Just about a year ago i set up a more private blog just to use for rants that didn’t seem wholy appropriate to a blog on an HE ring; i didn’t use it for ages and ages, then it came into its own when we were debating moving, so i could rant about house buying to a few friends who i knew better than others without plastering our personal financial life all over a very public place. Shortly after that, we went through what was undoubtedly the most horrific crisis of our life and it was definitely a good place for me to brain dump, though i mostly did that to myself because no one needs to read the ins and out of absolutely everything, no matter how much they might be a good friend.
But i’ve decided i don’t really like doing things that way; for one thing it rather makes a value judgement on who is a “good” friend and who is a casual friend and those things change quite a bit, for another you can’t really say what will remain private anyway and for another, it turns everything into a “who am i writing for” decision. Actually, i don’t blog for other people, i blog for me and so making those sorts of decisions has kind of devalued the experience a bit and made me feel like i’m trying to “speak” or communicate whereas actually, i’m just finding 20 minutes in a day to record my life in a way that is and/or will be valuable and enjoyable and sometimes painful to look back on. I’ve never been more aware than in the last few months that what you think and how you act changes with passing time remarkably quickly and it is good to be able to look back on what i thought and wrote and see where i was coming from. That is true of many things; choosing not to move away from here, choosing to carry on HE, choosing to pick our way through events beyond our control in the best way we could.
But actually 2 blogs hasn’t really carried on working for me; i’ve ended up feeling rather fractured by it, like i’ve got a public face and a private face and i don’t really like that. For one reason alone, i’ve ranted about things which happen to be important to me, like the births of my children, on this blog and received thoughtful and helpful replies from people i don’t even know. It may be a self absorbed habit to want to think about and write about the things that matter to me, but hey, we only have one body and one brain and one life to live and given i devote about 23 hours and 40 minutes a day to my children and my family life and the plastic beading habits of the multitudes, if i want to be self absorbed for 20 minutes a day, i will be. This is my blog space afterall, no one who doesn’t want to has to read it. Inevitably there will be things that it simply isn’t safe or appropriate to blog about publically, like which house you are buying, whether you are going to upsticks as a family or massive life choices, so there has to be an element of privacy, never more so than now, when my children can and do read it, but apart from that, i’d rather go back to spilling my guts all in one place really. People can take it or leave it. I don’t care much. (I love happy pills, i don’t care much about anything 😆 )
So while we’ve been away, i’ve been pondering how i’ll carry on. I could password my blog so that people who seem to feel the need to be spiteful about me can’t read it, but that might or might not work, given that a password is just a password and only requires to be given away, or i could make it user based, but then i’m back to making value judgements on who reads things and what good is that? I’ve found a friend recently in the most unlikely of circumstances, i ought to be everything she hates, but we get on and we perhaps never would have had we never read each others blogs. The next person like that could just be one blog post away. I’d rather have an ever growing circle of friends than one that gradually narrows down and a blog really has been an excellent way of achieving that for all of us.
I could delete the whole thing, but i’d lose the whole point of why i have kept this for 3 1/2 years, which is partly to try and encourage people to HE (which i know it has done) and partly to prove that HE and life, even a busy and slightly awkward life, can be done, partly to show that HEing 4 children of 4 different ages in possibly one of the dullest bits of the country can be done, partly to show that HE and wahm-ing can (just about) be done, partly as an LEA record but mostly so that me and my children can look back in 15 years time and say “aaah, do you remember…..?” And there is an important element of wanting to be able to look back and say “yes, that too passed” because how i wish i had been blogging when Fran was being operated on regularly or when Maddy was a locked up and frightened child. I would love to be able to look back and say “yes, that WAS bad, but now it is so much better.” Even now, only 4 months on from a truly miserable experience, i can look back at some things i wrote privately and see that while i am far from out of the legacy of grief, shock and guilt that occurred, while those events are still very much my present in many ways, i have begun to move on already and with moving on comes, i guess, some healing. There are days when the best positive i can see is that this particular shade of sh*t is not as awful, nor as rank, as the one 10 days ago. That is a bizarre and undignified place to have come to, but it does get me up in the morning and dressed, working, educating, nurturing and loving and whatever else i can say, i do know that my aim of shouldering as much complication as i could myself has largely achieved its goal of our children being oblivious and unscathed. They are happy, by and large, they know they are loved and the centre of our world, they know we would do utterly anything for them and that their life comes first. Whatever else occurs, i am good at being their mum and we are good at being a loving and committed couple and pair of parents and the best thing that my blog can do is remind me of that and that goal.
