Gah.

I am so bad at this blog thing. I didn’t even come close to blogging every day in June, which frankly I don’t have time to care too much about. And here I am in July stalled. I have lots I could say, but it’s not even easy to finish a sentence these days in real time and it’s not often that I have two hands free to type.

And then there’s Blogher. Every year the blog world stops while all the reports on Blogher come out and it just makes me realize what a misfit I am in the blogworld. First of all, I can’t seem to post on a regular basis. When it’s not school, it’s family. Second, I’m not ambitious enough about blogging. I’m sort of a blogger slacker. I’m not looking for a book contract. I could care less about my stats anymore, or blogging popularity. And it’s not a goal of mine to make money from this blog.

But I’m still sort of here and I’m not sure why. I want to create and blogging gives me an outlet for that. When we write we produce something that can be permanent, and generally that’s a good thing. That and the friendships, I think, keep me coming back. However, somewhere along the way, I became self-conscious. I started the blog as a place to capture my children, because I have a bad memory; I forget and I wanted not to forget. That first year that I started blogging I had all this time. Hannah was napping twice a day. Rachel had pre-school in the mornings and then went down for her afternoon nap when Hannah did. So, I had tons of time and the naps and the preschool schedule had put an end to the happy days of daily playdates and endless outings to pumpkin farms and hikes with friends. I was feeling socially isolated. I wrote my heart out and I made friends online. It was like being at an endless pajama party…or hanging out in the hallway in a college dorm late at night - sharing everything — except for the fact that I was sitting in a house with two kids. Yeah, that last part was different.

But then I started graduate school and it became harder to blog. At about the same time, I started to feel self-conscious. The blogworld seemed to be changing, or maybe I was. No matter how hard I tried to present the whole me here, I often felt a bit one-dimensional here - like the “inspirational mom,” which was boring even me. And then there was my social life. Blogging had satisfied me too much. I was getting bad at answering phone calls. It was all becoming a little weird.

So, I pulled back and focused on friends and community and school and family, but like a flake, I’m still hovering here, and it’s pathetic really.

There’s more I could so on this. I could go on and on about why I have an identity crisis as a blogger, but even if all of it was resolved (and by now I’ve concluded that it simply can’t be resolved) I have so little time to blog well.

I’ve thought about starting a passworded blog where I could post more photos and be less self-and security-conscious, but there must be something about the public aspect of blogging that makes a difference because when I think about it, it doesn’t feel the same to write and hide it all away. Putting your writing out there, makes it final, I think. Complete. It’s not just a draft anymore. It’s out there. You’ve produced something and you can move on. It’s cleansing in a way that private blogging just wouldn’t be.

If I had time, I think I’d like to be like Jo(e), who blogs daily, is fun, posts a photo daily but never posts photos of faces, is a clever and artistic writer (heck, the woman is a writing professor), and is anonymous on her blog. In fact, she makes an art out of her anonymity. But it’s hard to do what Jo(e) is doing without being Jo(e). Anyone who reads her will know exactly what I mean. I think I want to be Jo(e) when I grow up.

I could quit again, but I won’t because that’s even more pathetic than hovering. No. Actually that’s not true. I simply don’t want to quit.

And there’s you, my friends, who I can’t possibly give up. And there’s the urge that got me here in the first place. The urge to write it all down - capture something that I know I’ll forget.

So I keep sputtering and trying and hovering.

And that’s the story.

*************

We are having a very loooooooong summer. I have a few weeks coming up where the girls will be attending camp for a few hours a day, but other than that it’s the four musketeers every weekday, all day. It hasn’t been easy. When I’m nursing the baby, I sometimes feel a sense of helplessness, like when the girls are fighting or when I can’t hear them and don’t know where they are. We are limited in what we can do, because the baby can’t wear sunscreen yet or go in chlorinated water. It makes me feel stuck.

I have a handful of friends who also have three kids (all with relatively new babies) and we’ve been starting to send out emails to each other, trying to make plans to get together, and making cryptic remarks about the long days of summer while knowing exactly what the other is talking about. This week I’m going to try a long early morning hike to the beach with a friend and our six kids. If it goes well we’ll try to make it a regular thing. Care to place bets?

Despite everything, I’m not wishing the girls back to school yet. Instead I’m wishing for less fighting and more patience and more sleep. And the funny thing is that they’re not wishing for school either, like they did last summer when I had my act together. What is, just is, and it’s not bad, just hard. Maybe it’s not hard for them, just me. Funny how that works.

Last week, my husband stopped by the house at about 11:00 while doing an errand for work and found me nursing the babe in a chair downstairs in a kind of daze while the girls buzzed around me and in and out of the house. I managed to come out of my daze long enough to pick a little fight with him. He had to go back to work. I sat in the chair and suddenly realized I was really hungry — like deep down in my bones hungry. I looked at the mess around me and mentally looked through what was in the fridge. I shed a few tears. Then typed this email to my husband with one hand.

Subject: lunch

starving…no food in the house.

Within minutes he was on his way to pick up lunch and bring it to us. I’ve come to the conclusion that a Knight in Shining Armor is a person who brings food to the dazed and hungry.

Just writing this blog post, or getting through a pile of laundry, is a huge effort and is set with interruptions, like my yoga session was a few weeks ago. I get the girls to help with things like laundry by providing incentives, like letting them watch a movie while they sort laundry. Rachel now loves doing laundry.

I try to count small victories like this rather than the hours of sleep I get in the night. A small victory is that I’ve started remembering to catch the girls in acts of doing good, rather than simply the opposite. A small victory is that I’m losing my cool less than I did last summer. A small victory is finishing a project, picking up a book and reading for a while, or remembering to leave the kitchen dirty once in a while and just not care. A small victory is getting to bed early. A small victory is really not small at all.

And then there are the thrills. The thrill of sitting and playing piano with my two-and-a-half nephew yesterday while the baby slept and watching his incredible concentration and exuberance while I taught him Twinkle Twinkle “hickle” Star. The thrill of watching his parents parenting. They do it so beautifully. The thrill of watching my seven-year-old sit forward in her seat in the movie theater and gasp in wonder and excitement when Kit Kettridge gets her article published in the Cincinnati paper. The thrill of watching Hannah settle in to her role as big sister and genuinely enjoy her brother’s more frequent smiles. The incredibly charged tingle that runs through my body when I’m rocking the baby and he lightly grasps on to my hair as if to hold me closer and not let me go. It runs through me like a jolt, shocking even me.