Welcome to Bright Color Mom! My name is Michelle Meredith, and I’m the creator of everything on this blog. I’m so glad you’ve found me because I LOVE to help other parents celebrate their lives with their families! I want to teach you everything I know, and there are some key things I know a lot about: celebrating special occasions, being a mom, and drinking and eating.
I used to work full-time outside the home (I don’t have to anymore thanks to this blog!). I also have quality time with my children, pay all the bills, keep the house clean, make all the appointments, and run this business at the same time. So I can help you juggle the mom life, too.
I also love every holiday in existence, but especially Christmas.
In this blog, new articles are posted all the time (unless I get distracted by a really great Netflix show, or, you know, the flu) so be sure to bookmark brightcolormom.com!
The Story That Brought Me Here
Now, I’d like to share my tale of how I became the self-confident mom I am today. I mean, I’m not confident every day, but I’ve come a long way from where I was and feel pretty good most days.
Let’s start with a recap before we dive in!
As a kid, I was shy and overweight. Some kids were cruel, but fortunately, some kids were nice. I never felt like an outcast thanks to my handful of friends, but when I was younger, I was pretty shy.
On the bright side, my introversion helped me learn the skills I used to create an online business in high school that earned me six figures before I was 20 years old. I used that money to pay for most of my college tuition and live a pretty cool life in college without having to ask my mom for any money!
I turned down full scholarships at three universities for a chance to live in New York City and try to find myself and pursue my passion for filmmaking at NYU. (Spoiler alert: you never really find yourself, because the journey is the whole point.)
What I found instead was the love of my life – and a good reason to move back to my small Kentucky hometown.
My life turned out nothing like the perfect plan I wrote in my head, but I am extremely happy with how things ended up.
From Small Town, KY to the Big Apple
High school is often depicted as the worst part of your life, but I didn’t find this to be true. While I’m only remotely close with one girl from high school (my best friend then and now), I found a great group of new people that not only accepted but LOVED me for who I was. They gave me the confidence to stop caring about what all the other kids thought.
During high school, I became interested in filmmaking and video production. I seemed pretty good at it and particularly enjoyed editing on the eMac at school. Shooting videos with my friends was a blast, too.
Before long, I had a full-fledged passion for making music videos and decided I wanted to go to film school. I researched the best schools in the country and applied to four of them (along with a local university to please my mom). While I got full scholarships to Chapman in California and the University of North Carolina, I was only offered a partial scholarship to NYU. I personally thought NYU was the best school, but also…
I really, really, really wanted to live in New York City.
Coming from a small town in Kentucky, seeing NYC in all the TV shows and movies I watched… It looked like the coolest place ever. It also seemed like the best place to be for a film career (if LA wasn’t your thing – and for me, it wasn’t).
Rolling in Dough, for a Minute
Let me back up for a second. While in high school, I became enamored with incentivized advertising. For those that missed the boat, this was the height of sites like “freeipod.com” where you could complete a free or cheap affiliate offer, have some friends sign up and do the same, and have a nice product (like an iPod) mailed to you. They were totally legit, and I got a ton of stuff we never would’ve been able to afford, like a pool table, gaming PC, and Macbook Pro.
I realized these companies must’ve been making a ton of money to actually give away stuff like that, and researched how to make my own “free gift” website.
I’d taught myself HTML and PHP when dabbling in blogging back in middle school after we got our first home computer. Using those skills, I created eight incentivized advertising websites.
I quickly started shipping gifts to my users – and by the end of my senior year, I was making more money than my mother was. This was a HUGE deal to me because it meant I never had to ask her for money for anything while I was in college.
In fact, I’ve never asked my mother for money since.
The Best Years of My Life (Sorry, Kids)
I admit, as someone who grew up being careful with money, I went a little hog-wild living in NYC. Drinking Starbucks every day, buying all the video games and electronics I wanted, going to concerts all the time… It felt like a dream.
Living in a city where I could walk to everything also helped me lose a lot of weight. (Playing Dance Dance Revolution in my dorm room every day also had something to do with that.) So I also spent a lot of money on cute new clothes.
