Yesterday, I took part in a televised discussion about so-called ‘bad parenting,’ shame and confession. I wore a lot of eyeshadow.

I never wear eyeshadow, so I was really kind of embarrassed by it. Later, when I asked my husband what he’d thought of the show, he said, ‘you had some really good things to say, but you looked like you were in pain.’ ‘That was the eyeshadow,’ I said.

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No, it’s not what you think. It’s better.

Better, even, than one of Emilia’s still life art installations. She calls this one T-Rex The T-Rex With Purple Girl. It’s a reflection on the decline of feminism under post-modern capitalism.

It’s all the awesome of bringing forth new life – of a sort – with none of the nether-tearing or the crazy-making. Well, not much of it, anyway. There was still some amount of Ativan involved, and I may or may not have shouted foul things at my partner about never touching me again, but that’s pretty much just your average Tuesday around here, so.

It really is pretty awesome. And we didn’t even need sonograms or amniocenteses along the way to tell us that it would be awesome – we just, like, knew – and now here it is and we are just STOKED.

Passing out cigars over here. Come help us celebrate!

It started as a discussion about Balloon Boy and reality television and the corruptive effects of the pursuit of fame and whether children should ever be compelled to live their lives as performances, the better to line the pockets of the entertainment industry, but it became a discussion about whether writers – memoirists, bloggers, whomever – who deal in family anecdote can be said to be guilty of the very sins that we deplore in the Gosselins or the Heenes or the Duggars or whatever slimy, child-eating producer we imagine lurks in the offices of TLC. In writing about our children, some of you asked, are we guilty of the same kind of exploitation (if, in fact, we can call televising the lives of children for profit ‘exploitation,’ which I think we can), the same kind of troubling opportunism that is displayed by the Gosselins and the Heenes and the parents of Toddlers wearing Tiaras?

I’ve wrestled with this issue before. I always come down on the side of no. Which is not to say that I don’t sometimes lay awake at night, interrogating myself about whether I am always perfectly conscientious in putting the best interests of my children before my impulse to tell stories, but it is a more or less clear-sighted ‘no.’ My children figure in the stories that I tell here, but they are not, for the most part, the main characters. I’m not writing their stories; I’m writing mine. And to the extent that they appear in that story – and, obviously, they do appear regularly – they appear as (as I said the other day) narrative constructions. Emilia and Jasper are not, like the Gosselin kids or the Toddlers in Tiaras, compelled to perform upon a literal or figurative stage. They live their lives, they do their thing, and I write stories about motherhood in which they sometimes appear – characters, sketches, reflections of their real selves.

But, but… can it not be said that living under my writerly gaze imposes a kind of (to mangle the term) performativity to their daily lives? They do not perform, but do I not take their movements and moments and weave performance out of these? Can story be understood as a form of performance, in which it is not just the storyteller who performs, but the story itself and the characters therein? In which case, does my role as a storyteller not put me in a relationship with my children whereby I view them, and the things that they do and say, through a performative lens? Do they not live under (and here I jumble Foucault and Lacan and others into a postmodern psychoanalytic jumble that I may not be able to disentangle) performative gaze? And if this is true, is it any better – any less harmful – than living under the lens of television cameras? Do I exploit my children for my own creative (and, yes, to some extent, material) gain?

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I don’t know how to write here, right now.

I don’t know how to write here, because I am caught between the imperative to move forward in my life, in this life, in my life as Catherine, and the imperative – the desire – to dwell a little longer in this space where I am still my father’s daughter, where I am Cathy, where I can take all the time that I need to sort through the story, the mystery, of his life.  What that has to do with me being able to write here: nothing, and everything. This is and always has been a quote-unquote mommy-blog, of sorts. It has been about my life as a mother. But the space that I am in now – it is quite a different space. My children have been very much a part of this journey, but only a part, and I have been at a loss as to how to tell the story of mothering through this kind of grief, this grief that reduces me to childishness. I am living this experience as a mother, but I don’t know how to frame it, in writing, within the context of my motherhood, and so I don’t know how to write here.

Of course, there is no law that states that I must only tell, here, stories that fall neatly within the genre of motherhood-memoir. And I have told stories, shared reflections, that fall outside of that genre before. But this, these stories, threaten to overwhelm me, to carry me away on another narrative altogether, one that has more to do with childhood and memory and mental illness and infidelity and love and suicide and robots. It’s a narrative that I want to follow – that, I think, I need to follow – but I’m not sure that this is the place for it. I’m not sure where is the place for it. And until I figure that out, all my other stories are smothered under its weight.

