What is the meaning of life? … a simple question; one that seemed to close in on one with the years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.
– Virginia Woolf
(read this the first time on the beautiful blog Good Life Road)
A couple of years ago I realized that the annual, persistent cold I got in the spring was seasonal allergies. Odd, I thought: I’ve never had these before. My doctor told me that it’s actually common to develop them in midlife. Okay. So now I take Allegra for a while in the spring and all is well. Last year, I noticed that on long runs I coughed a lot towards the end. During my second half-marathon, in June, this was pronounced: I hacked and hacked all the way through the second half, never able to fully clear my throat or get a deep breath. It finally dawned on me that maybe I’ve developed exercise-induced asthma? I need to go see the doctor again to find out and, if so, what my options are.
Then this spring I started getting ugly red patches on the backs of my legs. They came and went, grew and ebbed. No big deal. Over the summer they grew, started itching, and got really pronounced. Matt noticed and said I needed to get them checked out. My legs were raw from the knee down. I saw my dermatologist in August and she took one look at me and asked, “Do you have seasonal allergies or asthma?”
Knock me over. What? Well, yes, I think I have both, and they are both new, I told her. Why?
She told me about a syndrome called atopy. For anyone who has this, or is a doctor, I apologize in advance for my butchering of the medical specifics. As far as she told me, it’s basically a group of symptoms that demonstrate acute sensitivity to the world. I am reactive to the air, to the very stuff of everyday life. Just living in the world is a stress on my system. This seems like a physical manifestation of my emotional porousness.
Why does this not surprise me at all?
Now, time for more answers … another group of questions emerged, around the logistics and reality of blogging and writing. Do I ever feel like I’m running out of ideas? Am I a quick writer or do I linger over words? When do I write? Do I write lots of posts at once? How do I find the space/time to be so connected to my thoughts and emotions?
So … Yes, yes, and yes, I often feel like I’m running out of ideas. In those times I will write about what I see out my window, or I’ll share photographs, or an old post that I love, or a quotation or poem. Often I find that just when I think I’ve got nothing to say I’ll be inspired or triggered by another blog post, or by something I read offline, or by something my kids or friends say or do. Sometimes life just comes to the rescue.
I am a quick and careless writer. This question actually made me chuckle, because almost 100% of my posts contain typos or grammatical errors and I often catch them midway through the day with horror. I do everything quickly, and sometimes a bit haphazardly. I wish I was more methodical and cautious, to be honest.
Mostly, I write in the evenings. It is pretty hard to get me out of my house during the week; my strong preference is to stay home, read, write, and go to bed early. I know! I’m so much fun it’s hard to stand it sometimes. But my kids go to bed early so I often write for an hour or two after that. Those are calm, quiet hours that I really enjoy. At other times I can squeeze in a blog post or a page of offline writing during the day, between meetings or sometimes when I get up early. I guess the answer to “when do you write” is both simply and totally unhelpful: when I can. And yes, I often write several posts on the weekend and queue them up for the next week.
There’s no question these are busy years, that most days are so full of commitments and obligations and experiences that often I go to bed feeling a weird combination of overwhelmed and drained. I wrote a piece for Talking Writing this summer about how the reality of life with small kids permeates the experience of writing for me right now, for better or for worse. I don’t have advice, necessarily, for people wondering how to balance writing with a demanding life and career. I guess my only advice is : don’t let that stop you. Sit down. Even if it’s for ten minutes. Just put some words down. They will probably take you somewhere you never imagined, and following that trail is hugely illuminating.
The question about space and time to be connected to my emotions and feelings flummoxed me a little. I don’t feel like I have a choice about that. My emotions are so insistent, I can’t imagine not dealing with them. I’m a lousy compartmentalizer and I can’t stuff things down and ignore them. So I just deal with things as they arise. This is not an ideal way to be, truthfully, because the spiritual weather changes I go through have a real impact on those around me, most of all Grace and Whit.
A couple of you were interested in the book I’m writing, on whether blogging creates momentum for it or not, and generally about its topic and status.
There’s no question in my mind that I wouldn’t have written a book if I hadn’t started blogging. So yes, absolutely yes, writing here fuels my other writing. For sure. It also interferes, of course, because it’s another place to spill my words that isn’t my manuscript. But for me, that’s worth it: I am certain my “other” writing benefits enormously from the discipline of writing here daily as well as from my now-ingrained habit of recording the smallest nuances of my daily life.
It is hard for me to even put out in public that I’m writing a book. It really is. Pathetic, but true. But I can hear Lianne in my ear urging me to put my dearest dream out there into the universe so, gulp, here it is. I have a very rough draft of a memoir about the way my unexpected pregnancy with Grace and the bleak postpartum depression that followed her birth have indelibly altered the way I approach the world. I don’t know that the book in this form will ever reach the world, but I think it’s an important and universal topic and I’m working on figuring out how to tell it meaningfully. I also have about half of a novel written about friendship and first love, and while I had put it aside for over a year, lately I’m waking up at night with those characters in my head. I think I’m supposed to turn back to it, so I plan to do that very soon.
When I decided to go back to Legoland with Grace and Whit this summer, I worried that maybe it was wrong to try to revisit and recapture one of the most glorious memories of my time as a mother. Perhaps we would all be disappointed, inevitably, and I’d regret the decision. Ultimately I couldn’t resist the clarion call of those happy moments, and decided to risk a return.
