Time (and) flies

It cannot possibly be mid-September already. Before yesterday, the last time I posted to this blog was in August. Of 2007. I don’t understand how that happened. I think it’s possible I still owe thank-you notes for some presents from Christmas ’06.

I had to take my blogroll down because half the links were outdated. I hadn’t noticed before because I do all my blog-reading on Google Reader now. Boy, people sure did move their blogs around a lot this year. Sometimes I wonder if one of the reasons so many stay-at-home moms have blogs now is because of the easy makeoverability. Painting my bedroom is way too overwhelming a project to contemplate. All those books to move, and I’d have to face the herd of dust buffalo under the bed and the dead fly in the corner of the windowsill. I have been avoiding that fly for three months, sort of hoping in the back of my mind that he’ll just, I don’t know, decompose into oblivion or something.

I guess he’ll be there until I delete him. Just like this blog.

What if they mostly remember the back of my head?

Sometimes I wonder what motherhood would have been like without the internet. I fell into both new worlds at the exact same time; we got our first modem the week I quit my job in anticipation of Polly’s birth. I became a stay-at-home mom and an AOL addict simultaneously. I learned to nurse my newborn sitting in front of the computer. I shared every gurgle and coo with the new friends I’d made on the pregnancy boards. Later we bailed from AOL and formed our own yahoogroup, and we’ve been in almost daily contact ever since.

I still have yet to meet some of them in person, but those women know more about my daily ups and downs during my first decade of motherhood than my own mother does.

Now it’s happening with blogs, too, only in a weirder, stalkerish way. I read your blogs, you other mothers, and I get all caught up in the milestones of children I will probably never see in real life. I worry about when Annika will get her new liver, and I go gooey over the antics of the babies, and sometimes—I freely admit this—I tell real-life friends a hilarious story about “my friend’s kid,” “friend” being shorthand for “person whose blog I read but don’t really know from Eve, but I’m sure we would adore each other if we met in person, or maybe not because you never can tell.” You could really bog down a humorous anecdote with an intro like that, so it’s easier just to say “friend.”

But I digressed from my original thought, which had to do with the way internet discourse has shaped me as a mother. Sometimes I catch myself rushing through a fabulous moment with my children because I am so eager to WRITE about it and capture its fabulousness in print before I forget it. It’s an extension of the way taking video of Christmas morning can spoil the sponteneity and naturalness of Christmas morning. Am I so preoccupied with chronicling my adventures with my children that I shortchange the adventure itself?

In some ways I do think e-lists and blogging make me a better mother. I do notice the miracle of the small moment because of this long-term habit of sharing such moments with my online pals. And some days I think I behave better because I write the truth, even when it hurts to do so, and I want to have something good to write, so I try harder to be fun and connected.

But it can be a kind of vicious circle. In striving to be fully present for my children, I work at bringing magic to the mundane, I really do. And then when it works, and the magic is there, I want to write about it, capture it, get it down so I won’t forget how magical these years are. I love them so much, these small people surrounding me. I want to fill their days with joy, and I mean that in the rawest, non-Hallmarky sense. Joy. A major requirement of a joyful childhood is, I firmly believe, that the people with whom the children spend the majority of their time are themselves joyful. And for these kids, that’s me. They want me, they want me to delight in their company.

I do, I really do! So much so that I can’t wait to sneak away from them and write about how much I love being with them.

Motherhood is a study in paradoxes.

Would I be a better mother if I were just living with my kids instead of writing about them?

Would you believe I just told the six-year-old, “Hang on, honey, I just need to finish this sentence”?

Every party has a wallflower, and I’m it

So there’s this party going on, and I’m slinking around the corners, snatching appetizers off the trays as the waiters zip past. Love those bacon-wrapped shrimp. And the Swedish meatballs, why are those only party food? Why am I not serving those for dinner instead of the fish scales?

Usually at parties I am one of those people who hovers invisibly at the fringes, eavesdropping on other people’s conversations. But then if there’s a game of Pictionary I will awe the masses with my rapidly executed yet intelligible scribbles and my uncanny guessing intuitiveness. Oh yes, if you’re planning a game night you should invite me because I am your ace in the hole. But you have to pressure me into it, see, because I will never never volunteer. It’s not so much that I am shy as that I am holding a massive ego in check. If I start putting myself forward, I might never stop until I wind up on American Idol or something, which would be disastrous because I can’t sing for crowds, and they don’t let you play Pictionary on that show.

A hazelnut shell would probably suffice

So obviously I am just getting started here, and it must be equally obvious that I don’t have time to post every day. I wish I did. By the time all the kids are in bed and the kitchen is de-crumbed so the ants won’t completely take over (though they continue to press their advantage) and the laundry is semi-folded and stuffed into drawers, I’m—just—so—tired.

