I was going to write a post about BlogHer. I was going to write a post about what it’s like and how to cope and why, really, really, nobody has any reason to be nervous or anxious because everybody is nervous and anxious, but then I realized, I’ve already written that post, like, almost a dozen times already, because this will be my fifth BlogHer, and I’ve probably written two or more posts about BlogHer for every year that I’ve been to BlogHer, whether speaking or keynoting or packing an infant around, so. I figured that I’d just link to the last one that I wrote about how important it is that we – collectively and individually – just chill the hell out about this thing that many of us are going to do next week.

Go read it. Or don’t. Either way, know that whether you’re going or not, it’s not the be-all and end-all of our collective existence, and you’ll be fine either way, we all will be, and when it’s all done there’ll be some bickering and bitching – there always is – but all in all we’ll all feel better for having this community, and we’ll all need a nap.

And some of us will be having tutus surgically removed from our bodies, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.

This weekend, my sister ran in a tutu for Tanner. Afterwards, she wrote this:

Wow. Life is a journey, a path that has been laid before us – to help us learn, love and grow. To push ourselves and just HAVE FAITH. In life and each other. I will readily admit, sometimes my faith falters… I think it does for everybody. Some days I am brought to my knees by grief. NOT because I feel sorry for myself or wish for a different life, but simply because I look at my kids and my heart swells and breaks at the same time. And I know many many parents face this and probably much worse than I do. I have the time. I can clockwatch, as my sister says. Though it may seem torturous, and some days it is, I am blessed with knowing now that life is moments. The here and now, not yesterday and not tomorrow. We have to cherish each and every breath we take. I have been taught that and have been blessed to make EVERY moment that I can of Tanner’s life be memorable and meaningful. I have at least that time for now. (continue reading…)

It’s the kind of thing that happens in recurring nightmares: you’re standing on stage in front of a vast auditorium, a thousand expectant faces turned toward you, the lights burning your eyes, when you suddenly look down and realize that you’re naked. Nude. Starkers. Completely and totally sans pants. And although you want desperately, desperately, to flee the stage and cover yourself, you can’t, because for some reason your legs won’t move, and you’re stuck there, under the burning lights, under the gaze of the audience, terrified as shit, and you must, somehow, go on.

And then you pinch yourself and you wake up, the relief washing over you in cold sweat.

Or, if you’re me, you don’t wake up, you just look up and realize that, yes, this is really happening, and that although you are (small mercies) wearing pants, you are sobbing your heart out, on stage, in front of more than a thousand people, and that public emotional nakedness feels an awful lot like how you imagine public pantslessness to feel. Which is to say, scary, and more than a little embarrassing.

In hindsight, of course, it was a liberating and empowering experience. I feel courageous in a way that I didn’t before; I feel that I accomplished something important in having walked through the valley of fear and come out the other side, whole. It’s not unlike the feeling of accomplishment that I felt after having given birth to Jasper under such trying and terrifying circumstances: I didn’t expect to feel such fear during his birth (just as I didn’t expect, as an accomplished lecturer, to feel fear during my community keynote address), and so surviving that fear turned out to be something of a unexpected gift. I surprised myself with my own strength; I discovered that I could, as they say, feel the fear (and the parts tearing) and do it anyway. But just as with Jasper’s birth, although I was proud of myself, in doing the keynote, for getting through something that was unexpectedly frightening, I can’t say that I’d want to do it again.

Or maybe I would. I don’t know. Sharing the story that I did with the thousand-plus women in the Sheraton Ballroom was in many respects more intimate and personal than was sharing that story here – this surprised me, because although I know that more than a hundred times that number have read the story online, I had figured that speaking the story would be less intimate than writing the story. I sobbed my heart out when I wrote that story, both because it is a story that breaks my heart, but also because, in writing it, I felt as though I was whispering it to my dearest friends, inviting those friends to share my secret, my mother’s secret, and to pull closer to me, and to comfort me, and to urge me on. I did not expect when I read it aloud, in an auditorium, through a microphone, my head blown up a thousand times its size on giant flat-screen monitors, that I would feel that intimacy again. And that I would, again, cry.