Which leads me back to where i am now… how do i do what feels best for me and mine at this moment? How do i do what feels right, right now? Shut down the other blog for one thing, that much i’ve done already, i didn’t like that at all. I’ve kept what was important, because i know i’ll need it, but i don’t like the concept of partly private ranting, so i’ll stop. I’m not going to password, or make user levels either because that leaves me no better off. I don’t really want to make the blog anonymous, because i like it having photos on it and even though my fall from Mrs MP and a known person in the online HE world has been total and graceless, it still probably wouldn’t work. I could leave the blogring, but then i’d be being a drama-queen too and rss feeds do rather make that pointless. Who notices when someone hibernates?
This emerging blog land has an odd set of rules that are growing with it; comments are fine and i love getting them but in a way i never wanted them. Sometimes you really want and need them and other times it feels like whoring but if you have them, you sort of have to leave them otherwise you end up looking like you are being more over dramatic by turning them off – and that doesn’t work anyway because people leave comments in other boxes! And that was made never more obvious than recently; i wrote something i had wrestled with for months, something i wanted to acknowledge and pay tribute to here, on this blog of our life as a family, because it seemed so utterly heartless to ignore it and not make some kind of memorial. I could have turned the comments off, because i really didn’t need sympathy, sympathy couldn’t have helped, i just wanted to speak those words outloud. And the comments were great, because they gave me the opportunity to speak privately to some people who were important, but they weren’t the point. The point was the memorial, the acknowledgement, the attempt to bring together my life in a way that meant i could start to move on. This is my space, i should be allowed to do as i wish on it, so long as i’m not setting out to deliberately harm people. I am as i am – and at 32 i can’t change that very much, no more than i can really change the way my life is, how i feel or what i’ve done.
So, having thought and thought and thought about it, i’m just going to carry on -“these are my children, this is my life” – but i’m going to make an appeal now and i’d really appreciate it if the handful of people that in 6 years of online life i’ve managed to offend, took note. In 6 years i’ve managed to offend an unknown person, 1 person for reasons i still don’t understand, 1 person by trying to do what seemed right, 1 person by my biological make up and 1 person because we were both too busy to communicate well. You know, okay, i hold my hands up. I fucked up 4 times and if you aren’t on the list but i’ve offended you too, let me know and i’ll add you. I’m on really strong pills, there is only so much harm it can do 😉
So here are the rules of the blog (and feel free to sing them to the tune of a Bucks Fizz song.)
*If you hate me, just don’t read this. I don’t want to offend you, i don’t set out to offend people and i don’t like having my life stamped all over in spite or anger either.
*If If i turn the comments off, i genuinely don’t want you to comment, so please don’t, even if you want to say something nice 🙂 Sometimes i’m going to blog for me and if i do, i do.
*Don’t assume that i’m trying to “talk” to someone without saying it personally, i’d far rather talk personally so if it is here it is because i am writing out stuff that is bothering me and that i want to write about. If it is in the “ponderings” category, then that is what i’m doing… pondering. And yes, some of this post has been sparked by “something” but no, i’m still not talking back, i’m putting down on paper the things that that event has made me think about. I’m not somehow mysteriously less allowed to write my thoguhts than anyone else is.
*Think the best of me, even if you once thought better of me. I don’t set out to damage or hurt anyone, but i am going to think, write and feel what i think, write and feel. If you’ve got a problem, do the decent thing and speak to me about it. And remember that i’ve probably written it while shaking 4 children off my leg, changing a nappy, packing a parcel, making someone juice, breastfeeding and crying – and be gentle first. It doesn’t do any harm to be gentle first.
And that, dear readers, is where it is at. I’ll be back with a few remarks about a few days away we’ve had, if i ever get to the point where i’ve had more than 3 hours sleep in a night.
