I am a designer with a past. A dark, secret, shadowy past of nested tables, inline font tags and spacer gifs. My past is littered with shamefully bloated sites built with disgracefully contorted HTML. I'd like to forget about that past. But what they say is true. The past does come back to haunt you.

Yesterday was a lousy day. I fired up the computer, all prepared to get to work on the site I've been building for over a month. I took one look at the homepage flickering on the screen, and suddenly I recoiled in horror.

A few months ago when my daughter was four years old, she stood beside my desk chair and asked, "Mommy, where's your wipes it?"

I looked up from the computer screen. "My what, sweetheart?"

"Your wipes it."

It's been almost exactly four months since I decided to "go professional" as a web designer, and I'm suddenly seized with the desire to pause a moment and take stock. In four months I've come a long way. For one thing, I no longer feel like I'm drowning. That's good. I still might only be treading water, but at least I'm not lying at the bottom of the pond.

I've been a freelance one-thing-or-another for over ten years now, and whenever someone finds out I work from home, they give me an envious look--"That must be wonderful." Well, yes and no. And not in the way they mean. It's wonderful to not have to fight traffic, clock in, justify my comings-and-goings to anyone, or have a boss hanging over my shoulder.