Today I’m chatting with Elizabeth Cooper, a mother, artist and crafter from Ottawa, Canada.
She runs Eternally Inspired Mama, a scrapbooking website and YouTube channel devoted to inspiring busy moms to tell their family stories on pretty paper. She provides education, inspiration, and motivation to help women capture the fleeing moments that make up their amazing lives.
Through videos, blog posts, and her upcoming online courses, Elizabeth is dedicated to helping moms from all walks of life tell their families’ unique stories using photos, words, and crafting supplies.
Enjoy our ramble through Beauty and the Beast and exploring Elizabeth’s relationship with her body and creativity.
Things we chatted about in this episode:
- the fairytale Beauty and the Beast
- the romanticism of it – the fantasy
- on writing for Harlequin as a romance author
- on being introduced to romance books by a gruff bachelor
- on making the ultimate sacrifice for someone else
- on transformation, from prince to beast to prince again
- on the transformative power of someone elses’ presence
- social media and selfies and the person behind the appearance we project to the world
- how scrapbooking filters our experiences, how we shy away from our difficult stories, and how Belle can teach us to be as we are and not care how society at large reacts to us
- relationship with creativity
- on being an artist at heart
- literature, painting, charcoal sketching, watercolours, scrapbooking – loves it all.
- scrapbooking with purpose – about leaving behind a legacy, the act of memory keeping
- on scrapbooking as a gratitude journal
- having struggled with depression and anxiety – scrapbooking takes her entirely into the present moment
- on being an immigrant from Romania to NYC at the age of 10, discovering storywriting
- how journaling with photography got her through post partum depression, which turned into scrapbooking
- relationship with body – it’s complicated
- on living in sweats and a tshirt for two years after giving birth
- being stuck in an in-between place as her body changed
- on self criticism and pining away for the body she had, and learning how to accept what her body is now
- realizing ‘my body is not the problem, the clothes in my closet are the problem’
- body honouring
- struggling with post partum depression
- having a traumatic birth experience
- on how identity changes after having a baby, and Janelle’s experience of having a child in her early 20s, and Elizabeth’s experience of having a child in her 30s
- on having a baby after 15 years of marriage and how it changes the relationship
- how having a baby changed relationship to career
- on really liking her body now
- on loving having thighs that touch in the middle, feeling so feminine because of this
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