And then I cried (photo courtesy Ree/The Pioneer Woman)

This, of course, is the beauty and magic of BlogHer: the feeling – almost always unexpected, for me, although you’d think that I’d learn by now – that you’ve wandered into a landscape filled almost entirely with friends and fellow-travellers (yes, even with all the sponsors, really), that although you believe that your most intimate moments in sharing your writing occur online, in the virtual space that has come to feel like a kind of home (it is, after all, where you wear your pajamas), that intimacy can be multiplied a thousand-fold, in real life, in a room where you are surrounded by people who understand, who even though they might not know you, the real you, the you that hides behind the screen, they know your stories and they love your stories (and even if they don’t know and love your stories, they know that you love storytelling, and you know that they love storytelling, and that matters) and that binds you in a way that you can’t imagine possible until you are there.

You simply can’t imagine until you are there.

Even sobbing your heart out upon the stage, even strumming your own pain with your own fingers, even killing yourself softly, publicly, with your very own song, even then, you feel the bond. Especially then. Because it’s then that you learn, or re-learn, that the community out there – that tribe of moms and foodies and fashionistas and bargainistas and techies and pundits and crafters, that tribe of women, that tribe of geeks, that tribe of storytellers – is your community, in all of its difference, because it is a community of people who understand why you are compelled to tell your stories, and how hard it can be sometimes to tell your stories, and how good the telling feels, even when it is hard. It is a community that shares its stories, that loves its stories, that honors its stories, and the tellers of those stories. Even when those tellers drop their figurative pants upon the stage and moon the audience with their souls. Especially then. So it’s my community, and I am honored to have had the opportunity to bare the ass-cheeks of my soul in its direction, and grateful to have felt the waves of love and encouragement in return.

Which is to say that, yes, maybe I would do it again. With or without pants.

*******

Because many of you have been asking, yes, there has been progress in the search for my brother. It has been complicated and emotionally painful (for both myself and my mother), and so I have had moments of wanting to give up the search. (If you plug “Lost Boy” into my Lijit search widget you’ll get all the posts that I’ve written on the subject, most of which I’ve linked in the previous sentence.) But I have not given up and will not give up and I will keep you all posted, I promise. Thank you all, so much, for your love and support.

I am so tired that my toes are limp and my hair aches. Even my left earlobe can barely support its own weight. I can, however, hug my children (who did just fine without me, thank you very much). Because the ache to hold a creature such as this is far, far stronger than the ache of tired.

So hold them I will. And that is the only thing that I am going to do today. The only thing.

Well, that, and explaining that Mommy saw a unicorn, an actual unicorn. And ate it.

I might need to get some sleep before I tackle that one.

(If you’re looking for the post that I read for BlogHer’s Community Keynote, it’s here. I’ll have more to say about that later.)

(Seriously, must sleep – and hug and eat and sleep and hug and sleep – today. There’ll be time enough for talking when the sleeping’s done.)

(Am so tired.)

My children, yesterday afternoon:

I guess they’re doing okay without me.

I am crying as I write this. Which means, basically, that post-partum hormones still surge through my body even over a year after the fact, and threaten to undo me at every turn. Also, that I am a sap.

I am a sap, and I am undone.

Soon, I will climb into a car and drive away from my children. This is a mixed thing: I so crave the break, the time to myself, but I ache at the very thought of being without my babies. My girl, I know, will be fine, and I will be fine without her, because we have done this before, and because she so loves her time with her daddy and the promise of a gift from somewhere far away. My boy, on the other hand, I don’t know. We’ve never been apart for more than twenty-four hours, and the one night that we did spend apart was painful for us both. I know that he is going to cry and reach for me as he sees me leave. I know that I am going to cry – more than I am crying right this minute – as I watch him watch me go.