I was even able to pay off two years’ worth of student loans before I graduated. Of course, if I hadn’t spent so frivolously, I probably could’ve paid off the last year, too… But I don’t regret one thing about how I enjoyed my college experience!
Unfortunately, as you can probably guess, incentivized advertising was an industry with an expiration date from the start. There were only so many offers to complete, and so many people to complete them for you. By the end of my junior year, my business had slowly declined until there was virtually zero profit, and with a month’s notice for my users to cash out, I shut down the operation.
I earned money senior year as a teacher’s assistant making $10/hr in local public elementary and middle schools – a very humbling and rewarding experience. (Have y’all ever dealt with inner-city middle schoolers? They are brutal.)
How My Husband Wore Me Down
Whenever I imagined my life after college, it was just me. Me, editing music videos and blockbuster movie trailers in dark rooms; me, dancing alone in my Manhattan loft; me, hanging out with girlfriends at bars drinking cosmos and laughing about how fabulous we were.
Friends, listen to me: Fate wasn’t having it.
The summer after my sophomore year, I met my future husband.
Josh was tall and cute, hard-working, sweet, and enjoyed the simple things in life. We’re polar opposites, really! I actually had to warm up to him, because my experiences with cruel boys in childhood (and my last overbearing boyfriend) left me wary.
But he quietly persisted and won me over.
He and my family dropped me off in New York at the end of every summer and picked me up each spring. We stayed in touch through phone calls and Skype sessions, and he even flew to Dublin, Ireland to visit me during my semester abroad. During the holidays and summers, we spent every possible moment together.
The Struggle, Part 2
When I graduated from NYU, I had no real plan other than getting married, which meant returning to Kentucky where our families were.
I knew I wanted to be with my husband, but I had no real plan for starting my career. As you can probably guess, it didn’t take long to find out that using my film degree in Kentucky was next to impossible. The only editing jobs available at the time were for YouTube ads for warehouse companies… which was far from what I wanted to do.
I carried on with a string of crappy jobs. I took pictures for minimum wage at Sears Portrait Studio (remember those?). I set up custom NFL jerseys while on my feet 10 hours a day. I slung hand soap at Bath & Body Works during the holidays.
That’s right. An NYU Tisch School of the Arts graduate was refilling your favorite body spray display at the mall, fresh out of college.
I was miserable, and seven months post-grad with my wedding day looming in the near future, I was desperate for a better-paying job. Any job. Film skills aside, I knew I was smart enough to do just about anything if given the chance.
Long story short, I wormed my way into a job at a furniture store.
After ten years, I became one of the most valuable employees in the store. Was it what I went to school for? Nope. But the job wasn’t super stressful, I liked most of my coworkers, and I made decent money.
I’m Supposed to Have Babies Now, Right?
Growing up, I told anyone who mentioned babies in any capacity that I was NEVER going to have one. They’re gross, they cost way too much money, and I’d never get to do the things I enjoy again. This diatribe carried on all the way through college.
One night, not long before our wedding, my fiance (now husband) and I had a conversation about having kids. It started out with us agreeing that neither of us wanted them.
But somehow, over the course of an hour or so, we found ourselves saying “You never know, you can’t predict the future…”
Despite my rock-star-level ambitions, my life at 25 had turned out to be pretty friggin’ ordinary. I married young, lived in a small town, and worked a desk job.
The truth is that I was feeling pretty awful about myself. At some point, I figured I was doing all the other ordinary things… Why not have kids? It seemed like what we were supposed to do. My whole life had turned into doing things I was “supposed” to do, and I’d resigned myself to it.
So yes, my first child, my daughter, was 100% planned. Since my life wasn’t the party-all-the-time scenario I’d envisioned, my crazy butt thought a kid would bring a little excitement into the mix.
Boy, DO THEY.
Motherhood totally changed me. I was putting a tiny, screaming creature’s needs before my own, exhausting myself, being the best parent I could be.
And I hated it.
Major life changes are super tough. And no matter how confident you are that you’ll hang onto the life you had before children, it’s just not going to happen.
One of the strangest things about being a new mom is loving your baby so, so, SO incredibly much while simultaneously hating the life change of having to spend so much time caring for a completely dependent person.