Emilia starts junior kindergarten today, and, oh, how many words would I have spilled about that experience, were I not so distracted by my grief? Jasper seems to have a speech-development delay: all of my angst around that would have been, should have, laid bare here. Kyle recently took his first trip alone with the two of them and it nearly killed him: that story might have been the funniest thing that I’d ever posted here. I’m not telling those stories, because I’m stuck.

I’m stuck.

My beautiful big girl at the site of her grandfather’s memorial.

I hope you’ll stick around while I figure this out.

Oh, hey, you hear that? That is THE SOUND OF SILENCE.

It’s pretty quiet around here, and might be for another day or so. Because? I am – wait for it – moving shop! Finally making the move away from Blogger and onto to more sophisticated blogging platform pastures. Which, I know! SO AWESOME. Also, terrifying.

Anyhoo. If you’re starved for the pathos and pedantry and total lack of humor that only I can provide, you can amuse yourselves by reading my other blog. Or by checking out what we’re up to over at MamaPop. Or by puttin’ on the beaver over at Canada Moms Blog. Or by reading whatever it is that you read when you’re not reading me. Which, yeah.

You better promise that you’re coming with me on the move, got that? Otherwise, I will be sad. And we don’t need anymore of that, now do we? Right?

Good.

Because nobody likes teh sad.

Last week, I almost quit blogging. Almost.

I wasn`t going to say anything about it. If I had quit, I would have gone totally silently into that good blogless night. There wouldn`t have been a post angsting about whether or not to quit; there wouldn`t have been a post proclaiming some long goodbye. I was just not ever going to post again. Which, I know, is kind of douchey, but still.

I was not going to post again, because the imperative to post was hurting my heart and making me crazy in a week during which I felt, strongly, that I simply could not post, that it would be wrong to post, that it would be wrong, somehow, to even Twitter all the fears and anxieties that I was struggling to contain. I wanted to write, but my preferred forum for writing was closed to me, or so I felt. I ached to write, to write anything, even just 140 characters proclaiming my fear; my fingers twitched, desperate to tap messages into my phone as we circled Emilia’s bed in the hospital, as we fretted and worried and paced. I am so scared, I typed, I am so scared. And then my fingers retracted their message, backspaced, deleted, and I resumed my pacing, my worrying. What could I possibly accomplish, publishing my fear? And how hollow, how terribly, selfishly, hollow to whine vacantly into the void when others were living and sharing darker fears. Realizing darker fears, the worst fears. What would I be doing, to add my own selfish anxieties to that chorus of pain?

No pain is hollow, of course. Seeing my daughter slumped and incoherent, eyes sunken in dark sockets, skin white and hot, was terrifying and horrible and I felt my anxiety in every moment as a strangling hurt, a terrible pressure against my lungs and throat that threatened to cut off my breath. But that was only my hurt, my fear, and although I know that every parent understands how terrible that hurt and how horrible that fear, it was not the time to share it, it was not the time to reach out. It was simply not the time.

Which invites the question: is it ever the time? This is a rhetorical question, of course, because, yes, yes, there is always a time for expressing and sharing fear or anxiety or sadness or all of these together. If we never shared these experiences, we would not know that they are common, ordinary even. We would not know that pain is something that we all live through. We would not know that it is something that we share. And we would never be able to find community in and through our pain, if we didn`t express it, share it.

But doesn`t sharing the pain, sometimes, just exascerbate it? Doesn’t it become, sometimes, a sort of twisted indulgence, a way of lingering in an ache and prolonging the sensation of hurt, in the same manner as scratching compulsively at an itch, even though it causes us bleed? If I write my hurt, am I expunging it or clinging to it? And if I draw others into my circle of anxiety, does it serve to comfort all of us – by underlining how common the experience – or does it serve to discomfit all of us – by making the experience common, by forcing others to live it, vicariously? Do I want community, or do I want attention? Can these two desires even be distinguished?

My anxiety about writing through my fear last week reduced to these three concerns – that I wanted to write because I wanted to wallow in that fear, that by wallowing, publicly, in my fear I’d be forcing others to experience that fear (in a week when fear and pain were already in too great supply) and that my writing/wallowing might be construed as attention-seeking (look! look! I hurt too! come see my pain!) – and these conspired to shut me down. And so shut down I did: I unplugged my computer and disabled e-mail on my phone and resolved that the only writing that I would do would be with pen and paper and kept entirely private. And then I cried. A lot. Because blogging has, in the worst of times, been a lifeline for me, a way of working through the pain and fear of struggling with depression and with the challenges of motherhood and with the general anxieties and regrets of a life well lived and with the looming spectre of death. And so the thought of abandoning it – of being abandoned by it – was terrifying, gut-wrenching.

