Fits and Starts

I guess I've been in a "fit" phase which has nothing to do with "fitness" and everything to do with "snit" and am slowly falling back into a "start" but if I put one more thing in quotations this will be the quickest relapse into not writing in history.

And with that jumble of a run on sentence I welcome myself back to the wonderful world of blogging and hope that someone out there remembers that I once wrote on a regular basis and was occasionally funny, sometimes thoughtful and always loosey goosey with the grammar.

The heart of the matter is that I became bored with writing and just about the time Chevrolet sent me to Memphis, I burned out.

Lame.

The struggle of "mommy-blogging" was the transition. My kids weren't so little anymore that their life was free fodder for my blather and I've always been fairly private about my marriage and quite frankly, there is only so much the Internet wants to read about my dogs...

The dilemma of "what to write" coincided so neatly with my foray into Facebook that it was an almost seamless phasing out of blogging (something which had occupied a great deal of my time) right into a world of status updates... I was able to get feedback I loved from a line or two... FB was the methadone to my blogging habit.

And now it's been years. Seriously. Years since I wrote with any regularity and suddenly I miss it.

Blogging for me began when Hugh and I were considering a second adoption from China and my first followers were all fellow adoptive parents. Through them I branched out into the phenomena of mommy bloggers and found myself truly invested in the lives of women that while I had never met, I considered friends.

It was very much a community... we all sort of mucked in together.

Then the review requests and benefits started to roll in and I found myself on trips and red carpets and with free cars to drive all because I had an audience that corporate America wanted to reach - to be honest with you I found it overwhelming. The more blogging became a job and the less it became a journal of my family's life, the more I found myself not wanting to participate.

So I stopped. I didn't feel like opportunity knocking - it felt like what I never wanted: a full time job.

But now I am 41 (holy shit) and I really don't see myself on the Internet. I am well educated and funny (as far as I know) and I have teenagers and I don't work but with the exception of a few writers, I don't see myself or my life represented. There are design blogs and cooking blogs and beauty blogs, but where are the women in the throes of reinvention?

Those of us who haven't worked and now suddenly have time on our hands... with kids who are about to date no less! My days are now my own. The kids, all 3 of them, are on basically the same school schedule which means from 8 - 3, I can get my freak on.

Confession: I don't actually know what that means.

But if I did, I could. Instead I find myself overwhelmed by the very real possibility that I don't want to really do anything... that I don't have a secret desire to return to school for a Ph.D and become a traveling professor of post WWII modern art (which was my original plan and if you had asked me a few years ago what I was going to do with my time when the kids were in school, that would have been my answer) but now I realize, in all honesty, it just doesn't interest me in the same way... I love it, but not enough to devote my new precious time to it.

This is a very very strange time.

And I know I am not alone. There have to be many of you out there in my position - oddly enviable in it's possibilities and totally terrifying.

So I thought I would write about it.

It's a start.