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Oh my god, I’m really doing it. 
I’m sitting here attempting to formulate my first ever blog post.
I’ve been contemplating doing it for months, maybe years. And to be honest, I imagined it to be a lot easier. People are actually going to read this.

Or not.

Maybe not.


Hopefully they are.

I’m a musician – so how come all of a sudden I turn to the written word?

For one thing, as a singer/songwriter words are part of the deal. I gotta have something to sing. 
For another, I’ve always liked writing. It’s been my spare time activity since childhood. I put together little stories and song lyrics, journaled, worked on screenplays and, believe it or not, I’ve even put a „novel“ to paper, eighty handwritten pages, at the age of eleven. 
For many years I’ve been toying around with the idea of writing something that I won’t lock away in my desk drawer or on my hard drive. The thing that kept me was the question of what I was going to write for potential readers.

I always thought that because I’m a musician I should only present myself as such to the public. If I appear in any other form it’s just gonna get confusing I thought. However, being a musician doesn’t feel like an unmanageable struggle to me (anymore), not as something I want to write about in order to come to terms with. I mean yes, on some days it’s no piece of cake, you get rejected, you see colleagues getting booked for better gigs than yourself, you have no budget to produce new songs, you screw up a gig because you still have an infection but didn’t wanna cancel that gig and bam! your voice cracks a million times and you fail a couple of notes and it’s embarrassing but you’ve seen it coming.

I’ve been doing this for seventeen years now and accept all these things as part of the deal, the rules to the game so to speak, they don’t freak me out anymore. I feel as though I’ve found my lane as a musician.

I could at best write a blog of advice about being a professional musician who’s not a celebrity (that’s important because for us, the rules are different than for our famous colleagues), but then again who am I to be an expert all of a sudden? 😉

It has dawned on my for a while now that the thing that I’m most curious to blog about would be the one thing I’ve been keeping carefully under locks ever since I signed up for my first Facebook account in 2008: my private life. Namely being a mom, a family caretaker, a homemaker. Because: I can organize a concert with multiple artists with no problem, PR, coordination with stage technicians, artist support – you name it. But I can easily get a breakdown over packing fresh sports clothes for my son’s gym class in the morning because there are no fresh sports clothes in his closet, damn it. And because I sometimes feel as though I drown in all those tasks and errands of family life, not being able to free up time for myself as an artist, to continue working on songs, on writing, or to simply train my voice for some thirty minutes.

Don’t get me wrong: founding a family, having children, feels like the truest, most human adventure I’ve ever gotten myself into and I’m proud of myself that I had the guts to do it. Yet it’s not always easy (what is!?) and I can guarantee you you’ll hear me vent. Especially on the first few posts – I have an inkling that I need to let off some steam first 😉 But I also want to share some insights, some experiences that I’ve had about how to not completely lose myself in family caretaking. Because I realize I still do my own thing. I mean, I’m sitting here writing this blogpost for crying out loud – while my family is sleeping, admittedly (and I’m not, but I’ll get to that in one of my posts).

So, to wrap up this introduction to my new blog, let me introduce myself as the private person Nora: I live with my husband and our two children, a son (8) and a daughter (6) and our two cats in an old, charming house with a pretty big yard in a small town somewhere in the Lüneburger Heide. I might have had you believe before that I’m “just” a musician, but I am in fact a full time family caretaker who’s following her calling in small time windows on the side: singing & songwriting, playing gigs, teaching singing, conducting a choir and now writing, apparently.

I’m excited that you found your way here and I hope you are looking forward, just as I am, to blogposts on motherhood, family caretaking, simple living and creativity.

Here are a few posts that I’m currently working on:

Children are not a distraction from more important work. They are the most important work. (quote by Dr. John Trainer)

I don’t do the dishes / I throw them in the crib (from Hole song “Plump” by Courtney Love)

And so I close my little introduction. Should one of my posts speak to you (or make you uneasy, for that matter) I’d appreciate you leaving a comment and share your thoughts. I already know how excited I’ll be about the first few words of feedback.

Thank you and take care! Nora