I've lately been harping about one single element of blogging that amazes me. It is, in my estimation, the simplest and most complex blogging truth: blogging is fluid.
Blogging is motion. Your blog is a full-length movie with an unwritten end, ticking frame by frame, simultaneously and with interwoven the plots of others. Blogging is a window into the present moment, and as our archives stretch into years and decades, a window into our headspace of the past opens. Of our triumphs. Of our mistakes. Of the space in between.
THAT single truth is what makes blogging a medium for growth like no other. Your growth, your change and transformation is taking place in parallel with other bloggers who are growing and changing.
Blogging is humanity exploding into the future.
Because blogs are also becoming part of our pasts.
The passage of posts is mostly silent. We don't notice that part. Tick. click. tick. click.
But look back. You'll see it. If not now, then a year or two from now. And if you don't see it, you probably won't be bothering to post a year or to from now.
I'll use myself as an example.
I wrote The Hyperlinked Mom a year ago to the day yesterday. I didn't know that when I opened it up today. I mean, I didn't know that this was the one-year anniversary of that blog's moment in time. It seems like three years ago. It seems like a dozen years ago in some ways. I'm not sure what made me go look at it again, except that I was thinking about blogging and fluidity. How that was a blog that "never went anywhere."
Maybe I was also looking for proof that I am not this day the person I was then. I am changed. Sure, our core beliefs and traits sustain. But something about me feels physically, emotionally, and spiritually different from having revealed parts of myself this past year and a half, here.
Revealing yourself. That is a big thing.
And sometimes the Revelation doesn't come until later, when you find out you weren't revealing yourself to others; you were revealing yourself to yourself.
Back to the hyperlinked mom thing.
In that short-lived blog I wrote this about the challenges and joys of raising our daughter at home her first four-and-a-half years, as we both worked out of the house. Our child-rearing-in-tandem-with-full-time-work, I now understand, zapped every ounce of patience and self-composure we thought we had then. This is what I know now.
Then, I saw it this way:
Today, I am virtually a full-time teleworker. While it's not for everyone, this lifestyle does offer women a way to merge work with home, and home with work, in an interesting--and often bizarre--way. With the advent of the Internet, physical distance and asphalt highways no longer separate work life and home life. Instead, within the networked landscape of the Internet, individuals, businesses, and customers are seamlessly connected. Technologies like Instant Messaging--which allows my clients to pop up urgent questions, and the occasional good joke, on my screen in real-time--erase distance. Here is there, and there is here, all at once. I can do research for the articles I write at night, when the house is quiet, from my couch, at the global library that is the net. For many, this infringement of corporate life into the home is unsettling. To my family, and to me, it has been a blessing.
Plain and simply, the Internet has enabled my husband and I to raise our daughter at home. Having her with us during these early years has been nothing short of amazing. These are years we will cherish--watching her grow, change, and shine. At the same time, teleworking has also kept us afloat financially and kept me engaged in a craft that I love. In a daily hyperlinked state of being, I jump between reading "I Spy," writing articles on e-business hubs, playing with our new "Bob the Builder" walkie-talkies, browsing the latest marketing theories on the Web, and teaching my daughter her numbers and letters. She even has her own blog now, which we try to update every day or two together. It's clearly not the life of choice for everyone--but it can be especially appealing to new moms as they weave their way through the challenges and options motherhood sets at their doorstep.
It sounds blissful, doesn't it?
It wasn't.
Does it sound like the me you know? Shit no.
I wasn't real with myself then. I couldn't afford to be. You can't understand. Can you?
Yes, you can.
The headspace I was in then was the only headspace I could afford to be in. We made the decision that we were not going to send Jenna to daycare, and the rest of it was pure improvisation. The last five years, essentially, just happened. Or did they? Who's driving? Who's guiding us? These are the things that only unfold when you look back.
The biggest motivator in our decision not to send Jenna to daycare was the horror my step-sister Christine went through. Because of the unending grief she has lived each day since her daughter died at four months old, died in an esteemed and highly-recommended private daycare. And while the legal term for Alexa's cause of death is "neglect," the realworld explanation of her death is that no one, and I mean no one, is a replacement for a child's parent.
Again, that word is: no one.
