Entries from June 2009 ↓

When I started blogging in the the f-inter of 2004, I was doing it on Myspace and I was losing my mind. Embarassment about myspace membership aside, it started off with simply hearing voices. No, really. I was hearing voices. Also, seeing things.

There was a lot of shit going on in the old noggin’ and some of that shit needed out, fast. Hence blogging.

I think I had, at most, about 10 readers. Those were people who I drank with, or smoked pot with, or fucked. Or would. Or people who wanted to keep tabs on how much I was drinking, what drugs I was doing and who I was fucking. It was it’s own tiny little box, couldn’t have expanded much further than that and it kind of resolved itself when I started getting saner, stopped hovering my nose above white powder on glass and started fucking The Ex again.

Also, I moved to Blogger.

Then, low and behold, I got a job after getting saner and I moved back in with The Ex. Then came the five pregnancy tests. Then came From Manic to Mommy?, which is a blog entirely not worth Googling, since it’s rife with memes and bitching and moanings about the first year and a half of Isobel’s life. I was never intent or content with a mommyblogger title, yet there I was, blogging about mommying.

Something happened and I wanted to hide myself. Reinvent anew. Embrace the momosphere and all of the wonderful people who call themselves momospherians.

I became Zoeyjane and Mommy is Moody was born, originally hosted on Wordpress, then moved to this domain.

From Myspace to Blogger, to Wordpress, to now, the subject matter hasn’t changed much – it’s nearly all still about old wounds, new mistakes, broken synapses, and failures and successes. What has changed, multiple times over, is my attitude toward blogging. My reason for blogging.

Initially, it was a method of recording the aural hallucinations, mood changes, minor psychotic break and laughing it off at the same time. I didn’t expect anyone to read, save for my best friends. I didn’t expect anyone to comment, except for those best friends that I wouldn’t have talked to anyway.

When I moved into Blogger, I still didn’t have that many readers, but the ones I did have, I knew. I read their blogs, I linked them, I blogrolled them. I hoped for, no, expected the same. It took me a while to realize that posting multiple times a day would garner less comments over all and that the 13 regular commenters shouldn’t be expected to leave word on every post I wrote. Especially if it was yet another installment of a 100-things-about-me. But I got hurt, a lot, before I knew that.

When I moved into Mommy is Moody, a few of my FMTM? readers came with me, but for the most part, the people stopping by were newer because I didn’t exactly leave word that I was moving here. I guess the advent of this Zoeyjane popped up on a bit of radar somewhere and people came to visit. Became friends. Left their own words of praise, critique, sadness and hurt. Shared.

Over the past year and a half, since I became Zoeyjane, the writer of Mommy is Moody, a few people who’ve been around for a lo-o-o-o-ng time have said that my writing’s changed. I guess maybe it’s more picturesque. Or tighter? (Which makes me shudder, all over again, when I think of how juvenile I find my commentary now. God, how horrible it must have been for those 13 readers to eek through back in the days.)

But Mommy is Moody isn’t getting to use the … voice that it originally was born to speak.

Now, I find myself with a few side blogs. A few pro blogs. A coupla volunteer blogs. All in all, I contribute to seven or eight urls, I think. It’s hard to keep up with because pretty much each is an extension of myself, yet compartmentalized.

But what remains here isn’t compartmentalized by anything other than the post labels.

What I write (here and at all of the theres) is about the past, the future, parenting, fucking (sometimes over) The Ex, food, eating, sleeping, moodiness, shopping, money, coveting shiny and beautiful things, music, love, loneliness, drugs, drink, smoke, and on and on. I dream of minimalism, yet I’ve deconstructed my writing into specific areas, putting X into a box made for X; Y into a carrier bag wrapped in tissue, meant only for Y.

It’s not me.

It is me, to over organize. It’s not me to have such specifics allocated to one area, when all of the specifics are relating to each other. Keep like with like, you know?

When I did the last redesign, I threw up my side blogs: fiction, reviews and food. Those are all part of daily life, yet for some reason, I thought that giving them their own voice – how could I really do that, if I was still the one speaking it? – would make them better. More successful. Widely read, or something. I’m not sure.

I do know that I intended to regularly publish on each of the side blogs and for some reason, I assumed that they could be just as popular as Mommy is Moody has become. Not that this blog is popular. I just mean, they’d see the same amount of traffic.

I think that somewhere along the line, I read up on some SEO and marketing bullshit that said to stick to a specific niche if you wanted blog superstardom, that having a blog that spanned several topics would be hard to maintain readership for. Fuck that shit.

I was wrong, but this was an exercise I needed to do, on the process of learning who I am. As a person, and as a writer.

I am a blogger who talks about random things, at random times, often within one very-long-winded post.

I cannot maintain the drive to regularly update seven blogs, market them, provide candor and wit and responses to the comments they do get, and keep a nearly immaculate house. Guess which one wins, in my world?

