I’m growing and changing, every day. I no longer wear the liquid-resistant panties to bed, I don’t hide from the Internet boogeyman as much and I consider myself a (n under employed) writer. I’m open to being in love, I’m made of spine and my waistline is now bigger than 24 inches. I’m maybe even starting to consider myself quirkily cute, instead of just weird looking.
So much of my blogging has documented both evolutions and backwards momentums and left out something usually highlighted in mommyblogging: the kid.
It’s been largely about me. My failings as a parent, true; how Zoë’s extreme nature has been a mentally bloody thorn in my side, yup; but how much of it has really been about her? Maybe 3%.
I’m just that self-obsessed.
But I’m cool with that – it’s all good – because this is my therapy, you dig? This is where I bounce the thoughts around and see them in black and white, so that the details can line up, instead of getting lost in the maze of my brain. Yes, I need Ritalin, but what I mean to say is this:
Blogging about me has brought me myself.
It’s also brought me further than I thought I might go in the race to self-acceptance, friendships I wouldn’t have thought myself worthy or capable of, and pleasure, at the talent that I can call friends, peers and mentors.
So.
I’m pondering if Mommy is Moody is really the place for me to be. I’m considering starting a new space, without the word Mommy in it. Until I figure it out, I’m unsure what I’ll be posting, but I have an idea.
Call it love letters.
When I haven’t been in my own head, or baking chocolate cupcakes for dinner with Zoë – yes, we did – I did this:
- Wrote a sex column: Being Bipolar Got Me Screwed… A Lot.
- Wrote about how I live inexpensively, in a damn expensive city.
- Got a (single) nomination for the Babble Favourites – in the company of some people I am humbled to know.
- Got nominated for Schmutzie’s Canadian Weblogs Awards, for Family & Parenting, equally humbling.
Edited to add:
I know that there’s no such thing as originality anymore, especially on the Internet, but when I logged into my reader and discovered that I had accidentally totally used Jenny’s “sex column” line, even though it’s like, we write on the same site and yeah, what do I call that – a magazine, a sex site, “posted an article”, “had an article published?”?
I’m so old school, magazines have paper, to me.
I’m conflicted. I think from now on, I’ll have to say that I “Got Crazy and Sexay”, since the column is about mental illness and sex. And so, you know, to guarantee that no one assumes I’m trying to ride on Jenny’s coat tails, which’re made of much funnier stuff than my own. I don’t even have coat tails – I wear a Docker’s bomber jacket. Which today seems to have grown a weird stain that kind of looks like dog shit, but I can’t figure out how a dog might have shit on my arm.
Smelling it didn’t help me narrow down what the stain was, either, but for some odd reason, I can’t let myself wash the damn coat until I know what I’m removing. Kind of like how I can’t stop typing until I know what I’m calling the damn sex column – I have closure problems.
There’s an even bigger issue at hand than whether I would steal all of Jenny’s phrases if I could (I so would – I mean, I don’t know if I’ve ever made liquid come out of someone’s nose before, but she’s forced projections from mine. I want that power. She’s like, the reverse Dyson of humour blogging.):
If I use the word Crazy, then anti-stigma people might come after me with Prozac-dipped pitchforks. I don’t know how many stabs it might take for me to overdose, but I’m pretty sure it would be many more than it would take for me to bleed to death while eeking out, “I only perpetrate stigma… to mock its power… ” knowing at my last breath that big pharma was guilt-free and my years of blogging about being Crazy mentally unhealthy were for naught.
And so really, I have no choice. I have to just call it a sex column, or I could die.