And so I decided to not decide. I would simply not write about my pain that week, and hope that I would somehow grow an ability write light-heartedly and humorously so that I might not be so often an agent for spreading dark and gloom across the internets. And then Monday came and Emilia seemed better and so there was something happy to say – Emilia seems better! - and so I opened my computer and said it and the universe didn`t collapse in on itself, so. Baby steps.

I still don`t know how I`ll handle writing about Tanner, whose condition is worsening, and about how I`m going to explain the fact of his inevitable death to Emilia (something that becomes ever more pressing with every question she asks about his disabilities), and about lost siblings and hurt parents and depression and darkness and faith and all those terrible, difficult things that seem to have become my stock in writing trade. I just don`t know. I do know that I will write about them, sooner rather than later, just as I know that I will, someday – later rather than sooner – stop writing this blog. But I`m not going to worry about those things now.

For now, I`m just going to keep writing, and see what happens.

You can tell me, honestly – is there such a thing as oversharing hurt? Do I do it? Do I need – do we all need – to bring less angst and more happy? DOES THE INTERNET NEED MORE UNICORNS? I think maybe.

I have typed six paragraphs this afternoon. I have deleted them all. I have deleted them all because they all said the same thing, and the thing that they said was boring and stupid and self-obsessed and whiny and I couldn’t decide whether or not I was willing to indulge in any more self-obsessed whining in this space and so I kept retyping the same blah-blah-blah-tired-malaise-blah crap onto the screen and then erasing that same blah-blah-blah-tired-malaise-blah crap because, really, who wants to read about that? Who wants to write about that?

Bah.

So I decided to spare you my melancholy. Instead, I’ll just direct you to some better reading, and go take a B-complex multivitamin:

1) When grandmothers get mad: my mother, frustrated and angry with the New York Times, lets loose on her own blog. (Yeah, you heard me. She has her own blog now. She needs encouragement, so please visit.)

2) You think you’re stressed out? Marital discord and sexual abuse and frustrations about babies having babies are being discussed over at the Basement. (Remember the rules over there, people: comment nicely. You’re free to disagree with opinions, and tough-love is welcome, but it all needs to be dealt nicely. Civilly. Respectfully.)

3) What do Jim Carrey, Pam Anderson and I have in common, other than a troubling propensity for oversharing? We’re all Canadian. So are all these bloggers. Check out our new project (it’s still, like, totally in beta, but you should still visit, and cheer us on!)

4) Or, just shut your computer and take a nap. That’s what all the cool kids are doing.

I don’t understand how this works, but for some reason, getting away by myself for one night this past weekend seems to have caused me to become even more tired than I am usually. Of course, the fact that getting away for that one night involved flying to New York and attending an event that was by some turns thought-provoking and by others head-exploding (more on that at some later date, when head-combustion is less of a threat to the structural integrity of my psyche) and, in the process, suffering near-intolerable nursing-boob-related pain (relieved only under circumstances that, again, must wait until I am considerably less tired to be explained and discussed) goes some distance to explaining why I am so tired. It does not, however, explain why I feel so emotionally fatigued, why I feel so utterly tapped-out, so completely drained of any will or energy to write/create/stand upright.

Spring is pressing upon my window, and I feel in my bones that the coming season will bring good things (a baby who sleeps through the night in his crib, who takes an occasional bottle – both causes were advanced by my night away – renewed energy for me, renewed spirit, sunshine) but at the moment I just feel limp. Lifeless. Maybe this is just late-arriving winter dormancy; maybe it is just March coming in like a depressed lion. I don’t know.

Whatever it is, it requires that I sleep. And eat, maybe, and try to not worry, for the moment, about finding ways to express things that have hurt my heart or my brain. That, and watch the entire first season of Gossip Girl over the course of an afternoon while eating chocolate and popcorn. I need a day, or two.

And a little mental space to enjoy me my sunshine.

Here’s the thing about maintaining a personal blog: one sometimes forgets that one is not simply maintaining a diary – albeit a carefully thought-out diary, one that is edited for style and for grammar – but publishing, virtually, a sort of memoir or collection of essays or some combination of these. One forgets, sometimes, that one has made, is making, one’s story public.

I forget this all the time.

The primary danger, here, is not that one might unintentionally reveal something that one might later regret. We most of us hesitate with our cursors hovering over the Publish Post button every time that we write, mentally reviewing what we’ve said and how we’ve said it and worrying over how it might be received. The Publish Post button reminds us, in the crucial moment, that we are in fact publishing, making public, our stories, our rants, our confessions. What the Publish Post button does not remind us, however, is that with every post that we publish we are constructing and furthering a narrative that is followed by tens or dozens of readers, tens or dozens of readers who might well want to know what became of that problem, was that issue resolved, what happens next? They follow a narrative, and our blogging platforms don’t provide tools for reminding us that we’re weaving such narratives as we write. And because we are not reminded, we – I – sometimes forget.

