You know how we talk about how time passes? How you have some big milestone, years go by, you get in your groove with life, and then you totally forget about the milestone?
Yeah, that just happened to me.
Sunday morning, June 24, all I cared about was waffles. Well, waffles and having some of our dearest friends over for brunch. We feasted on farm-fresh strawberries and raspberries straight off our backyard canes. We caught up on our lives, and decided our respective kids were having so much fun that we would just keep the play date going all day.
That evening, Jodie baked me a cake. Since Connor’s birthday is the day before mine, he gets a birthday cake in December, and I get a Father’s Day cake in June. However, on Father’s Day we were in the midst of a weekend full of parties with their own cakes, so we decided to bump my cake a week.
Turns out that was perfect.
Sunday evening, when Jodie brought out my chocolate-with-mocha-buttercream-icing cake, she floored me.
“This is Daddy’s Father’s Day cake,” she told the kids. “But it’s for something else too. It’s also for seven years that Daddy’s been self-employed.”
My mouth fell open.
I’d totally forgotten.
On June 24, 2011, I resigned from my old job. (I’m smiling as I write this, thinking back to blaring Credence Clearwater Revival’s “Proud Mary” as I left the parking lot.)
The job is dead, long live the self-employment.
Seven years, man! Seven. Seven years! Seven… seven… yeeeeeears! (I might be channeling a certain car scene in Grosse Point Blank there. Just maybe.)
Over the past seven years, Jodie and I have had our two kids. Her violin and early childhood music studio has grown. And bit by bit, word by word, I’ve made my way. Four books and over 300 articles published, plus I’ve helped quite a few folks with their websites, messaging, and marketing.
I like to joke that I’m seven years into my journey to become an overnight success.
But what makes me smile inside and out is that I’m doing the work I love and living the life I’d hoped I would live.
I write every day. I’m inspired. My “creative well” keeps getting deeper and wider. I’m coming up with new fiction and non-fiction that I can create to, I hope, leave this world a better place than it was when I came in.
Seven years in. A lifetime to go.
Who wants a slice of cake?