perspective
Silas is sleeping, so I have a moment to write about something that’s been on my mind for awhile now. I’ve been thinking a lot about blogging: why people do it, why I continue to do so.
For me, it’s really more than posting pictures of my cute baby. I’ve blogged before, and there’s probably four or more abandoned attempts left in my wake. Why did I start each one? For the same reason most people do.
We write, we post because we are fascinated with ourselves.
Don’t misunderstand me. I am the last person that you’d accuse of having enough self-esteem to actually think my words and small life are significant enough to be interesting…but I’m interested in what’s happening in my life.
We are fascinated with the way we change.
Being pregnant, becoming a mother…obviously, that’s some significant change for me. Watching Silas grow and learn, discovering my new self as a mother and wife and staying at home…it’s change.

People do this with blogs all of the time: going to college, traveling to a new place…I know I’m not alone in this desire to sift and shape it into words and find a way to share this part of my life.
Maybe in a way I want to pin down who I am. Shadowbox these moments. Allow myself to step back and figure out where the me is in all of this.
Because when you change, you come unhinged. You feel like you aren’t you anymore.
At the beginning of August, I sat in a lawn chair in our new-to-us backyard, huge with child and looked at the trees and the sky. Periodically, I’d mist myself using the garden attachment on the hose. I knew how ridiculous and stereotypical I looked, but I was beyond caring. To me, the air seemed a bit thinner, the light was leaning toward Autumn. Do you know those moments where you can see hintings of the next season simply in the light?

As I sat, thinking about the change about to occur in my life I couldn’t keep the lyric to “Landslide” and Stevie Nicks’ warbling voice from worming into my thoughts:
I’ve been afraid of changing because I built my life around you
I kept going with that thought. My life was built around me and that was all about to change—not just shift a bit, but crumble. Vanish. For the rest of my days, no matter what happened…there would be a son. And he would take on a significance that no other physical person ever had. I’d have to give up a lot of who I’d been, I’d find out just how selfish I really am.
My sleep, my body, my freedoms, my time, my choices have all changed.
Time makes you bolder even children get older. I’m getting older too.
So for now, that’s why I write here. There’s significance in this change. Maybe not to you…but hey—why are you reading this, then? I post this because I want to reach out in the midst of this rocking and reeling shift in my life and know that I am not alone, that my days matter, that these moments are fleeting.
That there is such gorgeous meaning in this becoming.
