To blog is therefore to let go of your writing in a way, to hold it at arm’s length, open it to scrutiny, allow it to float in the ether for a while, and to let others, as Montaigne did, pivot you toward relative truth. A blogger will notice this almost immediately upon starting. Some e-mailers, unsurprisingly, know more about a subject than the blogger does. They will send links, stories, and facts, challenging the blogger’s view of the world, sometimes outright refuting it, but more frequently adding context and nuance and complexity to an idea. The role of a blogger is not to defend against this but to embrace it. He is similar in this way to the host of a dinner party. He can provoke discussion or take a position, even passionately, but he also must create an atmosphere in which others want to participate.
That atmosphere will inevitably be formed by the blogger’s personality. The blogosphere may, in fact, be the least veiled of any forum in which a writer dares to express himself. Even the most careful and self-aware blogger will reveal more about himself than he wants to in a few unguarded sentences and publish them before he has the sense to hit Delete. The wise panic that can paralyze a writer—the fear that he will be exposed, undone, humiliated—is not available to a blogger. You can’t have blogger’s block. You have to express yourself now, while your emotions roil, while your temper flares, while your humor lasts. You can try to hide yourself from real scrutiny, and the exposure it demands, but it’s hard. And that’s what makes blogging as a form stand out: it is rich in personality.
–”Why I Blog,” Andrew Sullivan (via Chelsea G. Summers)
“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.’”
I’ve been out of the traditional workforce for eleven-plus years now. Were I to reenter it in my previous capacity I would no doubt be fired on the very first day for saying “fuck” in front of seventh-graders.
Best to keep on working from home.
(source)
I transition from mother to lover so clumsily that unless I will myself to stand still for a moment, alone and naked (or in new sexytime attire purchased specifically for the occasion) I cannot even figure out where to put my hands. Minutes before they were packing lunches! And now they’re supposed to do what? And my mouth? Which just kissed my daughter goodnight? I’m meant to put it where? You can see the difficulty!
In this instance, however, I had not even enough time to put down my purse and keys; in fact I barely manged to rip off my glasses before he pushed me back on the stairs and slid down my throat. Worry about where to put my hands? There was no need! They dug into his ass to keep him from tumbling down the stairs, and before the time I’d normally have spent trying to get into character had passed my clit was thumping hard in time with his strokes into my mouth.
“I kind of attacked you the second you walked in the door,” he said afterward, curled behind me in the bed. “I hope that was ok,” and while I assured him that it most definitely was, I had to wonder for whom it would not be ok? Who wouldn’t like being the recipient of such extreme desire that it could not be put off long enough even for a purse to be set down or glasses to be removed?
Seriously, who wouldn’t like that?
Having sent an older sibling to Kindergarten many years ago and this child to half-day preschool last year, and considering that summer stretched through five-hundred weeks packed with activities and expenses and ohmigodsomuchwhining, I thought I would have no trouble dropping my middle child off to her first day of school. No trouble at all.
If anything I worried that the other parents would cast scandalized eyes upon the one mommy who didn’t even stop but merely slowed as she drove past the school; or at least upon the part of the mommy they could see, which would be the foot, connecting to the child’s fanny, as she was booted without warning out the minivan door.
But then summer’s final weeks dwindled down to days, then hours and minutes. The child, dolled up in an outfit selected weeks in advance, vibrated day and night with barely-suppressed glee. Superimposed on the image of her beaming in a hand-me-down fancy dress and bright-white shoes was another from six years in the past when this child’s sibling started school and I, for the first time in years, was left to my own devices for hours every single day.
For ten weeks I did everything I could think of to find a child to adopt short of setting out with a dowsing rod. So convinced was I that I’d never get to raise another small person that those ten weeks felt like eons; until finally on a frigid November morning her mother signed paper after paper, weeping, and then handed over to me a fat blond infant. If those ten weeks were decades then the past almost-six years have been minutes, and standing in front of the school seeing my little girl and that round newborn all at once yanked unexpected tears from my eyes and from my chest a sob that every other bleary-eyed parent must have heard, were they not each immersed in their own ruminations on the plastic nature of time.
Given the uncontrollable seepage from my eyes at the departure of this child, I will hold out no hope that next year, which will bring the send-off of the last little fledgling from the nest, will be any less tearful.
In an average month sickness or late nights at work kept me away perhaps three times. The other twenty-seven (or twenty-eight, or twenty-five, or twenty-six) days found me there for at least an hour and quite frequently for closer to three.