As I drive away I will think about how much I will miss him – and her – and I will cry and wring my hands, but I will also think about how much I will enjoy the time away and I will thrill, a little, with excitement. And somewhere in the space between anxiety and anticipation, I hope, I will find peace.

Otherwise, this weekend is going to require a lot of liquor.

And why not? If you were publishing a story about a certain blogging conference in the New York Times, and wanted an eye-catching photo to complement that story, the image of a heart-clenchingly adorable infant draped over his mother’s back as she bogarted a microphone at one of the sessions is far more arresting than the front view of said mother bogarting said microphone, no question.*

Front page of the New York Times Style section at ten weeks of age. The heart, it bursts with pride.

*No comment – YET – on the fact that the article makes women-bloggers sound like a bunch of sappy doofuses – doofi? – in which case, arguably, pictures of said women clutching their adorable babeez just underscores the relentless media focus on estrogen and vaginas and flowers and unicorns and shit when it comes to women bloggers, instead of the fact that we’re writers and tech-geeks and business-persons, but whatever. I’m still chuffed about the picture.

Two years ago, after BlogHer ‘06, I wrote this:

“I left behind something that I think that I am going to miss… the me who was happy and fulfilled in the absence of the loves of my life. The me who could assimilate the quiet ache that is that absence, the pressing ache of those missing limbs, into another kind of energy and move, happily, despite that ache. The me who felt both quieted and stimulated alone (sans child, sans spouse) in the company of other women, other writers, other mothers who, for a moment, put the activity of motherhood or whateverhood aside and said, now, what about me? What about us?”

That experience? That was missing for me, this year. Because I did not and could not put those other parts of me aside. I did not attend BlogHer this year as the me who has a passion that extends beyond and away from her family, the writer, the friend, the woman who can compartmentalize her manifold selves and carry on, and flourish. I attended BlogHer as a mother, with babe-in-arms and lactating boobs and head fuzzy from lack of sleep and heart sore from guilt and anxiety and all that tremendous and challenging mother stuff that distracts one from the business of being anything other than a mother, full stop. And that was hard. Really hard.

And so I felt, for much of the conference, as though I was watching from the sidelines, from the other side of the curtain, from behind my locker door, my baby clutched like so many books – my vulnerability, my shield – to my chest. Which is to say that, yes, there were moments, some moments, when my experience reminded me a little bit of high school, albeit the kind of high school experience that you see in low-budget after-school specials about how having a baby at sixteen means that you’ll be left out of all the parties and your cute-girl clothes won’t fit and you will feel like an outsider and omg why did you not cross your legs like your mother told you?

But those were only moments, and they had nothing to do with anyone or anything other than me and my own issues and insecurities. It was hard for me to expose myself as a mother at BlogHer, because being a mother in real life is not the same thing as playing one on the Internet, and all of the vulnerabilities that roll onto the screen so easily don’t play so comfortably on a real life stage. No matter how exposed we are on that screen, no matter how bravely, fiercely naked we allow ourselves to be, we are still, end of day, behind the screen, sharing fragments of our whole selves, preserving whatever other parts need to be preserved as private in order to protect our self-regard. So while it was one thing for me to bare my breast and nurse my child in front of the audience attending my panel – because, of course, I knew that everyone would be glad to see it – it was quite another to attempt and fail to soothe my child in public spaces, or succumb to a panic attack in the presence of friends and strangers, or to admit to exhaustion and frustration and sadness when everyone else was trying to party. And so I kept, mostly, to the sidelines, and observed.

And what I saw was this: friendships being formed, friendships being renewed, friendships being celebrated and revelled in and enjoyed. I saw love and tenderness and warmth; I saw women cheering each other on, and men cheering the cheering. I saw all of the things that I’d seen that first year – “women who are, like me, trying to use found moments of lived fearlessness to navigate the murky waters, the frightening waters, of womanhood and motherhood and writerhood (here be monsters, here be monsters. We know this. Still we fly our sails). Among women who are willing to say, out loud, that they don’t know how to always be fearless. Among women who walk with fear, but who carry wit and intelligence and charm and strength as rods and staffs for comfort” – and more.

