I can’t write today. I’m not sure why. It’s not that I’m at a loss for words; if anything, it’s the opposite. Too many words, too many thoughts, too much to say but no will to unravel the tangle of verbs and nouns, opinions and assertions, declarations and reflections and expletives and neologisms and statements of fact and hunches of gut, etc, etc. Blogstipation, after too many head and heart filling meals of roast provocation with a side of mashed emotions and thinky sauce, and also cake.
So this is all you get: one toddler, rocking out, and some links, while I figure out if there exists, somewhere, a laxative for the emotional-intellectual tract.
That ain’t working/That’s the way you do it/You get your diapers for nothing and your sippy cups for free.
Today, Tanner goes to the doctor. This is, in itself, nothing new – Tanner sees a lot of doctors – but today, he’s seeing the doctor so that they can start fumbling toward answers to difficult questions concerning when and how and how long. How long until his food needs to blended? Until he needs to be intubated? Until he can no longer sit up on his own? Until his lungs are compromised? Until he cannot breath on his own? Until my sister can no longer look after him on her own? Until, until…
The clock ticks so much louder now. Tanner’s condition is aggressive, relentless: his muscles are breaking down quickly, and as his muscles break down, so does hope.
`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
You know that it’s going to be a long day when your four year old gets out of bed with giant wads of purple bubble gum stuck in her hair.
“How did you get gum in your hair? Did you get out of bed last night and get some gum?”
“No. The Gum Fairy put it there.”
“You know that gum isn’t for chewing at bedtime.”
“The Gum Fairy doesn’t know that. She thinks gum is for anytime.”
She went on to explain that this is a longstanding disagreement between the Gum Fairy and the Tooth Fairy, who does not approve of gum on pillows. The Easter Bunny, as might be expected, is agnostic on this issue, as it does not involve chocolate. (The Easter Bunny, we also learned during this discussion, is part kangaroo. “That’s how he can stand up on two legs and carry his basket. Regular bunnies can’t do that.”) One learns much when one asks the question: how did you get gum in your hair?
There are trolls, and then there are trolls.
There are the anonymous trolls that live under the virtual bridges of the Internet, coming out to swat and bite and snarl. And then there are the trolls of real life, the trolls that you know, the trolls that you maybe even loved, the trolls that you didn’t know were trolls until, one day, the claws extended and the fangs bared and the shredded hem of your pants told you – if the sting from the venomous spit of the troll hadn’t alerted you already – that something was amiss.
I get hate mail. Not as much as Dooce, I’m guessing, but enough. I get hateful e-mail – and comments, and Facebook messages, and tweets – about how depressing I am, about how I’m exploiting my children, about how I whine too much, about how I’m encouraging women to take anti-depressants and so contributing to the global drug problem, about how it’s terrible and selfish of me to look for my long-lost brother, about how nobody wants to hear about my Frankenvulva, about how I’m setting the feminist movement back by complaining about motherhood, about how I should just stop writing about my grief over the death of my father already, about how I only write about Tanner to get attention for myself, about how I’m an attention-whore who really should just shut up already, because, please.
I get correspondence that addresses one or another or some combination of those issues and others left unmentioned with some regularity. It’s why I sometimes close comments; it’s why I sometimes just don’t look at my e-mail: because I know that at some point I’m going to read something really hateful. Something like this:
When I got to the South By Southwest Interactive festival this past weekend, someone told me to not tell anyone that I was a mommyblogger. “Say personal blogger, or lifestyle blogger,” this person said. “Just not, you know, mommy.”
It was too late. I’d already ridden in from the airport on a short bus full of hipster boys, who had asked me what I was there for, and whether I was in film or tech (the fact that I did not sport an ironic mullet tipped them off, I suppose, to the fact that I was not there for music), and I had felt compelled to explain that I was kind of in tech, if by ‘in tech’ he meant ‘writes about frankenvulvae and Ativan-dependence online.’
“I’m what’s sometimes referred to as a mom-blogger,” I said. “Oh,” he replied. “You’re a mom? Do you know anyone who buys animated shorts? Like, say if they were kid-friendly?”