They're loosely tied together by the fact that they call on creativity and problem-solving, and that I am moved by them. Website redesign; book design; illustration; collaborations with film lovers, the highly literate, the environmentally minded; I'm learning to write code (front-end and back-end, please); and I'm finding myself impassioned to create a space (virtual? real) for other mamas who want to do this everything-thing. ... This is only about half the list.

I think in a different time, or under different circumstances, I might consider myself a Renaissance man. Polymath.

And why not now? Why not let myself be that thing?

Maybe it's the sense of, or the lack of sense of, accomplishment. Save a few items here and there, nothing is ever done, and one thought is so often interrupted by another. This might be the particular nature of mamahood. I don't have to go into detail about that whole set of facts (endless dirty diapers, toys that need to be picked up, explaining how to put on a shoe for the twenty-third time, blah blah blah).

Don't you think of Renaissance men as being folks of accomplishment? People notable for how much they did? Or is that me misunderstanding the process? Is that me looking back on history, once a life is done and you can catalog eighty years of learning, practice, experimentation?

Maybe those people we call Renaissance men would never, ever have felt done. Would have been driven mad by all the things in their head that there doesn't seem to be room for; that the entire earth could not possibly provide enough room for.

And now it's time to wonder why it would even matter for me to label the things I do or suss out the direction it's all headed. So what if my moments are crammed with ten things; so what if I'm not sure what it's all leading to. 

What's really incredible is that this is all making me very happy. I'm frustrated and overwhelmed and sometimes staying up until midnight but I am  V E R Y  H A P P Y.