Listless

It’s been weeks and weeks since I’ve done this. So, in an effort to play catch-up while failing to write something noteworthy and substantial, you get a series of lists.

Yes, there are still half-finished drafts that are not finished. As time passes, it feels like acknowledging failure to revisit them. I’m not suggesting that this is truth, but it is the voice I hear in my head when I think about finishing them.

Things I have been doing lately instead of blogging:

1. Joining a mommies group.
2. Going to parks (see #1).
3. Catching and then recovering from a cold.
   This happens any time I travel or meet new groups of people. I have always caught a cold the second week of school each year and get sick as soon as I start a new job. Every vacation I take concludes with me getting terribly sick. Anyone who has tips for this, I’d welcome it. Hand sanitizing, Airborne, and Zicam are not working.
4. Meal planning (includes grocery shopping, cooking and storing).
5. Making baby cubes.
6. Marveling at, and struggling through, Lyra’s latest milestones (see below).
7. Cleaning my floors with this hard surface floor cleaner, because mopping has been impossible since my surgery; and I really hate looking at grime on floors.
8. Sleeping, because all of this housework and mingling with people either puts me in a place where I need pain medication (yes, still); or drains me because I’m such an introvert that an hour-long social encounter requires four hours of recovery time.

Things that Lyra has experienced since the last time I actually managed to write a Five Things list:

1. Sitting up (on Christmas Eve, of all days).
2. The joy of ripping paper off a wrapped present.
3. Separation anxiety.
4. Two colds, each lasting two days.
5. Shear terror following her first stuffy nose.
6. Nightmares that make her scream out in the middle of the night.
7. Extreme frustration while learning to crawl.
8. Crawling.
9. Extreme frustration upon realizing that crawling isn’t walking.
10. Being mistaken for a boy any time she’s not dressed in pink flowers from head to toe.
11. Falling, finger pinching, head bumping and other hazards of being mobile.
12. The joy of pulling an object off the table and watching it fall.
13. An obsessive desire to sample whatever is on Momma’s plate.
14. The agony of feeling her first two teeth emerge.
15. The power that comes with using her first two teeth for biting.
16. Pulling to standing.
17. Cruising.
18. A lowered crib.
19. A human in a character suit.
20. Styled hair.
21. Learned how to bang things (current favorite: a wood xylophone).
22. Choked on a leaf.
23. Began to clap her hands.
24. Developed an unhealthy love of french fries.
25. Fell in love with water.

Things that I have been thinking about a lot:

1. Whether BPA will result in the horrors of Children of Men coming true.
2. My first trimester bleeding episodes and their connection to my postpartum hemorrhage.
3. My weight.
4. Cutting my hair.
5. The Great Depression.
6. Garrison.
7. Tummy tucks.
8. Whether I need physical therapy.
9. The sadness of my wardrobe.
10. Portland.
11. Taking a vacation.
12. Having my breathing tube removed.
13. The collapse of my junior high school.
14. How difficult it is to be a locavore.
15. How sad it is that I miss cable as much as I do.

Last, not quite a list, but here’s a link to our Parent’s Night Out event from a few weekends, ago. Jim and Natasha gave birth to their son, Sam, the day after Lyra was born. This was their first day alone together since he was born. My parents agreed to watch both babies, while the four of us ate at a trendy restaurant, toured downtown San Diego, bowled badly, and deserted on ice cream. Good, clean fun.

Mobile

After months of struggle, my independent, baby girl is now able to move through this world on her own. Click the image to watch Lyra take her first crawling steps (and to hear my voice get all squeaky with excitement). She will eight (!) months old on Sunday.

Confiding

Confidence is a flitty nymph. She flutters in, is easily swept away. She perches on my shoulder for a moment, frequently brief, and then is caught up in the faintest of winds and blown completely from my sight. As 2007 became 2008, the fiercest gales were blowing. She was nowhere to be found.

And so it is that once again all of this–this writing, this unbearably dull droning about my aches, pains, sadness and injustices–began to feel like a fruitless and pointless exercise. Maggie Mason was right. No one cared what I had for lunch. Nor what I’d gotten for Christmas, nor what I’d coked for Thanksgiving dinner, let alone all the foibles of New Momminess or that I happen to have a hideous, keloid scar on my belly.

Life is hell. For everyone. Why do I feel the need to go on and on about my personal one?

Get over it and get off the Internet.

Confidence far out of sight, blinding gales of wind and rain shrank my visibility to zero. My story wasn’t important. Even when half of the story I told here wasn’t mine. It was Lyra’s. Her birth, how she was growing and changing. It was her face and her feet playing muse to my amateur photographer’s eye. It was me constantly pondering the impossible bond that July 9th, 2007 had made between the two of us. Wondering when or if I will find more to celebrate than mourn about that day.

I was invading her privacy. I was putting her at risk. Maybe her story wasn’t mine to tell. Maybe it only belonged to her. Maybe the fact that I had nothing else to write about besides her was a sign of how completely small my life had become. Maybe my life was uninteresting. Maybe my writing was uninteresting. Maybe I wasn’t a good enough writer to make my life interesting.