But I also saw insecurity and anxiety and nervousness and reserve. I saw another mom with babe-in-arms keep to the sidelines, like me. I wish that I’d done more to connect with her, beyond waggling my baby at her baby (an effort that made her baby scream, which, you know, can really make someone feel like a fuck-up), because I wanted to ask her, is this as hard for you as it is for me? I heard a woman crying in the bathroom, and another woman soothing her, and wanted to say something, but I didn’t, because I was embarrassed, having been soothed myself the night before, and still feeling awkward about it. I saw, many times, women sitting by themselves, and sometimes I approached them, and sometimes I didn’t, because I didn’t want anyone to think that I was working the room – don’t laugh, it happens – or demanding attention (oh mah gahd have you seen mah BAYBEE?!?!) or, sometimes, just because I felt stupid and awkward and who knew when the baby was going to start crying again or the front of my blouse go wet and what would I say then (oh, hai, I’m HBM, pleez to excuse the sloppy mammaries and squalling infant)?

I saw a wonderful woman, anxious and hurting, defending herself in front of a crowd of a thousand. I saw a crowd of a thousand wonder, some of them – wrongly, wrongly, so wrongly – whether it was all an act. Actually, I didn’t see this, because I was on the other side of the doors, tending to my baby, my heart, wondering what was up, what was going on, what was I missing now? only hearing the details after the fact, and watching the video, and wanting to wrap virtual arms around my hurt friend, too late to help her in the moment that mattered, because my attention was divided, and while one hurt woman stood up to another (because, yes, it all had to have come from a place of hurt, it just did, and that sucks for everybody, for real) and the conference fell into a hush I was outside the room, in the corner, ruminating on being on the outside, lost in myself.

We all feel on the outside, all of us, sometimes; even the biggest and brightest of our stars feel their distance (let’s mix metaphors and wonder whether, if you prick them, stars bleed their brilliant light and burn holes in the sky. Is this what happened?) Whether we know a hundred people in the room, or one, or none, we feel, in certain moments, lonely. Misunderstood. Lost. Alone. We’re women, we’re human. We can be surrounded by love and still feel isolated. We can project love and still feel empty. We can be friends and make friends and still yearn for friendship. We can be inside and still feel completely outside. We’re internet geeks, girly ones, some with babies, some without, most with vaginas, all with hearts. We’re complicated.

I love us for that. I love this weekend for that. I love BlogHer, and BlogHers, for that. But there is still the ache. So please, can we be gentle with each other, forgiving of each other, this week, next week, and in all the weeks and months to come?

Thank you.

Grover knows. He did the whole conference with a hand up his ass. He gets us.

(THE LOVE. I do not do this exclude. I really, truly, do not. But I can’t and won’t censor my impulse to send warm hugs to the people who really took care of me this weekend, and/or who just added a special degree of awesomeness and oh god I am going to forget somebody really important I just know it but here goes: the spectacular lady who offered the loveliest, most welcome haven from the fray, the wonderful, baby-whispery heart-breakingly sweet man who snuggled J and cuddled J and crooned him to sleep with baseball stats, the lovely, lovely guy who stretched his arm to the breaking point swinging an infant-laden car seat on multiple occasions, the gorgeous young woman who snuggled the babe until his need for boob overwhelmed my entire session, the beautiful pregnant lady who stole my son’s heart – while he was still on the tit oh god – I may now have to call him Jasperalah – and who I was unable to rescue from partum faintage because I have no life skills – and who always makes me laugh even when my head is about to burst from anxiety, THIS beautiful woman whose very presence with her even-more-beautiful daughter made me cry, and the amazing, truly amazingly big-hearted woman who rescued me from my corner and insisted that it was okay for me to cry it out and OH GOD I cannot even refer to her in the third person without tearing up, and this super-smart chick who I wish I could spend way more time with in Canadaland and the amazing women that I hadn’t met before but now will be stalking relentlessly and her and her and her and her and her, oh lord, my girls, my bosom buddies, my heart-friends, my (oh sob) total BFF comrades-in-arms, my hearts… *collapses in tears and smiles*)

Let’s just all cling to the love, kay?

