So, this happened.
TIME named this blog to its list of the 25 best blogs of 2012. Which, yes, I am totally bragging about, because I can. And because blogging for me has, this year, been a little bit harder than it has in previous years, and this feels all the sweeter for coming on the heels of a difficult year. In brighter moments this year, I’d have called blogging a ‘labor of love;’ in others, I’d have just called it labor. It’s hard maintaining a blog when you’re so squeezed for time that you miss things like, say, your kids’ childhood.
But still. I do it. I do it because when I don’t do it, I miss it. I do it because, although I could say all sorts of high and mighty and noble things about the radical cultural meaning of mom blogs and the revolutionary potential of mom-centred storytelling and motherhood is a feminist act blah blah blah, it all comes down to this: narrating the story of my motherhood has become so core to the experience of my motherhood that I could no sooner not do it than I could not care for my children. And I say that as someone who has locked herself in the bathroom – door shut against screaming children – just to get a post out. Go ahead, judge me.
I do it, in part, though, because I love my children — and because I am fascinated by my children and by the whole amazing and absurd experience of mothering my children and because I can’t imagine not documenting and interrogating those things. I do it, too, because I love my experience of motherhood and because I am fascinated by that (whole amazing and absurd) experience and because I can’t imagine not documenting and interrogating that. Mostly, though, I do it because it’s sort of become like stretching: something that I don’t need to do, exactly, but something that I want to do, something that I get the uncontrollable urge to do. I can’t explain why or when or how the urge to blog will come (and I can‘t always indulge that urge — slow blogging is the new black, you guys!) just that it does. Always, it does.
Anyway. This was nice news. There’s really nothing much deeper about it than that.
And sometimes that’s more than enough.