Full, Fat, and Feeling Good

As we reach the last day of the year, I’m feeling a little full and fat, but also content with my life. Looking back on 2025, I might still be unemployed, but I feel I’ve achieved a lot.

One of my son’s favourite catchphrases is “All done!” whenever he completes something. So, as we say “All done!” to this year, I decided to proudly look back on what I have achieved.

Friends

2025 was the year I realised I’m now too busy to make new friends. I’ve learnt to stop trying so hard and not get upset when people cancel plans or don’t message. The older I get, the more I realise everyone is busy with their own lives. I’m finally happy with my own company and the company I have with my little family. Any friends I make going forward will be friendships that come naturally, not ones I’ve tried to force.

Motherhood

At the start of the year, I had a little one-year-old who was already talking and walking in leaps and bounds. Now I have a two-year-old who is putting all his words together to talk in sentences. I can’t always figure out what he’s saying, but I can tell he’s telling me something very important.

Daycare drop-offs can still be a little heartbreaking, but they’re becoming easier for both of us. It’s also great to see a smiling happy boy running up to us at the end of the day, which is a big turnaround to the start of the year when we would go to pick him up and he’d see us and burst into tears.

I’ve always known I wanted to have kids. I’d been wishing for my little boy since my 20s, but due to various life events and a string of terrible men, it didn’t happen until I was 39 years and 364 days old. It’s been a challenging two years, but honestly, not as hard as I thought it would be. I have so many days where I sit and think for a minute (obviously when he’s napping, I can’t sit and think when he’s awake) about how at ease I finally feel with my life. I feel like my whole purpose in life has been to be Mum to this little boy, and I’m finally where I belong.

Of course, every now and then my heart breaks a little when I get to see him after a long day apart... and he runs straight past me and to his Dad, but that won’t stop me continuing to be the best Mum I can be.

Writing

Apart from being Mum to the cutest little boy ever, I think my greatest achievement of 2025 is my writing. I started out in February having never written anything professionally before. I wrote a little story to share our family’s experience with sleep training our son because I’d seen so many other parents asking questions about this topic. I don’t know if it helped anyone, but 104 stories later, this story still has the second-highest number of reads, and by a long shot, not just because it’s my first story. Don’t ask me how I managed this... SEO maybe?

I started off writing about my real-life experiences as a parent, and have since branched out to poetry and fiction.

Ten months down the road, I’ve had several Top Stories, placed in a couple of unofficial challenges, and received some Runner-Ups and Honourable Mentions in the Vocal Challenges.

I’m also proud to have become an admin for the Vocal + Assist Facebook group and love posting my Saturday Leaderboard Lift post to help Vocal writers make the weekly leaderboard.

I went from laughing at people who said I should write a book, to saying “Maybe, just maybe if I write enough fiction stories, I might one day publish them in a book.”

Career

As for the rest of my career, well, it’s a bit non-existent at the moment, but I’m trying. I finished my career as a vet nurse a few years ago and I still don’t want to go back to that kind of commitment. I’ve found that since I became a Mum, my career priorities have changed. I just don’t want to be responsible for other people or animals that aren’t my own.

I’ve been applying for lots of jobs in retail. I really want a job where I can go in, do what’s expected of me, leave work at the door and come home. I’ve had too many jobs that have nearly broken me over the years, and I can’t afford to have that happen to me now.

It scares me sometimes when I think the reason I am so happy right now is because I don’t have a job and I know unfortunately that will eventually have to change.

Hopefully, I can find the perfect job in 2026.

Happy New Year!