I needed some way to process the difficulty I was having and someone to talk to, so I started talking to *sweeping arm gesture* and found that no matter how enraging or humiliating or desperately lonely my day may have been, if I summarized it with a couple of pictures and jokes, I would feel better about it. And I could move forward.
Then I added another kid, and she had curly hair and smiled a lot. She looked like this:
And I still had a lot of hard days, but I got better at what I was doing and I met a lot of people though blogging and it became less of a way to survive and more of a way to just check in. I've posted at least twice a week for eight years, on holidays, on vacations, on days I was attending a funeral. I made donuts that looked like poop. I attempted to recreate the activities on Martha Stewart's calendar. I killed two (2) lobsters.
Now the girls look like this:
And the enigmatic infant is an open book of an almost-nine-year-old who talks a lot. A lot. And the curly-headed one can orchestrate impressive art projects and read entire books by herself. And I have a small business and as much adult interaction as I can handle, sometimes slightly more.
And the energy that I used to spend successfully alchemizing personal depression and anxiety into mildly humorous blog fodder no longer works, because it is a national depression and anxiety that I'm trying to digest and reform, and I can't. So I wake up on blog mornings with a consistent feeling of dread, because I know that I will have to check and see which level of dystopia we are functioning at that day and adjust my output accordingly, and no matter where I end up on the earnestness scale, it all just feels like whimpering into the void.
So I think it's time for this blog to go on hiatus for a bit while I figure out how to direct my energy in a way that feels more useful. Or at the very least conserve some of it. I will probably come back soon, with a less compulsive posting schedule. Or later. Or not.
In the meantime, know that I am here, making three-year-old Anna's expression of perpetual distress and exhaustion.
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| BIG MOOD |