The stress slid off my shoulders six feet outside the door. By the time I’d shown my card, grabbed a towel (the towels always smelled reassuringly of heat and bleach) and punched in the code to the locker room, I had no recollection of the annoyances which had seemed so vast just moments before. Far from stopping me, the omnipresent scent of Hot Man pulled me in to the weight room, where I’d spend a blissful half-hour surrounded by specimen my friend and I affectionately dubbed “The Bigs,” focused on nothing more taxing that making a block of steel go up and then come down without a clang. This was followed by an hour of step aerobics,1 leaving me as happy and calm as a medicated clam.
Additionally, three days a week I practiced punching and kicking (and getting punched and getting kicked), a workout more grueling than anything that could be dished out in weight room or aerobics studio. If none of those options were available (and sometimes even if they were) I walked in the open air, occasionally ticking off as many as thirty miles in a single week.
That might have been excessive, no?
Out of the corner of my eye I observed my co-steppers and -lifters and -kickers and -walkers; I particularly noticed the ones who weren’t moving at my same speed. Invariably they were the ones weighted down with strollers and surrounded by a roiling cloud of children. Often I caught the hint of a suggestion of annoyance on their faces as they wrangled their offspring or sat impassive on the sidelines. I’m ashamed to say that I pitied them. However do they manage to get any time to come to the gym on their own, I wondered, then quickly thrust away the thought as the only conceivable answer was too horrifying to bear.
Eventually biology nudged me; it suggested that I could churn out my own tiny replicants and in the process not lose myself. “Those parents weren’t very good at managing their time,” I smugly thought. “Of course I’ll do better.” And when I had but one child, I did. I maintained my martial arts training and weight lifting, and when I took walks it was with the added cardiovascular challenge of a fully tricked-out stroller. But then arrived child number two, then hard on the heels of an impending divorce came child number three, and neither finances nor the clock permitted the extravagance of my past workouts.
These days I’m lucky if I can squeeze a few crunches into a schedule that’s increasingly overrun with the social, academic and athletic demands of my children. Has this taken a toll upon my formerly rock-hard waistline and super-powerful thighs? Oh hell yeah. Even worse it’s taken a toll upon my psyche as is evidenced by the fact that while registering my three children for three sessions of back-to-back swim lessons during which I was interrupted by said children no less than a number equal to the sum total of aforementioned individual classes,2 and despite having not, against all odds, forgotten how to add, I lost my motherfucking shit over the final bill.3
All that money spend on my children, who will frolic joyously in the pool while I stew and glower from the sidelines, dry of body, baleful of spirit and empty of checkbook, feeling nothing but the most shameful resentment toward the small souls who are entrusted to my care.
It is not a happy thing to admit to resenting one’s offspring, but I have to imagine that I’m not the first to feel such an emotion. Nevertheless, I recall no mention of this phenomena in my longstanding and painfully close research into what to expect from parenthood.
I’m not the first, am I?
It was hurled sotto voce, one floor and half the house away from where I flipped burgers; consequently I knew nothing of the altercation until its surly instigator appeared across the kitchen counter from me. “Do I really have to go home? She said I do.” He jerked his head over his shoulder in what I could only assume was the direction of his perpetual summertime companion, my eldest child.
Not wanting to encourage a he-said she-said at that moment I used the excuse of impending dinner to shoo him out of the house. No sooner had he slammed the door behind him than my daughter appeared bearing a sordid tale of younger siblings interfering with a game, her friend’s annoyance with their continual interruptions and his outburst, which after a moment of stunned silence prompted my child unceremoniously to oust her friend from the typically friendly confines of our house.
This is a child more likely to put down her head and ignore what upsets her than to confront it directly, but in this case she responded with a righteous anger that made me proud. “He can never come back here again,” she hotly announced. “He causes too many problems and he’s never nice to the babies.”
I agreed that he did cause lots of problems. “But you better decide how you’re going to address this next time you see him,” I cautioned, “because you’re not going to be able to avoid him forever.”
“You have to talk to him,” she said, “And you have to talk to his mom, because he was not being nice.”
As a veteran of many years in the public school system and of raising my own offspring, I try my best not to get ensnared in children’s battles, but after my daughter told me the content of her friend’s remarks I felt compelled to phone his mother. I managed to time the call to coincide with my child’s arrival at their house; after suitable small talk I asked if she was aware that even as we spoke, my daughter was confronting her son about the fact that he had tried to insult my middle child by pointing out that her daddy was not in fact her “real” daddy.
