45 and still alive
A baseball-season break for my birthday and geting real about time
Today is my 45th birthday, and my big celebration is renting a cabin to go spend a few days just looking after myself, reading, catching up on shows/movies, working, and doing a few back end things on the newsletter like sorting together some of the archives by theme (this Botox etc. thread made me realize it might be helpful to be able to quickly find back issues by topic).
I’ll be back to my regular life this weekend, but I’m going to take a month off the newsletter.
Here is a screenshot of my kids’ partial baseball calendar to provide a partial explanation why:
I had a talk with a colleague not long ago about the sense of stress I’d been feeling sending out my newsletter the last few months. I could pinpoint a few causes but a big one was sending my kids to a new farther-away school last fall.
The switch has actually worked out great so far, but part of the cost is that my husband and I spend a lot more time driving the kids around and that our workdays end a lot earlier (we both work from home and do our own childcare.)
My kids are at a paradoxical time of life where they need less hands-on caretaking but just as much caretaking time. Over the last year I tried to fight against this and fit in as much newsletter and freelance work as I had in the past because otherwise felt like admitting defeat. I’ve sent Evil Witches out twice a week, once free, pretty reliably since it started in 2018. Substack suggested that cadence and I assumed that was best practices, but the platform wants me and you to be using it more, not less, so consider the source.
Less time, plus a greater freelance workload (which I didn’t want to turn down after a slow post-COVID recovery), Substack’s method of forcing publishers to confront their metrics every time they log into their dashboard, plus peri-induced anxiety and depression all conspired to make me feel less of a sense of fun/curiosity with the newsletter and more of a bracing feeling when I sent it, like, “I hope I don’t let someone down with this.”
I think a little break will be good for me and the product. Plus, I don’t want to bring my laptop to baseball games or practices that much this spring if I can help it. I’m going to take the month off to do some admin work, refill my well, do some reporting and editing and take a full break from trying to get my aspirational work terms to mesh with my immovable life terms.
When Evil Witches come back after May 15 you can expect weekly paid subscriber issues/threads to resume but free issues will come every other week or so. I want more time to work on them, especially when readers send me big hard questions, which is an honor but not something that should be cranked out to keep the content flowing. If you are like me, maybe you won’t even be angry about receiving one fewer email per two weeks.
If you are a paying subscriber, I understand if you feel a sense of “This is not what I paid for,” especially if you just subscribed or you don’t have the budget for a newsletter on hiatus. (If you unsubscribe, don’t worry: I don’t get notifications when it happens.)
But before you go, you may want to hang out in the archives first to see some free issues that I think were either useful or entertaining to people:
You advised, I listened! Witches' advice on international family travel
Modeling healthy eating habits and body attitudes when you used to emphatically not
Good news for people who like trying new things and have a young kid with ADHD
The definitive guide to raising preteen girls without letting them get to you
Anyway, thank you for understanding. The newsletter will be back in May. I truly appreciate you being an Evil Witches reader. Maybe I’ll see you at a baseball game.
~Claire
End credits
Thanks for reading Evil Witches, a newsletter for people who happen to be mothers. New here? Here’s what the newsletter is all about.
If you have any questions, feedback, or suggestions for future issues, you can reply directly to this email or leave them in the comments.
Our Instagram, curated by Carly O., lives here. The Evil Witches archives are here. A few from the past that if you want more reading cover a jealousy-inducing hysterectomy story, a thing + a thing recipes, donating money to avoid school fundraising, and… middle school.
If you looked through those free articles and decided you wanted to support the newsletter even though the next one isn’t coming until May, who am I to stop you?
One witchy thing
Happy birthday, happy break! Honestly, every time a woman I admire says no (even to me!) or otherwise draws a boundary, it's such a gift and I reminder that we can do that, too!
Happy Birthday! Every time your email pops up in my account I'm like "Ooh a FunEmail!" with absolutely zero (like, less than zero?) thought of the amount of time it's been since the previous. I'm sorry substack puts the grind-metrics-machine-monster front and center to make you constantly freak out but no one else notices.* Probably because of their kids sports schedule but my kids don't do sports so I don't even have that excuse.
*I'm stressing about this sentence for two reasons: 1) obviously unsure if the asterisk goes inside or outside the period but don't have the will to check in another tab and 2) I don't want to imply that I don't care because I enjoy getting FunEmail and I am a paid subscriber but if you asked me how many emails you sent last year vs. how many I expected, I would stare at you like you asked your children what they wanted to eat. [blankly, as if no one had every thought to pose such a question].