Open for (the) Business (of Sharing).

I am going to make this blog public. I have been mulling this over a lot in the past few days but a couple of articles I read last night really led me to this conclusion.

The Ethical Implications of the Parental Overshare
The Atlantic, author: Phoebe Maltz Bovy

Why I Write About My Daughter on the Internet
Huffington Post, author Lyz Lenz
 "Where is the line when someone elses' story ceases to be yours and becomes theirs?  If it happened to you it's your story. You need to tell your story and let others have the job of telling theirs." 

These articles have been bumping about in my mind today. Very interesting points brought up in both. It certainly gives voice to the nagging concerns I've had over the years about the privacy of those close to me, who may come up in my writing. And it gives me pause. 

I'm glad people are debating these things, pausing to think about them in our world, which seems to be moving so fast no one stops to think much about how it's brimming with narcissistic "me-ism" and TMI moments. We're all getting caught up in it in spite of our best intentions. It seems to be human nature.

To the above questions from Ms. Lenz's article (the second one linked above) I would add: "when do the minutiae of one's daily life or their musings cease to be interesting and perhaps even become cloying?" One can always switch the channel, as they say, but I'd like to think my work would be less about navel-gazing and more about pushing forth ideas in order to -- again -- get others thinking. For me, that's the best of what writing can do. It can get us to think about things we otherwise may not have. 

All this being said, everyone likes a little fluff now and again so there will likely be content on here occasionally that is not thought provoking nor trying to be. You have been warned! I am an avid fluff lover. All work and no play ... we all remember that scene from The Shining, right?

This is what I know:

• I am fiercely private but there’s no getting around the fact that I write to express my thoughts and I often feel I have something to “share.”

• Of all the blogs I've started, the one I got the most out of personally was the one I made public. I think I felt more compelled to write knowing I wasn’t ‘screaming out into an abyss.' It was satisfying to open myself up to others and I realized I was touching peoples’ lives, even if it was only for a few minutes a day.

• I need to write. Builders build houses with wood, concrete, brick. Cooks make things with vegetables and other ingredients. Painters use acrylic and canvas. And I make "things" with words. With context and syntax and nuance and metaphor and little black characters on white pages or screens. I will continue it regardless of whether I am sharing or not, so why not share? Am I a writer if I don't share, or am I merely a diarist? I would rather be the first of those two, though personal diaries certainly have their place. I trust myself to gauge where the line is between the revealing and the truly intimate, and to mind the gap between the two.

• The chances of becoming a published writer are near zilch if I don't share my work. I've always said this, yet found a reason to still hide behind a wall. I am a "late adopter" of the openness required to express myself widely, as successful writers do.

• I will not be everyone’s cup of tea. This, I need to keep reminding myself, is JUST FINE and a measure of taking risks and having an opinion. Some readers may not like me for reasons I can't understand. But is it really my job to understand? Perhaps, sometimes. But for the most part, a thick skin is required so I am toughening mine up.

• I will not overshare - because my life is entwined with lots of people I love dearly and they deserve privacy, even as I take a step outward with writing about my life. So I will be referring to people for the time being, anyway, in less than specific terms and not by name. There will be photos but this won't be an exposing forum for my kids, especially.

• I have the support and love of a lot of people who are fierce about encouraging me to take leaps when I feel I need to. Here is a quote shared among myself and some of my close friends today:

You've got to get to the stage in life where going for it is more important than winning or losing

wherever I am when you feel sick at heart and weary of life, or when you stumble and fall and don’t know if you can get up again, think of me. I will be watching and smiling and cheering you on

I have a close friend who also struggles with making her dreams real by making them more public. For an artist, the work is intensely personal and the self consciousness that informs this tentative stance is exactly what makes artists artists. However, the exposure raises the stakes because it makes you more accountable, and we all know it seems like a steeper fall when others are watching. I hope my doing this and reaching out toward a larger audience will encourage her to do so as well.

Want to join me? I am rolling out my Welcome mat.

The Sands of Time & Renewals.

In the spirit of a mandala, my old blog on Blogsome, The Maternal Mandala, has been de-activated. In the spirit of a busy mother, I only found this out a few minutes ago -- the blog has been "gone" since Dec of 2011. Funny...surprising...not surprising, all at once. 

How appropriate to begin, again, here -- putting the pieces back together from what I can find and then forging forward. No loss we experience is not also a gain, right?

Cheers!

An Update...

Alright - for all my beloved friends and family and all the other lurkers who may or may not be reading  these entries: here is the long awaited follow up to my last post, titled “Nap Blog”. It has been around 9 weeks since that quiet summer afternoon when I jotted down those words. 

In a nut shell, here are the immediate updates:

Our little one's blood tests revealed abnormalities in her liver function which -- after about 10 Hellish, perplexing, frightening, exhausting days in the hospital, numerous blood draws, tests, scans and one exploratory surgery -- was finally determined to be caused by Biliary Atresia, a very rare liver disease that strikes every 1 in 15,000 or so infants. With odds like this, our family needs to start playing the lottery more often.

In Biliary Atresia, the bile ducts in the liver are damaged or completely missing so bile has no means of exiting the organ, thereby backing up and causing progressive damage. The liver becomes cirrhotic and begins to fail. Without the option of a liver transplant, she would likely not survive past 18 months. Thirty years ago, a Japanese doctor pioneered the Kasai operation which gave BA kids a chance -- by fashioning a makeshift biliary duct out of a piece of the small intestine. Although outcomes are not overwhelmingly effective in most cases, it gives kids a bridge and buys them some time. Most will eventually need to have a liver transplant. Prior to that, parents of babies with this condition could do nothing but sit by and wait while watching as their kids slowly died of liver failure.

Exploratory surgery revealed that the damage to our baby's liver was so severe, that the stop-gap bypass procedure (a Kasai operation) was out of the question. So, we are on to the transplant fast track and hoping that she will undergo a liver transplantation operation sometime in the next two months (December ‘06).

Life has been so busy that it will take me some time to fully detail the impact this turn in the road is having on me. Writing a blog, which was my newfound and fledgling hobby until those crazy days in August, seems so completely unimportant in the scheme of things. It took me a long time to get back to this -- but I realize writing serves a multifaceted purpose: it, as always is therapeutic, but it is also now a way to keep others apprised of how things are progressing. People who I would otherwise lose touch with because there are just not enough hours in the day to talk on the phone or type out emails. In a later post, I will explain how and why I even have enough time to do this small amount of writing. ..more soon, I hope. 

The Granules of Motherhood.

The Granules of Motherhood: Why This Blog?

Well, I finally did it -- I stopped being a bystanding wannabe, asking myself perplexing questions like “how do mothers find the time to start blogs?” and I took action and started one. I took a swan dive off the precipice of possibility and decided it was time (even if I rarely have any).

The name? I’ve been conjuring up imagery of Tibetan sand mandalas for a while now; and being amused at how they seem to symbolize for me what motherhood feels like these days. Sand mandalas are created with a single-minded devotion and fierce attention to detail. They are meticulously watched over and created, representing life and its transitory nature. There are days when it feels like motherhood and its various rote but rewarding machinations, though done with love and reverence, are as impermanent as the granules of sand in a mandala. It feels as if each day the slate is swept clean, for better or worse, and the only place to be is in the present moment, hoping and believing that each day you seize the opportunity to re-create something beautiful out of your own experience of motherhood.

August 4, 2006