After a few moments of shocked silence she apologized for his churlishness and vowed to speak to him immediately about the realities of adoption. I asked for and received permission to add a few thoughts of my own next time he turned up at my house.
As this is perhaps the most common insult flung at any child who was adopted, I knew we’d face such a scene sooner or later.
But I hoped it would be later, and delivered by someone with fewer ties to the family.
I’ve been up to my neck in PINK! and SKULLS! this week. It’s been awesome:
The site owner’s a bit worried that no one will ever visit her in her new location, so would you be so kind as to head over to her site and wish her good luck on her new digs? Grab her feed at the same time.
You should know that MassHoleMommy gives away a lot of stuff — I mean really a lot of stuff. While you’re visiting, why not get in on her latest giveaways too?
So tightly was my day scheduled that to be ready for an 8pm date I had to pack up the sex-toys before lunch. An afternoon of screen-door-slamming kids, blog-maintenance and client phone calls flew by; after that my plan was to take my eldest to dinner and shopping for school supplies before dropping her at home with her father. “I won’t be back ’til very close to ten,” I informed him while endeavoring to ignore his look of curiosity mixed with annoyance.
Alone in the car with my daughter (bag of toys stashed beneath the seat), I thought I was through the worst of it. I drove across town in a happy dream of what I’d be doing just a few hours hence, hardly listening to the constant stream of commentary coming from the back seat. As most of it focused on the educational implements she hoped we’d soon acquire, I had plenty of brain-power to respond to her adequately and still have some left over for thoughts of a naked man — at least I did until she asked what in heaven’s name would keep me out until ten o’clock at night. “I thought you were getting all of your errands done with me,” she said.
Dear reader, I am ashamed to say that I lied. I’m going for coffee with a friend, I told her, naming a woman who has been in my daughter’s life since she was a baby. As I very frequently do go out for coffee with that friend, my answer perfectly satisfied the child, enough so that she instantly lapsed back into a monologue about the relative merits of automatic versus traditional pencils.
I lapsed into worry, and even after a full day of thought I’ve not been able to come up with a better answer. While I’ve never hidden the people I’ve slept with from my children, I’ve always explained their presence in my life in the context of friendship. When my former partner came to my house to help with some project involving hand-tools or the string-trimmer, they saw us talking and laughing but not getting frisky. Others have periodically stopped by for one reason or another, but I was never called on to explain that I was sleeping with the mommy who brought her child to my kid’s birthday party, or the man who helped me test drive the new mini-van, or the other man who popped in the door to drop off books.
Perhaps it would be different if I were dating with the goal of nuptials or even cohabitation in the future. I’m not. While one of those things might eventually happen, would I lead my child to believe that it was an imminent possibility if I more accurately identified my partners?
While I’m perfectly fine with explaining any aspect of sex from the physical to the emotional to her, my confidence falters outside the realm of the most generic terms. “Here’s how some people handle this facet of sexuality” I can discuss ’til the cows come home, but when faced with a concrete question about how I deal with sexuality much to my shame I freeze.
Surely there is some age-appropriate variation of The Mango Talk that would have been preferable to a lie? Readers, how would you have fielded my child’s question?
“In reality, and for the existentialist, there is no love apart from the deeds of love; no potentiality of love other than that which is manifested in loving; there is no genius other than that which is expressed in works of art. The genius of Proust is the totality of the works of Proust; the genius of Racine is the series of his tragedies, outside of which there is nothing. Why should we attribute to Racine the capacity to write yet another tragedy when that is precisely what he did not write? In life, a man commits himself, draws his own portrait and there is nothing but that portrait. No doubt this thought may seem comfortless to one who has not made a success of his life. On the other hand, it puts everyone in a position to understand that reality alone is reliable; that dreams, expectations and hopes serve to define a man only as deceptive dreams, abortive hopes, expectations unfulfilled; that is to say, they define him negatively, not positively. Nevertheless, when one says, ‘You are nothing else but what you live,’ it does not imply that an artist is to be judged solely by his works of art, for a thousand other things contribute no less to his definition as a man. What we mean to say is that a man is no other than a series of undertakings, that he is the sum, the organization, the set of relations that constitute these undertakings.’”
- Jean Paul Sartre, via Fuck Yeah Existentialism