I was reminded – uncomfortably – of this the other day when I wrote a confused, rambling post that was a variation on another post that I’d written a few months ago. I knew that I had already written on the topic – whether or not I wanted to keep open the possibility of having a third child – and was just trying to sort my feelings out further. It was a post that I wrote for myself, not one that was intended to advance my story, such as that story is. And that pissed at least one reader off, a little: she protested that I was just retreading old ground and that it was frustrating and why didn’t I make more of an effort to let readers know what I was doing to prevent what seemed to be my inevitable slide into whiny insanity – for example, what had I done about the sleep issues? Had I taken any readerly advice? – because, seriously, if I kept this up – and certainly if I made the terrible mistake of committing mental suicide by further childbearing – she, for one, was not going to be able to read me anymore. (She later apologized for articulating herself so harshly, and made clear that she was just frustrated because she is a fan of the blog, and I’m totally comfortable with that, so please don’t smack her in comments.) Which: OUCH.

The comment struck a nerve, because a) I’m sensitive about the possibility that this blog can be, you know, angst-ridden at times, and believe me, my angst bores even me, and b) oh, gawd, I like totally can’t maintain the thread on my own stories, can I? But there’re reasons why I don’t always (read: almost never) maintain a narrative thread: because sometimes doing a follow-up on how nothing has changed and how I’m still angsting out over the same old miscellaneous bullshit seems, I don’t know, tiresome, and because – more often than not – I forget. Some other issue comes up – the girl pours canola oil on the living room sofa, or I become obsessed yet again with the finality of vasectomies – and whatever thread I had begun to weave about sleeplessness or feeding baby or finding long lost siblings gets lost.

Which is fine, in a way: this is my story, and if it’s disjointed, so what? But still: I like a coherent narrative thread, and so far as coherence is possible in personal narratives, why not pursue it? I can’t promise that I’ll follow up on every little issue, but I can promise to make an effort to not just abandon cliffhangers (I laugh even as I write this. Who among you was waiting with bated breath to see if Her Bad Mother would ever sleep again, dun dun dun DUN?!?!?) So, to that end: the first of a series of semi-occasional, whenever-the-hell-I-feel-like-it, will-probably-forget-to-do-this-ever-again updates on stories that you probably don’t care about but this blog is a narrative, dammit, and so the story must go on:

1) Did Her Bad Mother ever sleep again? No, she did not, and probably will not again, ever. She has tried most of the suggestions offered and none, so far have worked. She would just give up and look into becoming a vampire, were it not for the fact that she doesn’t want to eat her baby (I don’t care what Stephenie Meyer implied in Breaking Dawn about mother-love overcoming the temptation to sink one’s teeth into buttery baby butt cheeks; if I were a vampire I would totally eat my baby because, my god, the deliciousness), so she’ll just persist in this lovely and only slightly inconvenient sleep-deprived fugue state.

2) Did Her Bad Baby ever take to solid foods? Yes! He did! He does! But only if they’re, you know, solid. As in, able to withstand the clutch of a chunky little fist. Which is to say, hunks of bread or cereal biscuits or meatballs or whole baby carrots or, for some reason, pickles. Anything mushy, anything on a spoon, anything in a bottle (sigh) is rejected with a swat of a chubby hand.

3) Did Her Bad Mother ever find her long lost brother? Has she made any progress? Not so much. Believe me, you’ll hear about it when – WHEN – anything happens.

4) Whatever happened to the Phallic Lovey? He (Christian name: Toadstool) was tossed aside by the girl – who declared herself to be ‘too big for Toady now’ – a few weeks ago. It was like a sad Toy Story 2 sub-plot, really, and Her Bad Mother got a little weepy. Her Bad Husband, however, rejoiced. And then this happened:

And so it goes.

Any other questions on narrative threads that I may have dropped, recently or, like, eons ago? Fire away in the comments, and I’ll follow up them, someday. And tell me, what are the narrative threads that you’ve dropped? I’m not the only one out here who can’t tell a story, am I?

Also, oh, hai: yesterday was Delurking Day, and I missed it. Feel free to make up for that today.

It takes the baby a minute to get the joke, but when he does, he falls out of his seat laughing. I’m that way about fruit jokes, too.

(Sunday Morning Music Show: Music Editions are on indefinite hold until the girl retires the burlesque, no-pants version of her show, which is entirely NSFW. Nude comedy, on the other hand, can be shot waist up, so.)