Dear Internets: my name is Catherine Connors and I am a writer. I am also a mother.

Maybe it’s the other way around: mother, writer. This weekend, I’m not sure. This weekend, I am trying to be both, and more: mother, writer, friend, acquaintance, business woman, community advocate, self-promoter, thinker, drinker, writer-mother, mother-writer, woman, self. I am trying to be all things, and I am struggling.

I’ve struggled before. I struggle everyday. Everyday I wake up and immediately put tit to the mouth of a tiny human being whose survival, whose well-being, whose flourishing depends entirely upon me, and I throw my arms around a slightly larger human being whose heart is my own, and as I nurse and hug and love I gaze at my laptop and wonder when the moment will come that I will open it and record this love, this work, this love and craft it into words. And my heart strains in those moments because I know that I cannot have both immediately at once, my motherhood and my writerhood, just as I know in those moments when I share love with my husband or sisterhood with my friends or writerly solidarity with my peers (who are also, so many of them, my friends) that I am doing so as my self but not practicing my whole self – I am not being a mother in those moments, or a writer, or what-have-you – and that’s fine, that’s totally fine and that’s good because that’s life, even if it sometimes feels hard because you so often want to be or feel you need to be all your selves at once. You can’t be everything at once.

But ordinarily, the moments that I struggle with wanting to be all or some my selves at once are private ones. This weekend, they are public – they are public because they are exposed, because I am exposed, because I am wearing my heart on my sleeve, because I am carrying my heart around in a red-and-white polka dot sling and sometimes he cries and sometimes he shits and always I want, I need, to protect him, and that want, that need, that him makes me vulnerable because it puts my fears, my love, my anxiety, my hope all on full display and demands that I deal with those here, now, NOW, while I am surrounded by people, my people, my peers and role models and friends and sisters, while I am trying to be so many parts of myself all at once, and that. leaves. me. raw. It leaves me feeling exposed, it leaves me feeling vulnerable to every flutter of emotion that moves through the room – the triumphs of others, the hurts of others, the vulnerabilities of others, the love of others – because I am carrying all those things of my own, in my arms, and I am doing so in a three-day long moment that demands many other things of me – things that I want to give, want to share – and so I am tired, vulnerable.

And so the other night, I sat down by Guy Kawasaki’s swimming pool, heart in my arms, and I wept, and as the crowd – my peers, my idols, my friends – buzzed around me I tried to close in on myself and shield myself – my mother self, my weepy self, my stressed-and-scared self – from exposure so that I could keep these selves detached, keep these selves from muddying the water of my other selves – my writer-self, my friend-self, my woman-selves, the selves with hopes and ambitions that have nothing or very little to do with the little heart cradled in my arms, head damp with my tears. Those selves, my public selves, the selves through I distill and present my messier selves in my craft as a writer/blogger, those selves fell away and I was left with all the messiness – no words, no screen to hide behind – and I cried. As my heart squirmed in my arms and my soul ached in my gut, I cried.

I have cried, again, many times since then, in moments of inspiration and love (so many of these, here) and anxiety (can I cope, here? should I even be here? am I brave to be here, or am I stupid?) and fear (oh the fear). I will cry many times more. I will be the girl – the woman, the writer, the mother – in the corner, crying, yearning to be seen, and yearning to be invisible. Yearning to feel comfortable in my wholeness, in my love and hope and ambition and fear and tears and baby-shits and all.

