Futility

I’ve had this site, blog, on-line journal — whatever you want to call it — for 5+ years now. It is about three weeks younger than Kate.

And some days lately it feels useless to me. Pointless. Aimless, wandering, and completely worthless.

I don’t really know what I am doing.

I’ll probably soldier on — I haz deep thoughts, and I have to get them out; I am an insecure parent, dresser, wife, and sometimes I need reassurances, or advice, or whatnot; I like the sound of my own voice (let’s face it).

But sometimes when I read stuff that floors me — like this, and if you are a parent or caretaker of any kind GO READ THIS STORY, and be amazed — I have a mini-crisis. Like of the “what the fuck am I doing with a blog” type of crisis.

This story — that story — is not about me, but I just want to talk about it a little more for awhile, about how it slammed the breath out of me, for reasons obvious and not-so-obvious. And, yeah, if you haven’t read it GO GO GO — I retweeted it last night after reading it from a re-tweet, and it’s obviously struck me, hit me where I live, because here I am incoherently blogging about it.

The obvious ways the post hits me: as a mother, as a baby lost mother, as a mother with three — no, four — children, as a mother who has said of her third (live) baby, “He’d have to be bleeding from the eyes for me to be worried” — cavalier much? — as a mother who prays for the safety of her children with almost every breath in spite of my demonstrated cavalier-ness (is that a word?).

The not-so-obvious way that post hits me: as a writer.

I’ve read it through three times now, and gotten chills each time — even though I know the outcome — and I have been that mother, even though I haven’t had that happen to one of my children *knock knock knock on wood*, I have been on the verge of being that mother, and (please excuse me, Dad) sweet Jesus Christ what writing.

I am, down to the soul of my being, a writer. Before I was a woman, before I was a wife, mother, before even probably I was a good friend, I was — I am a writer. I wrote my first poem in fourth grade, and that pretty much set my feet on the path they have been on since I was — how old are you in fourth grade? 8? 10? — yeah, a long time.

And I am having a real crisis directly related to my writing; I have been having this crisis for some time now. (It is also tangentially related to my mothering and working outside the home, but I don’t have the words right now.)

Because I don’t think I am doing what I am supposed to be doing with my writing (or as a mother), and I am not sure how to move forward and get on with doing it.

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Well, dammit. Here’s stuff I have to start telling Flora now (and Kate soon). Bring tissues.