I spent months resenting the hours “wasted” trying to get her to sleep, or the round-the-clock feeding and pumping schedule, or spoon-feeding her before I could leave for work. For some reason, it was a total shock to me how much TIME babies require out of your day.
I love my daughter and I have always done a very good job of taking care of her, but it was a long, slow process of mourning the life I had and getting comfortable with my new role.
My daughter wasn’t quite two when my husband and I “accidentally” conceived our son. By that, I mean we rushed to get it on while my mother took our daughter to an ice cream social during a two-week family vacation, so we didn’t think all of it through…
It was my 29th birthday when I took the pregnancy test that came up positive.
My period was two days late. I stopped at a Walgreens on the way to work and spent $20 on a pack of two fancy, early detection, high-accuracy tests. I peed on one of the tests in the bathroom at work as soon as I got there.
When the digital display read “Pregnant,” I cried.
I was just getting used to life with one child to care for.
Wouldn’t a life with two be twice as hard?? I honestly wasn’t sure I could handle it.
Telling my husband was nerve-wracking because I knew he’d had a really hard time adjusting as well, going through a worse postpartum depression than I had.
But when I pulled the positive test out of my pocket at dinner and laid it on the table in front of him, he smiled.
It was the first moment I felt like this was doable.
The World Turned Upside Down
(If you recognize the Hamilton title, I’m a huge fan!) Yes indeed, having children totally turned my ordinary life upside down. And while I felt nothing but a constant internal struggle with my daughter, after my son was born, it was like a missing piece of our puzzle had been pushed into place.
Something just clicked, and it all started to feel right.
I thought I was so smart, I thought I knew it all, and my children have proven me wrong time and time again. They’ve taught me to make the best out of the life I’m given, and whether it’s good or bad is all in how you look at it.
A few months after my son was born, I had a personal epiphany and decided to be the best person I could be in this life. I made conscious efforts to rid myself of my worst habits and form new ones that helped my family as well as myself.
Once your focus is keeping two little humans alive and raising them to be the best versions of themselves you can, every other worry just seems… unimportant.
Happiness can be measured by unexpected things – like little humans that love me, and that I love more than anything in the world.
Hang on to Your Spanx
What’s super exciting right now is that you’ve caught me in the middle of my success story!
When the pandemic of 2020 forced retail stores to close their doors for a while, the furniture store I worked for couldn’t afford my healthy salary anymore. After ten years, I got fired with zero notice.
Fortunately, by the time my unemployment funds ran out, I was earning a full-time living from running this very blog!
Some people consider my path one of failure because I’m not doing what I went to school for, but I don’t see it that way anymore. Others are antagonistic toward me because they think I should still be working 40 hours a week to earn my money (because they have to).
Well, they don’t know how hard I worked to get to this point, so I don’t let any of those people bother me!
I’ve got a newfound love for life and so many aspirations that I couldn’t have dreamed of ten years ago. Life didn’t turn out the way I planned – it turned into something so much better!
Now, my dreams are all new. I want to build this business into a huge source of passive income so I can spend more time with my children and husband; travel the world and share my fortune and experience with others; and so much more!
This blog is my way to connect with other moms like you, providing my own perspective as a mother of two while sharing useful information. I know you may have felt the same as me in your journey to motherhood.
Maybe you’re pregnant with your first baby and have no idea what’s about to happen.
Perhaps you feel enormous guilt for taking a PTO day from work just to binge-watch a grown-up show without your kids at home.
Or maybe you just have this nagging feeling you could achieve so much more if only you had someone or something to show you how.
Well, you’ve found me, and I want to help you be your best self, too!
The crazy thing is, I’ve achieved every major goal I’ve ever set my mind to.
It’s time to shake things up, and work toward something greater! This blog is my vessel to remain a work-from-home mom and live a beautiful life!
I hope you stick around for the ride.
I’m always here if you need me. Drop me a line sometime.
P.S. This blog has been such a huge inspiration and life-force-renewing project for me. If you’re curious about the exact steps I took to put this blog together, check out the book below on how to set up your own! Your blog will help you spread your message to the world. And if you don’t think you have a message to share – oh, honey, you are SO wrong. There’s a tribe out there just waiting for you to reach them.