And it was just as wonderful. Different, but marvelous. The whole four days we were there I was struck by the proximity of the past, felt last year’s four days right alongside this year, keenly aware of the ways in which things are the same and the way they are different. Some combination of familiarity and maturity meant that the children felt masterful at Legoland. Remembering the routine at the hotel and navigating the park, they knew what they were doing.
Whit went on the rides, Grace seesawed wildly between adorableness and surliness, and I had a blackberry to check. This was all new. There was sheer joy in their faces on the safari ride, they careened ahead of me down the hall from the room to the 5pm wine-and-snacks lounge, I took the elevator down while they raced me on the stairs. This was all the same.
So much new, so much the same. The children change with blinding speed and yet there’s a permanence to my bond with them, some eternity that beats in its core. I found myself falling into the black hole of regret about all that has changed, mourning the younger children Grace and Whit were and the year that I’ve lost in the interim. And then, just as quickly, I shook my head and tried to reimmerse myself in the moment I was living, knowing as I did that within weeks I’d be nostalgic for it. As I walked through the park, a child’s hand in each of mine, I knew, vividly and viscerally, that immediately I’d wish I had that minute back.
I’ve sworn and promised that we’ll return to Legoland again next summer. And I know that when we do I will slide back in the slipstream between now and then. And I can’t wait.
Thank you so, so, so incredibly much for your warm and thoughtful wishes last week on my 5th blog anniversary. I can’t quite imagine it either, for the record. And the thought of five more years here seems both daunting and inevitable. I want to respond to your questions, and will do so in a couple of posts because a few constellations of themes emerged.
Several questions grouped around the topic of why I started blogging, what the journey has been like, and how I feel about sharing personal things about myself and my children here. Is there anything I regret or would change about my kind of blogging, what did I hope to gain from it, has writing here led me down unanticipated paths, when I started did I imagine I’d be writing the things I am now?
Of course it’s taken me 37 years to realize that it is not a coincidence that you’re asking me questions that have already been on my mind lately. Launa can tell you that I’ve been thinking about these very topics recently.
I started blogging because there was so much I was afraid I would forget. The first year of my life as a mother is a blur, to be honest, streaked with tears, rain, a baby’s colicky cries, late-night phone calls about heart transplants, and more tears. An ocean of tears. Eventually, once I found my balance again, I became aware of all the small things I didn’t want to lose. I remember writing Grace a letter on her 2nd birthday (a tradition I’ve continued on this blog) – that is probably the first time I felt pushed back to the page, to the keyboard, in an effort to memorialize the mundane moments that I somehow knew were the stuff of my life.
My blog came out of that impulse. Even before I was consciously aware of it, something deep inside me knew that life itself was in these little things, the light in the sky, the lyrics of a lullabye, or the funny things my children said. This was just one example of what I now recognize as a pattern in my life: something essential is known to me in a deep, inchoate way long before I could articulate it.
And, yes, absolutely, this blog has led me places I never imagined. I definitely thought of it as a personal or family scrapbook for a long time. And then, imperceptibly but irrevocably, it became something else. The five years of archives here are a record of my own awakening, my own gradual movement into a set of questions that continue to fascinate and preoccupy me. I now have a map of my wandering around my own brain. Also, importantly, blogging reminded me of my intense passion for writing, something I had frankly forgotten. Because of this blog I have started – and finished a draft of – a memoir, written half of a novel, joined a writing class with my writing idol, and allowed myself to dream of a life in which writing is a central part.
Now, the stuff that has been on my mind. Is there anything I’d change, anything I regret, do I worry about putting pictures of the kids up here? In short no, no, and yes. I wouldn’t change anything about what I share here, because of all the ways that writing this blog has enriched my life and my sense of myself. My writing is instinctive and I can’t imagine blogging about less personal things. But it is true that as my children get older I feel more concerned about sharing certain things about them. I have always tried to write about my experience, but Grace and Whit are the main characters in these stories. I feel more and more aware of certain things belonging to them now, and not to me.
I have always written frankly about the things I find difficult in mothering and about Grace and Whit’s challenges and struggles. This candor marks me in person, too: I have written about how I feel both aware of and guilty about my willingness (need?) to present the unvarnished truth of my life. I assure you, I have been judged on the playground. As Grace and Whit get older, though, I feel newly constrained about sharing certain things. There remains plenty of conflict and struggle for me on this mothering journey, and I’m wrestling with how to represent my path and experience honestly while respecting those two little people who didn’t ask to be written about. Why do I have to represent it at all? Because I figure out what I think when I write. And, much more importantly, because I benefit so tremendously – I feel encouraged, taught, and heartened – when I read similarly honest accounts from other mothers about their own paths.
As to the photos and personal details, well, yes, that’s something I fret about too. A reader emailed me several months ago saying that my willingness to put those things out here reflected my belief that the universe is a benevolent place, a generosity of spirit that she hoped would be reflected back to me. I don’t know that I had thought about it that way but on reflection I think that is part of my motivation. Also, more simply, I started writing and sharing photos when nobody was reading. I oscillate between thinking that actually anyone can find anyone on these enormous interwebz and suspecting that I ought to be a lot more guarded in what I present. I don’t have a good answer here, but I can tell you I think about it a lot.
More questions and answers soon!! Thank you again for your thoughtful and thought-provoking responses, last week and always.