So I go to bed and think about what I would have posted if I had the brain power to post.

In some of the post-BlogHer accounts, I read that Arianna Huffington talked about sleep deprivation in her keynote and how that’s something she’s concerned about. It’s the first time I’ve heard anyone single out sleep deprivation as an Issue with a capital I—you’re always hearing about how no one gets their eight hours, tsk tsk, but it sounds like Arianna is elevating the topic to let’s-take-this-seriously status, like Sleep Deprivation should be rubbing elbows with Global Warming or Homelessness.

I don’t know what I think about this. On the one hand, I feel sort of awed and giddy that someone out there, a high-profile someone, no less, recognizes the enormity of what has to be the single biggest problem in my life.

On the other hand, it seems such a personal, individual problem. No national movement or awareness can alter my own personal circumstances, which are pretty simple, really. Lots of kids (by choice! I love them! I want them! Big families are fabulous!), husband who travels. Doesn’t take a Brazil nut shell for my nutshell version. I have many children; therefore I get less sleep than I need. I’m not a martyr. It’s just life.

I haven’t yet read what Arianna has to say on the subject. I’m wondering, speculating. Would she advise me to scale back on activities and time commitments? Check. Since I knew I was having a baby in April, I didn’t sign the kids up for ANYTHING last spring, and then summer hit and Mr. David Copperfield had to depart and so I didn’t sign them up for anything again. We go to the pool, which is close to home and free. We go to the park once in a while. Otherwise we’ve been pretty mellow, just hanging out. No mad rush of gymnastics and art class pulling us out the door in a hurry. Except for Sunday Mass, there’s no place we HAVE to be.

What else, Arianna? You might say I should choose sleep over late-night time sucks like, just for instance, the blogs on which I read about your BlogHer keynote in the first place. Or the Huffington Post, for that matter, which has nibbled away at a hefty portion of my time over the past two years. Here’s where that gets tricky.

1) I read blogs to stay connected, to remind myself I’m not in this alone, to keep my sense of humor in good working order and my sense of perspective firmly in place.

2) I read news sites like the HuffPo to keep myself aware of what’s going on outside my little nutshell. This is very important. Otherwise I become isolated and insulated and liable to make mountains out of my molehills. Yes, it’s hard to take care of five little kids by yourself. But, you know: running water, central air, vaccines, a washer and dryer, a Giant supermarket, a BBT debit card. No bombs, no waterborne parasites, no war or drought that touches me beyond a delicate groping of the pocketbook. I’m guessing there are a lot of women around the world who’d be thrilled to have my problems. If I don’t READ about their problems, I might stop seeing mine for what they are: the kind of problems that really count as blessings.

So I stay up a little too late reading—reading what Arianna has to say, what you have to say (so many of you, who don’t know me, but I know YOU, I wince or rejoice over your daily adventures)—and then instead of adding my bit, I acknowledge that Arianna has a point, and I turn away from the computer and go to bed to write these things in my head.

Except tonight, I didn’t.

An auspicious beginning

I just got my first hit from a Google search. And I am a proud, proud woman, because it turns out my little blog is the FOURTH hit for “diapers made from fish scales.” Fourth! And here I would have thought there were hundreds, nay, thousands of esteemed bloggers who had already covered the ancient Phoenician practice of fashioning babies’ nappies from the surprisingly flexible scales of very large fish. Flexible, I say, yet somewhat disappointing in the absorbency department. But if you are in the market for a waterproof diaper, fish scales are the way to go.

Of course what’s funny here is that I hadn’t even WRITTEN my post yet about running out of diapers and desperately seeking an emergency replacement (ME: “Polly! Quick! Grab the World Book!” POLLY: “OK, Mommy…let’s see, D for diapers…” ME: “What are you doing??? Looking it up? No, I meant start tearing out pages, this baby is peeing on the sofa!”) and thus discovering the aforementioned Ancient Phoenician Secret. Which worked out great, because I had all those leftover fish scales from the dinner they wouldn’t eat.

And I bet after this post I’ll be FIRST in the Google queue for diapers made from fish scales. I am upwardly mobile, and it is thrilling.

So I just sort of began in the middle

But there’s no way to back up to the beginning; we’re in the middle of our story here. And I felt silly trying to write introductory remarks, like I was commencing a David Copperfieldesque narrative. “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own blog, or whether that station will be held by someone in the comments thread, these posts must show.” So I skipped ahead to the part where the plot has already thickened to the consistency of pudding, and David has a bunch of charming but picky children who (charmingly) turn up their adorable noses at the nice kippers their mother made on her George Foreman grill, and David isn’t actually home for months at a time because of His Job which is Far Away Right Now But Fortunately Provides for a DSL Connection so his wife can chronicle her adventures in serving grilled kippers to the tousle-headed Copperfield moppets.

Or something like that.