mary mac made that

Hey Friend! I’m Mary, the creator, author, and illustrator behind this blog. I’m married to my really sweet and really nerdy best friend, I’m a mom to the wildest and most loving little boy you’ll ever meet, and quite honestly I’m pretty sure I’m living my best life.

I started this blog to document my journey as a picture book author and illustrator. I also thought this would be a fun space to share my personal creative projects.

My background

My professional background is in digital marketing. I graduated with a bachelor’s in animation and interactive design, and decided that the 3D animation world wasn’t a good fit for the kind of life I wanted. Instead, I utilized my interactive design skills to build a successful career in digital marketing. I worked as a marketer for 10 years with the last 2 being dedicated to market analysis. I thrived on data and enjoyed building spreadsheets, predictive models, and other corporate nerd things until I had my son. After his birth, I started feeling like something was missing out of my career, but I couldn’t put a finger on it until recently. Passion. I was missing passion.

I had spent 10 years building a successful career that at the end of the day, I really didn’t care anything about. I loved my friends and my coworkers of course, but the job felt draining. I realized I was building it for other people, and I chased what I believed was “acceptable” work for someone with my skillset.

They say motherhood changes you, but I didn’t realize how deep that change really goes. It didn’t take me long to figure out that I didn’t love what I did for work, that I wasn’t passionate about it, and I missed being weirdly, wildly, wonderfully me. I trapped myself in a work persona, one that honored the hustle/climb, and no longer honored my God given talents. My art didn’t feel “good enough” to make a living, and to be quite honest, it might not replace my income, but what I’ve gained out of choosing this path for myself is so much more – control, direction, and a gentleness that has helped me heal and work towards becoming the wife and mom my family deserves.

When I looked at the squishy faced being that I held in my arms I knew I didn’t want that kind of life for him. I didn’t want him growing up believing that he had to work a certain job or live a certain way to be deemed valuable by society. I want him to grow up honoring his God given talents and deem his own life valuable and worthy. We all fall into that trap at some point, but now that I’ve stepped out of the rat race, I’m making it my life mission to prove to my son as well as other children that life really is what you decide to make it. Realizing this has freed me to create.

My creative journey

Once I decided that I wanted to be a creator, that wasn’t the end of the story. Far from it. In fact all I did by admitting to myself and my husband that I wanted to be a writer and an illustrator was open a flood gate. The research period felt like drinking out of a firehose! Since I became a little more in tune with the person I wanted to be, it thankfully didn’t take me long to realize I was consuming more content than I was creating. But now I faced another challenge. What kind of illustrator and writer was I going to be?

If you want to send an artist into an identity crisis, ask them about their art style. Ask a writer about their writing style. Style, style, style. I spent HOURS watching videos on developing an art style. I won’t go down the rabbit hole again in this post, but I share this to warn others that you can trap yourself by consuming rather than creating. You can’t develop a style, or get better at writing, by watching other people create. All that does is boost their ad rev.

To escape I had to do the unthinkable as a millennial. Remove myself from social media including Pinterest and YouTube. I had to put my phone in another room. I turned off my computer. And I sat down with a composition notebook and just started writing. I sat outside. I listened to the birds and the breeze and for the first time in a long time I just sat with my real, raw, and unfiltered thoughts.

At first this was pretty uncomfortable. My brain had been conditioned to seek the instant gratification of social media, tv, any sort of digital consumption really. My brain would try and negotiate with me like a child, “well if we sit out here for 15 minutes we can look at reels for a bit right?” or “you don’t really know anything about that, how about we look that up on YouTube”. Not letting my brain win took some getting used to, but now I can happily say that I spend more time offline than I do on.

The win in all of this is to learn how to be uncomfortable again. Original and funny writing and art doesn’t come from scrolling or being comfortable. Comedy comes from pain, embarrassment, humiliation, and the desire to keep going despite failure. You have to learn to write and create by doing, and that seems so darn plain and boring, but sometimes the simplest truths are the hardest ones to follow through with.

Once that truth started to sink in, I knew in my heart what kind of writer and illustrator I wanted to be. It’s one I’ve always wanted to be. A children’s book writer. And not just any children’s book writer. I want my stories to be witty, fun, laugh out loud funny, and absurd because all of those describe exactly who I am as a person. So, by becoming a kidlit author and illustrator, I’d be living my truth and what a really cool and powerful realization to have.

Creativity grows with play

The world is heavy. I started this paragraph out with “today’s world”, but looking back at history the one thing we can take away is that the world has always been heavy and life has always been hard. As parents, it’s our responsibility to teach our children how to be kind, uplift others, learn from our mistakes, and shoulder the weight of the world with others.

Kids are under immense pressure to perform in school, in sports, and online. We drive and push them to achieve “greatness” most of the time without helping them define what that means on their own terms not ours.

Since our kids are already inundated with messages about how spectacularly they fall short of societal expectations, I decided that I didn’t want my stories to simply “teach lessons”. They get that enough already. All of the stories I’m working on do have underlying themes of empathy, resilience, and other biggies that we as parents want to teach our kids, but the main point is to have fun. I read an awesome quote the other day, in a random article I can no longer find, that creativity grows when we play. This is true even for us adults. And if we want our kids to have magical childhoods as well as magical adulthoods, we need to give them (and ourselves) permission to play.

What to expect on this blog

If you guessed that it’s permission to play – you’re right! For you, me, and our children.

I’m not a published author or acclaimed artist (yet!). I’m still figuring everything out. I love the quote that says everything is figureoutable. Because it is! So, my friend, we’re on this creative journey together. And I’m glad you’re here!

On this blog, I’m going to share the ins, outs, ups, downs, and all arounds of figuring out kidlit as well as illustrating, diy and craft projects, and anything else my crafty lil’ brain decides to come up with. My goal is to document processes, be transparent and authentically me, and build a community around this journey.

One day, I might even be able to read my books at the library, or even open my own children’s book store. You never know! Everything is figureoutable!