I cannot maintain a charade of neat and orderly posting on the Internet. It’s my one and only place that I’ve, from day one of blogging, allowed myself to be completely off-the-cuff crazy without (much) guilt or concealment.

I am finding the filing system to be too complex, so that I’m spending more time figuring out the colour coding and Dewey Decimal System, when I should be creating the stuff to be filed.

I am saying fuck it.

I’m going back to posting everything in this one tiny spot. Your feed readers are going to groan at you, and I won’t blame you for hitting Mark All As Read. This could mean the usual 3-5 posts a week, or some times a couple in a single day.

I’m just giving you a heads up, because all of this self-created blog bureaucracy is harshing my contact high, yo.

If you tell me I have to do something, I will not. If you tell me that I can’t do something, or that a large group can’t, I will boycott.

This is why I no longer shop at H & M. When two women (on two separate occasions) were told that they could not breastfeed discreetly in the Vancouver location, even though I hadn’t breastfed for well over a year and was never a “we’re out, we’re proud, and we’ll squirt you in the eye” kind of milk nazi, I still said nay.

When I registered at a certain career college at the age of 20, I was ensured by both the administration and their radio ads that I could work at my own pace. Three weeks later was told to slow down. I’d been expressly forbidden from working at an accelerated speed, hyper-focused on the text books and manuals handed out to us. They said that if I didn’t stick to the class’ curriculum, at the same rate as the rest of the students – some of which were battling issues with learning English while also learning medical terminology – then I would not receive credit for the classes that I’d already (for all intents and purposes) challenged. I dropped out.

When my father told me, at eleven, that I was never going to be a beauty queen in response to my question, “do you think I’m pretty?” I went out and got a modelling agent. And worked part-time for two years, completely behind his back, earning enough to have a (mostly) part-time habit in the nasal candy.

I almost failed math in grade eight because of this same trait. I was told to show my work. But how does someone who: a) does it in her head; and, b) is just starting to experience this thing now known as ADD; show their work? There was no work. There was no little ones over the left-most column of numbers, signifying a carried 10. I thought it, it worked, it was right. And I almost failed, after I’d been working two years ahead in the subject for since the end of grade four.

Can’t be a single parent on a lower income, with a child who requires a special (expensive) diet, in one of the most expensive areas (in one of the most expensive cities) in Canada? Watch me.

When a certain ex, in the throws of the rage that I seem to be able to bring about in anything that walks and owns a penis, screamed at me that I should grow the fuck up, stop playing on the Internet and get a real job so that I’d understand how hard he had to work…well, I did grow the fuck up. I did get three real jobs. I didn’t get off the Internet though, and now, I make nearly twice his hourly income. Which means that I don’t work nearly as hard as he does, or as often. Taking the high road means that I swept that information under the rug, temporarily, but I don’t often take that road when my face is being screamed into. One day, he’ll be told how much easier my job is than his and how much more it pays and it will probably be a metaphorical vasectomy for the man who thinks I need to rely upon him for everything.

I don’t know why it is that I’ve been born with an inherent need to do things the opposite of what I’m told. I don’t know why I hear ‘you should…’ and it’s automatically rejustified into ‘never do…’

I don’t know.

I do know that it costs me. Money, energy, relationships.

Not shopping at H & M has meant that I’ve often had to travel further for inexpensive children’s clothes, or settle for closer, more expensive ones. I still owe the balance of that college’s tuition, plus interest. I don’t have a degree, never mind the three I’d planned on getting. I don’t have a boyfriend, because anyone I’ve considered resilient enough to be able to handle me being me just isn’t around for the plucking.

It’s tiring, you know, not fitting into a tiny little box and crossing Ts efficiently.  Prize example: when you consider my daughter’s name and the fact that I must cross the middle of the Z and make sure the dieresis is over the E, that’s like, three extra steps to take. In a three-letter name that gets written or typed all the freaking time.

It adds up, the costs. In fact, nearly everything I seem to do, costs a little more, because it’s just a little less easy than the alternative.

And Isobel is the exact same.

It’s been bred into her, apparently, because from day one she’s done things her own way. She’s only slept when she wanted to, eaten when and what and how much she craved. Been as loud or as still as she felt she should be. She’s been exhausting to keep up with and a delight to watch – a child-like version of myself, if there ever was any element of inner-child to me.

She’s just as moody and definitely just as stubborn. She won’t even get onto the toilet from the front of it – has to launch herself onto the Dora seat from the side, just because she will not do it the logical, normal way.

And for the past few weeks, she’s asserted her authority in the most emo-tastic form possible. She’s virtually stopped throwing tantrums when she doesn’t get what she wants or is given structure that she doesn’t agree with. Now, she just falls, dejectedly, onto the floor (a chair, the bed), in a heap of teen-aged melancholy. Limp, a dead-weight of adolescent despair over having a parent who just doesn’t understand.

She’s gonna be both the bane and the trophy of some man (or woman)’s existence, one day. And I wouldn’t change a thing about her.