This is not an anti-daycare statement. Back then I would have proudly proclaimed that it was an anti-daycare statement. But not anymore. It remains, however, fact.
A parent's love for a child is the connection that rings a bell when something is amiss in another room, another part of the house, that something is wrong, that it's too quiet, too noisy, too still, not still enough, that maybe you should walk ahead or behind them, that something could be wrong while your child is supposed to be sleeping.
We don't always get it right. Being a parent in charge of your child does not guarantee success. The "I should haves" and "If only I hads" can happen anyway. The key word there, though, is "I".
In Alexa's case, while the other children at the daycare were having their Mother's Day photos taken, she was placed in another room, for safe keeping, right, sure, in her car seat, on a bed, on a water bed, and when the carseat tipped over--this is what Christine lives with--when the car seat tipped over, no one was there. No one was there to stop Alexa from suffocating to death.
no one.
The same age as I, born 11 days apart, my step sister went before me into the world of motherhood. Before I knew what it meant to be a mother, Chris suffered the most agonizing terror a parent can suffer. Chris' experience changed the course of how we would raise our daughter during her early years. If not for Chris, and Alexa, we may not have given the idea of sending Jenna to daycare a second thought.
But we did. From somewhere, somehow, from her precious presence and the agony of her absence, Alexa guided us in that decision.
Today I can tell you, this: I no longer judge a parent's decision to send their child to daycare or to raise them at home or to use some combination of things to keep themselves afloat. I know only this--what happened to Alexa steered us on the course we took. It didn't guarantee us success. It didn't guarantee us happiness. It wasn't righteous. It steered us.
Looking back on the results, the outcome of that decision, I have mixed feelings. It was not all flowers and roses. It was so hard. It did not make me the the best mother I could be. Maybe the worst. The days when I went into the office and greeted my child at the end of the day were the easiest days. I was refreshed from not having to care for her day in, day out while juggling work. To have your child at home or to go into work and create things with adults: which is easier? Work. Which is more rewarding? Home. Which is better, worse, right, wrong, here, there, smarter, sillier--that is no longer a constant in my mind.
But one constant remains for me. Christine today is someone I admire--admire beyond the words I say to her, or that I said to her then. Beyond any words I have ever said to her. I admire her for being a giving person. For growing up in the same household as I did. I admire her because she didn't lie down and die. Because she made a difference in the world of children. In the world of children in daycare. Because she did something with her grief. She didn't give in to guilt; that would have been the easiest choice.
And because she didn't quit, Chris and her husband now have two beautiful children who have benefited from having their mother home with them.
And now she has started blogging.
Who knows where she will take it. I see her entering it slowly, bouncing around a bit, finding her voice.
But wait. Let's watch.
What does all of this have to with fluidity and blogging?
I've drifted, haven't I.
No, not really.
I look back on that old hyperlinked mom blog of mine, and I think it was me not being real.
Me not saying, I'm afraid to send my child to daycare because I'm afraid something will happen to her. Me not saying, if you can't work from home and keep your kid there with you, then do what you can. Do what you have to do. Only you know if you're making the right choice for you and your child. Only you know if you're making the only choice you can, which, is not a choice at all. Which is what too many parents in America face. Especially single mothers.
That the Sessums had a choice, that George and I had careers pre-dating Jenna which allowed for flexibility--not easy flexibility, but flexibility still--was more accidental than purposeful. I didn't start writing one day because I intended to be a work-from-home mom. I started writing. Was blessed with a child. And made the best of it.
That's all. The aura of self-righteousness in the in-between was just that, an aura.
The last two weeks full of snow days, and the two weeks' Pre-K vacation before that, reminded me of what it was like to be home, to try to bill 40 hours a week, with a one-two-three-four year old tumbling off the bed, torturing the dogs, running over my DSL cord, with Jenna wanting me to close my laptop and play just as I had formed a sentence my client would like, then completely forgot said sentence, glaring at my little girl who thought she wanted a mommy who didn't work from home.
We do the best we can, and sometimes we do the worst we're capable of, and we blog it into the future.
And when we reach the future, we look back at where we were.
If we're lucky, if we're listening, if we dare to be real, we learn something. Something that changes us.
That's what I'm talking about.
