Wednesday thoughts. . .I mean Monday thoughts

My blog and I have been suffering an identity crisis of sorts. I don't know how honest to be. Whether to write for an imagined audience, or to write for myself. I haven't sent the link out to many people because I'm scared, yet the reason I'm writing is for people to read my thoughts and my words. I have a new appreciation for the people whose blogs I read regularly.

The ones I like the most share stories about their children, talk about their marriages and post pictures. I worry about talking too much about my children lest it affect them when they're older. I worry about writing about my husband, about my family, because something I write might hurt someone or cross a line that they don't want crossed.This crisis of my blog's identity is a familiar one--how much myself can I really be? That's something I have struggled with, and still struggle with, in my real life. So the page has sat blankly, waiting for me to set off in one direction or another. Hmmm.

Last Monday I had the idea of sitting down to the computer and writing out the various and disparate thoughts that were flying around my head. And then I fell asleep at nine o'clock. On Tuesday I thought I'd title the entry "Tuesday thoughts" instead. . . and then I didn't. One of my favorite writers, Anne Lamott, writes often about the most difficult part of writing. It's the sitting down and actually writing something. There are always a million other things you'd rather do, and that is so so true. I've always meant to be a writer and yet. It's been hard to start. Hard to figure out what to say. Scary to speak out loud about how I feel about things, how I see things because. . . well, then I might be really seen. Eek.

All the thoughts I thought about last Monday disappeared except for the one about our recycling being a microcosm of our lives right now. Every week our bin is absolutely overflowing--with cardboard boxes from the two new big car seats we had to buy because our kiddos were getting too long for their bucket seats. With long, skinny plastic boxes that held our new curtain rods. With Peets coffee cups. Formula containers. With various and sundry detritus (is that redundant? I'll have to look it up. . .) in a flow that never seems to slow down. It feels like it MIGHT slow down, that we might actually fit it all in one week. . and so each time the truck comes to pick it up and dump it we actually get excited about getting to put the stuff that didn't fit before into the blue bin. But then three days later it's all full up again and we're stacking up in piles, squashing brown bags of recycling down as far as we can fit them, littering stray cardboard dejectedly around the bases of the bins.

Who cares about this? I talk about my identity crisis and then launch into a story about trash. Interesting. But the stacks of stuff, the leftovers from the life we're building or trying to maintain, feel like weights. And the clearing away each week, leaving us for a moment without piles, feels like redemption, like if we just keeping swimming we'll eventually be able to fit it all and move on to the next thing. But there is always a next thing. Always. I flit from one task to another, trying to decide how to spend my thirty minutes of energy at the end of the day. Cook a meal. Unpack a box. Work on a project that will earn some money. Sit down and write a blog. Sit still and look out the window and feel this life. Actually feel what it feels like to be me--thirty-seven; mom to two funny, challenging, heart-wrenching babies; wife to a man I love and still feel like I'm getting to know; home-owner for the first time; project manager for an organization I've worked for for eleven years; pregnant for the last time to two unmet baby girls; daughter; sister; friend. The only me there ever was or ever will be.

I wrote about recycling but what I really thought a lot last Wednesday when I wrote this, what I carried in my heart, was the idea and reality of leaving my kids with a baby-sitter. We'd done it once before and we've left them a few times with family but for the most part they've been with me, or with us, these past eight months. The first two months they were in the NICU, visited by us but mostly cared for by others. My son is a sensitive kid and he has a hard time with other people. He cries, screams, wails, moans. He reaches towards me when he sees me and stops crying once he's in my arms. That wasn't always the case--there were months of screaming fits when even I couldn't calm him down. I wasn't ready to leave him. . .I still don't feel ready. But as the birth of these two little sisters approaches, as I get bigger and more unwieldy, and for so many other reasons I knew I needed to bring someone in to meet them, get used to them, take care of them. To get to the point where my babies reach for her (or him, but in this case it's a her) and smile, happy to see her. I was that person for many babies before I was a mother. Why has it been, why is it, so hard to leave mine with someone else?