Maybe I wasn’t good enough. Maybe I wasn’t good enough. Maybe I wasn’t good enough. Maybe I wasn’t good enough. Maybe I wasn’t good enough. Maybe I wasn’t good enough. Maybe I wasn’t good enough. Maybe I wasn’t good enough. Maybe I wasn’t good enough. Maybe I wasn’t good enough. Maybe I wasn’t good enough. Maybe I wasn’t good enough. Maybe I wasn’t good enough. Maybe I wasn’t good enough.

Maybe I wasn’t good.

Maybe I wasn’t enough.

And so the tapes played in my head. I found myself starting posts I couldn’t finish and taking pictures I was too afraid or ashamed to post. (Even as a I write this, I’m feeling nervous and apprehensive. This is too naked, too narcissistic. I have stopped twice–for days–and am resisting the urge to do it, again.) I have come to terms with the latter. I will continue to take and post pictures of Lyra and I will still write about her here on my blog. I’m willing to feel okay about writing about her a lot, or rarely, depending on mood. I spend 90% of my waking hours with her and she will be the only human whose toes once found a comfortable home under my rib cage. I think I have to be okay with writing about someone who is such a big part of my life, and if that means I don’t have anything else but her to write about sometimes, I’ve decided to be okay with that.

In terms of the privacy issues I that have gripped me, I’ve decided to give us the privacy I need (for now). That simply means that I’ve upped the security on my blog to block search engines. This means that for now at least the fuzzy fantasy where the editor of some magazine is doing a Google search and winds up at my blog and falls in love with my writing, is not going to happen (not that I believed such fantasies would become reality, mind you). I comment on quite a few blogs throughout the week. If someone likes what I have to say, they may find their way here. If not, that’s okay too.

It also means that I’ll be posting most of my future photos to my .mac account, instead of Flickr. This allows me to have a less visibility on my photos (people can’t discover them on accident, they either have to be sent a link or find them by way of my blogs). This also saves me an extra step in uploading from iPhoto, though I lose some of the functionality and organization of Flickr.

As for the former–those tapes–I’m working on it. I have a convoluted, confusing relationship with the written word. I feel much like Hemingway’s main character in The Snows of Kilamanjaro, a writer in name but not in action. Actually, I don’t use the word writer to describe who I am or even my “dream career.” Not any more. I no longer feel like a writing life was my destined life, or that anything is getting in the way of that. I think writers write. Nothing more complicated than that.

I’m not a writer right now. I don’t know whether I’ll evolve into one. In the mean time, you get this. Me, spewing on the page, hoping you’ll find something interesting enough to check back for more.

Absence does not make the reader’s heart grow fonder

I haven’t meant to leave one stagnant post here for two weeks, but alas, I have.

I have nine drafts in partial stages of development, that I hope will turn into actual posts before reaching irrelevance.

In the mean time, for those who enjoy such things, if you click this link, you just might find some recent photos of Lyra. I have been having a crisis of conscience about posting pictures or focusing much of my writing on her. I think I’ve resolved my feelings about it (that is, until I change my mind) and I’ll probably drone on  too long about the subject in an upcoming post.

That is, when I manage to finish a post, hit publish and call it “Done.”

Writing About Others: Four Constructs

Hump Day Hmm: How do you handle writing about people? What are your criteria for discussing the people who affect you? Have you ever dealt with someone finding themselves in your writing and reacting (in any way)? Share with us your ethics and mores as a writer, when it comes to characterizing others.

The connection between last week’s Hmm and this one, might not seem obvious at first. Certainly, they both involve blogging, the internet, and living online; but how you view the ethics and mores of blogging about people you know has a lot to do with what construct you view your blog through.

Sound too Sociology 101? Let me take it slower.

Social Media Voyeur

This week’s Hump Day Hmm is: The ethics of social media. You can read responses from the other participants vis Julie Pippert’s Using My Words.

The other day I was listening to an episode of the Jumping Monkeys podcast (an informational and funny podcast about parenting in the digital age). The episode discussed some of the legal and privacy issues that affect parents and children; in particular a lawsuit involving the commercial use of photos from a Flickr account that I was already familiar with. While discussing the legal and ethical standards involved in this case, they had a side conversation about it not being ethical (and possibly illegal) to post pictures of say you child’s kindergarten graduation if the pictures contained the faces of other children. Realizing that he had recently committed this egregious act, one of the hosts said he was immediately removing some photos he’d recently posted of his daughter’s school play.

For a moment this seemed reasonable to me. Then I thought about the 100 other parents in the line who have access to digital cameras, online uploading sites, and surely had taken pictures of their child’s achievement that day. The show host is a geek who thinks about the wider implications of digital media, and can approach it objectively, as one application amongst a slew of others that form similar functions. To those other parents, the digital camera and the photo sharing sites are simply the tools for how those activities are done in this age.

1. Use digital camera to take pictures.
2. Use Flickr to share with aunts and uncles.
3. Contemplate no more than that.

This is precisely the way that most people view social networking tools like Twitter, Digg, and Facebook. This is particularly true if you are younger than I am (32).