The other night I did something that I had never done before: I Googled myself.

(No, seriously, I’d never done it, not once. Seriously. Because, you know, I’d heard you could go blind from it.)

Here’s the thing about Googling yourself: once you start, you can’t stop. Even when you go through a page of Google listings that have nothing to do you – I share my name, apparently, with numerous Irish women of the 19th century, and at least one high school sophomore in Chicago with a distinguished record in middle-distance running – it’s fascinating. And it’s all the more fascinating when you hit pages upon pages of links to references to yourself. Look – there’s me mentioned in the Globe And Mail! There’s my AlphaMom interview! There’s my first peer-reviewed academic article! There’s that cheesy essay about being Prime Minister that I wrote as an undergrad! Look, everyone: my 15 (fractions of) gigabytes of fame!

It is, in some respects, I suppose, the 21st century equivalent of rifling through a shoebox of mementos – the newspaper clippings that your mom collected and kept in a ragged file folder, the tattered certificates of achievement, that undergraduate essay that got published, somewhere, the picture of your graduating class – except that the things you find aren’t things that you’ve saved – they’re things that the Internet has saved. The virtual detritus of an unfamous but not entirely obscure life. Which makes it a little surreal. I came across that aforementioned undergraduate essay, along with a handful of professional academic articles, a lot of blog-related miscellany and an assortment of virtual newspaper clippings about awards and speeches and the various whatnots of an overfunctioning young woman trying to prove herself in a world that records bits and pieces of that life in code, and holds it out for anyone to see.

That Google search revealed, in some small and completely messed up way, an index of my life (and, of course, my blog life, which may or may not be the same thing) as it has been captured on the virtual screen. It is, for better or for worse, my biography as it appears to the virtual world. So I thought, why not use it to introduce myself? It is, after all, BlogHer week, and we should really be trying to get to know each other, better, no? And what better way to get to know a blogger than through her online profile? Herewith, then – Five Things That You Can Learn About Me Through Google:

1) Despite my protestations to the contrary, I am Tracy Flick. Rather, I was Tracy Flick, once upon a time. I am so not kidding. My career as an undergraduate was one long exercise in look how good I am! I am smart! And a good person! OMG I can totally save the world!

2) It was kind of sweet, though. I meant well. Also, I figured that if I played my cards right, I could be Prime Minister.

3) But then I decided that I hated politics, and committed myself to the pursuit of the philosophic life. In the pursuit of which, I embraced misanthropy, and publicly (academically) defended Hannibal Lector as a tragic Rousseauan figure. I’m still proud of that, as I am for having, in my first peer-reviewed book review, called out Erich Segal for writing what is possibly the worst book on comedy (v.v. the history of classical thought) ever written in the history of the world, ever.

4) Misanthropy gets old fast, though, so I turned my professional interests to love, sex and virtue in the history of political philosophy. Because, you know, love and sex are much more fun to think and write about than are grumpy, bourgeois-hating old men who may or may not indulge in a little cannibalism. Which brought me around to the field of academic research that I stuck with, which was women – and specifically motherhood – in the history of political philosophy. How did I get from misanthropic critiques of bourgeois liberalism to motherhood? Basically, this: they are, if done properly, the same thing.

5) Which brought me here, to the state of being and creating that is Her Bad Mother. Here – the domain of my Bad Motherness, Badtopia, Badmotherlandia, the Badlands – speaks for itself, I think. But if you’re new to HBM, and don’t feel like spending hours reading the archives, or if you just want a refresher on what I look and sound like (I am so much more, after all, than just words on a screen) Google offers you this HBM Live With LeahPeah On AlphaMom TV moment:

It’s two years old, but I haven’t really changed all that much. At all, really. So there you go. Just look for the blond bobbed, recovering-Tracy-Flick-with-babe-in-arms in San Francisco. That’ll be me.

(Um, hey? You should totally do this too! GoogleHer yourself! You know, for fun and edification.)