Me starting a blog feels a little like my mom talking about technology, as in:
MOM: I know what Facepage is.
ME: Um, actually, it’s Facebook.
MOM: Whatever.
Welcome to 2007, right? Bear with me. One day, I will learn CSS. Until then, I will swear under my breath and generally feel like my Gram trying to figure out the ATM.
I was never particularly excited about living in public. I was a late, late adopter of Facebook and in all honesty, still don’t love it. Blogging always felt like leaving your journal out for anyone to read, which seemed mad to me. Why would anyone do that? My thoughts are already quite loud, as my husband tells me, when I stare into the darkness beside him at night. So why would I invite anyone in to watch my mental gymnastics? And why would anyone care?
We keep moving, and with the two wonder boys I had in January 2010, I am a terrible keeper-in-toucher. Emails that require more than a simple response slide far, far down in my inbox, because I hope that one day, I will have time to sit down and compose a proper reply to far-flung friends. I recognize now that this is the same deluded optimism that makes parenting so hard. I keep expecting or hoping for something different than what actually is (e.g., my children will not suffer from the terrible twos because I have sleep-trained them; or, my children will love vegetables when they get to table foods because I pureed all their first foods from organic sources myself and froze them in BPA-free containers). This delusion has also carried over into my desire for a stable home, as in whenever we visit a place, I look at the real estate ads and declare, “We could totally live here!” In fact, we even bought two houses in our gap year in a quaint Connecticut seaside town and essentially returned them.
But you out there, reading this, know how much you have meant to us on our switchbacking (L.A.-NYC-L.A.-NYC-L.A.-CT) journey. We could not have guessed that our next leap would be out of the country, and farther away from all of you who have helped us feel at home where ever we were. I can only hope this blog helps us keep in touch, and doesn’t mortify me or my children in a few years.
The hope in moving abroad is that your life becomes larger, but of course at some point the loneliness comes, too. So the other part of this starting a blog thing is that it seems marginally better than talking to myself while my husband is at his new job and I await the cat’s ok to enter the country.
The Other Side of the Road 