Annie Fox's Blog...

Thoughts about teens, tweens, parenting and this adventure of living on Earth in the 21st century.

Annie Fox, M.Ed., is an internationally respected parenting expert, award-winning author, and a trusted online adviser for tweens and teens.

Podcast: Did I bite off more than I can chew?

November 23, 2009

The Package Deal: My (not-so) Glamorous Transition from Single Gal to Instant Mom by Izzy Rose

"The Package Deal: My (not-so) Glamorous Transition from Single Gal to Instant Mom" by Izzy Rose

Most of us appreciate having chunks of our day-to-day existence running on auto-pilot. It’s a good thing not to have to think about which aisle in your supermarket has the oatmeal or which branch of your county library has the best collection of books on CD. You don’t have to think about this stuff. You just know it, because, well, because this is your life.

But lives aren’t carved in stone. Whether you like surprises or not, you get them. And often they make you sit up and notice that life isn’t really a 24/7 auto-pilot proposition.

What happened to me in San Francisco, years ago, was one of those surprises. I was on vacation, so yeah, I was looking for adventure but not necessarily the Turn Your Life Upside Down variety. And yet, within a couple of days of meeting David, we were both crazy in love and planning our future together. Nine months later we were married and living in San Francisco, where I knew no one except David and the dog I brought with me from Upstate New York. Left behind were my family, my friends, the wonderful school where I taught, my adorable 4th graders, the cool old house I lived in, my enormous garden, the forested paths for escaping to when I needed to be alone and pretty much everything else that was nothing like California. Did I regret my impulsive choice to marry a guy I met on vacation? Never! But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that the first year was hard.

Transitioning from the known to the unknown can be a test of one’s creativity, resilience, self-esteem, patience and endurance. Having too much “newness” thrown at you at once can definitely leave a person wondering whether they should have taken a few slow deep breaths and looked more closely before they leaped. But too often by then you’re already up to your neck in the soup.

In this week’s podcast I talk with Izzy Rose, author of “The Package Deal: My (not-so) Glamorous Transition from Single Gal to Instant Mom” in which she chronicles the first tumultuous year of her marriage where she gave up her career, moved to Texas and became a full-time mom to her two step sons. Izzy Rose is an Emmy award-winning television producer from the San Francisco Bay Area. She’s the creator of Stepmother’s Milk, a blog and resource site for the modern-day stepmom with national and international readership. She’s appeared countless times on television and radio programs in San Francisco, Austin and Memphis and is a regular contributor to Stepmom Magazine.

Listen to my interview with Izzy Rose right here:

[QUICKTIME http://www.anniefox.com/podcast/FC012.m4a 300 300 false true]

If you have iTunes, you can subscribe to this podcast in the iTunes Store.

Or, you can download an MP3 version here.

Upcoming guests include:

Rosalind Wiseman, author of Queen Bees & Wanna Bees and Queen Bee Moms & Kingpin Dads

Diane E. Levin, co-author (with Jean Kilbourne) of So Sexy So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood And What Parents Can Do to Protect Their Kids

Susan M. Heim, author of It’s Twins! and Chicken Soup for the Soul Twins and More

Hannah Friedman, author of Everything Sucks: Losing My Mind and Finding Myself in a High School Quest for Cool

Dara Chadwick, author of You’d Be So Pretty If…

Matthew Amster-Burton, author of Hungry Monkey: A Food-Loving Father’s Quest to Raise an Adventurous Eater

*What’s a podcast? “A podcast is a series of digital media files, usually either digital audio or video, that is made available for download via web syndication.” –Wikipedia… So, in this case, there’s an audio file for you to listen to (in addition to reading the above).

---------

No Comments »

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL

Leave a comment

 
Follow Annie Fox on Social Media and the Web