Balance needed. I forgot the password to my baby.

2015 goal: More of this. Update: Failing miserably.

It’s 4:58 pm and I just realized I forgot my own password to log into Beers & Beans. Holy cow.

Have our lives gotten that crazy? Has it really been a month since either one of us have been able to sit down and write a post?

My eyes welled up instantly. It’s like forgetting your own baby at the train station. That’s what Beers & Beans is to me – my baby. And I forgot it.

Actually I didn’t forget about it – I am a worse kind of mother. The kind that thinks about their kid each and every day but still doesn’t make time for it.

Yeah that’s me – a deadbeat mom. Awesome.

My connection to Beers & Beans and all of you, our amazing readers, is still very strong but how could anyone know that but me since I’ve been wearing the cloak of invisibility online.

It’s not on purpose, trust me. I have just been 1000% overwhelmed. We both have been. No one could’ve predicted how strongly our Speakeasy Scarves would’ve taken off. And it’s a blessing. A gift from the gods.

Between you and me, Beers & Beans was grasping so badly for air when I decided to make these scarves. We had been living day to day and were in debt up to our eyeballs. I spent the entire month of October in 2013 crying in bed. I was so down and out and most of all just so exhausted. To solve the money problem I knew I had a choice: Give up and get a job or make money magically appear.

I’ve been broke pretty much all of my adult life so I have plenty of practice when it comes to scratching up some money quickly. I used to the be the queen of buying cheap on Craigslist and reselling high and I paid rent plenty of times that way. You wouldn’t believe how much people would pay for a well photographed coffee table that I would snag for $20.

I knew I had to sell something tangible if I was going to save my baby (and us) so Speakeasy Travel Supply was born.

I didn’t know what would come of it, all I knew was that I had to try. I’ve never given up on anything but we were stuck. Seriously stuck. Our lives may look slightly glamorous online and I wouldn’t trade my journey for anyone else’s but we were going nowhere. We were stuck taking ads to eat and traveling only on sponsored trips because we couldn’t afford to go anywhere on our own. We were working like 10 -12 hours a day. Weekends – I have no idea what that word even means.

Meaningful photos take time…sometimes hours.

This is the part that no one sees. To make things look great, to give each place and story the attention it deserves – it takes time. A lot of time. Some people can sit down, whip out a story or a photo essay in an hour. I’m not one of those people and honestly I don’t want to be either. I have always preferred quality to quantity and I’ve always known in my heart that this is part of the reason that Beers & Beans stands out. Quality takes time – that’s just the way it works. From day one I’ve always set out to make sure that Beers & Beans has it’s own look – from our graphics, to our words, to our images to everything in between. Beers & Beans was never made to blend in. No one puts baby in a corner, especially my baby.

Life is nothing if not ironic though. The one thing I had created to make me free was pulling me down a dark hole.

In late 2013 I handed all email correspondence to Randy – I simply couldn’t stand negotiating with people who wanted things for free. I felt constantly taken advantage of and could no longer count on myself to answer professionally. I had enough sense to know I just couldn’t be the voice of Beers & Beans during that time. I was angry every single day.

So with fingers crossed I started piecing together scarves, hoping and praying it would somehow pull us out of this hole and into a real life. One that would allow us to travel freely again and make plans for the future. Also, and this was a big one, I prayed I would get the time to simmer down and go back to Beers & Beans with a fresh attitude – new photos, real discussions and less of the ads we had needed just to put food on the table.

I cannot tell you how many times I cried and felt completely and utterly despondent about the direction BnB was headed in. It was starting to look and sound like everyone else and it was heartbreaking to watch it happen, even if it was out of necessity. Every day this was always our topic of discussion: How can we save it?

Speakeasy allowed us to do that. It provided the stable income that we needed so dearly. Every single typical ad email we’ve received this year has gone into the garbage. The delete button provides a very scary, yet satisfying sound. Scary only because when you are so used to living on the poverty line walking away from money, even if it’s virtual, is literally like leaving a $20 you just found on the ground. It’s hard to do – putting trust in the idea that it will come back to you in a different form.

Speakeasy has given us a rope and pulled us out of the darkness. I guess you could say Speakeasy is my second baby or third baby if you count Pin-Up Live. And now I’m like the mother trying to figure out how to have three kids and love them all the same. And somewhere in this I want to find a little time for myself. We need to find a little time for ourselves because there is absolutely no balance in our lives.

If there were such a thing as virtual mom jeans – I’d be in them.

Mom jeans look good on everyone. Said no one ever.

We have zero time to do anything but work. Just going to the grocery store is something that needs planning and coordination. The daydreaming of exotic landscapes is at an all time high.

A typical Beers & Beans/Speakeasy day looks like this:

8am – wake up, shower, get dressed, hopefully take Chachy on a 10 min. walk

9am – Randy emails for BnB, I email for Speakeasy and Pin-Up Live (Oh yeah, that other sibling), I update my order sheet for scarves

11am-ish – Randy starts writing or has conference calls for upcoming projects. I’m starting my sewing for the day.

12pm – we realize we are hungry and go upstairs to stuff our faces for 15 mins.

12:15 – Back to sewing, writing, emailing. Hopefully updating something on some social media account at some point.

3pm – Randy starts packaging all of the orders going out that day and rushes to the post office for the final cut off at 4:30pm. I’m still sewing.

6pm-ish: Head upstairs, dinner time with Seinfeld!

7pm: Time for 2nd half of the day. Now I’m working on the couch so I can pretend that I’m not really working but still really I am. I have a careful Jenga-like conglomeration of pillows that I use to stack my laptop and hard drive on so that I can still from time to time watch the TV as well. This is my time for editing photos, doing design work for other projects, answering interviews (ok that only happens like once a month but it sounds cool), creating custom orders and of course answering emails again. OR instead of doing all that I use this time to cut fabric which makes me happy because at least I am standing up. Randy is generally doing back end website things, writing or working on newsletters. This continues until about 11pm.

11pm: Continue working from bed this usually involves editing instagram photos for all of my children and getting my ‘likes’ out into the world. Then every night at this time I always come up with a really awesome social update and then decide not to post it since it is so late and I feel like I should save it until morning. Ultimately I forget what it is anyway and finally fall asleep some time around 12 – 1am.

The other items that also fit somewhere in the week are photographing new scarves, organizing fabric and ordering supplies. All of which take a surprising amount of time. I try to work out four times a week, in reality I’m lucky if I get time to do it twice a month and then I beat myself up over it. My friends get together once a month for ‘girls day’, I can’t remember the last one I went to.

Anything we want to do that isn’t work related is carefully calculated in terms of planning.

This is not a healthy lifestyle. We are on teetering on the border of real success but we are both in the worst shape of our lives. We promised ourselves that 2015 would be the year we balanced our lives and thus far we are both failing miserably.

I am super excited about life and it feels AMAZING but we need some balance. Do you have ideas? If so please let me know. I know so many of our incredible, brilliant readers have equally crazy lives. Have you found a life/work balance? Do you have any advice?

How can I find some personal time to take better care of myself? How can I continue the growth of Speakeasy, Pin-Up Live and have enough time to truly give my authentic self to Beers & Beans so that I never forget the password again?

Universe, freelancers, parents… I’m listening.