The Back Story

Settle in folks, it’s a long story.

I’m Tresa Edmunds. I have been blogging in one place or another since 2002, having all my 20’s and 30’s while writing about them publicly. It’s been messy.

When I started this blog I was 25, doing my darnedest to be a Righteous Mormon Woman, disabled by endometriosis and desperate to become a mother. I was working as a freelance craft designer and the biggest, grandest  vision I had for myself was to have a crafting show on HGTV. 

But simultaneously, I was also a feminist and gay rights activist pushing for a more inclusive version of Mormonism. I just tried to keep that last part quiet. And when I failed at that, I tried to compartmentalize it by keeping my activism separate from the blog. But I failed at that too. At a time when Mormons dominated the craft industry in the scrapbook world, and also the Mormon Mommy Blogging world, my big mouth held me back a lot. Even as hard as I tried to keep a lid on it, I still lost jobs, book deals, brand opportunities, networks, friends, and so much more. But dammit, I tried so hard to keep a smile on and keep moving.

I left the LDS church in 2014 when they started excommunicating activists. Once I had too much experience to deny any longer – that the way things were was the way the church leaders wanted it. And I knew that they did not represent the God I have known. I still consider myself a person of faith, but my faith is in so much more now. And crucially, tempered by humility. I am thoroughly comfortable in the uncertainty. Maybe I’m talking to ancestors, maybe I’m carried away in a particularly powerful Internal Family Systems meditation. I’m not threatened by either one. I think of things in a dual approach. I’m a skeptical mystic.

I became a mom in 2008 with the very sudden and exciting arrival of my son Atticus, born at 27 weeks and weighing 2 lbs 3 oz. Before he was home from the hospital we knew he had cerebral palsy, and later in his childhood we discovered he is also autistic. After a grand total of 16 years of wrestling with endometriosis and fertility, we made peace with the fact that we won’t have more kids. Which means my only experience with motherhood has been in uncharted waters with milestones that look very different from what I expected. It isn’t disability that has made that challenging, it’s the isolation. It’s having to constantly reinvent the wheel, alone, because the “What to Expect When Raising A Child That Isn’t Perfectly Typical” book doesn’t exist. And usually what happens is you only talk to doctors or clinicians dealing with what’s “wrong.” Nobody is telling you what is right. 

I’ve been lucky to have adults with disabilities in my corner who have taught me how to be the kind of parent I want to be to Atti. In our house we celebrate our differences and use them to be a stronger team. We believe in biology and that every human has unique strengths and limitations. That disability designations are just rooted in capitalism and the worth of every human lies in their innate human dignity. We celebrate autism as just another way to be a human, with its own challenges but also its immense gifts.

I took a big blog break in 2016 when I could no longer keep up with the demands of a compartmentalized life. I couldn’t write one more friggin craft tutorial while I was fighting to stay alive. I went on a deep dive to figure out what I could do about my health once and for all and had to confront a lot of things I was working very hard to ignore. Trauma therapy has changed a whole lot since the last time I gave it a sincere try. It actually does something other than desensitize you now. It’s been brutal, but I feel like I actually have reason to hope for a future free from the past.

Now that my health is improving and it looks like I’m just some physical therapy away from being healthier than I’ve ever been, I’m entering my 40’s without any vision of what my future will look like. Everything I imagined for myself up until this point has failed spectacularly and rained down with ash. But, like Janis sang, Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose. Which means that failure brought me freedom.

Now I’m trying to reclaim all the dreams I set aside in my quest to be the Righteous Mormon Woman, and I’m working up the courage to believe they could still be possible. I don’t want to settle for the slivers of artistic expression I can cram through the loopholes. I want to make what is in me.

This section from one of my earliest blog bios still seems to apply all these years later:

So much of my life has not been fit for public consumption. This blog is my attempt to communicate with the world despite the messiness of infertility, premature babies, unemployment and other ridiculous bad luck. It helps not having to witness immediate reactions. I write about my journey into a different kind of motherhood, all the stuff I make, and trying to create a life of grace amid the temptations of a suburban California life. I want to be a more peaceful person, more grateful, more appreciative of every moment, with a clearer vision for the direction of my family. And yet at the moment I’m a bundle of neuroses and contradictory ambitions. There’s a whole lot I want to do in this world. I wonder if I ever will.