Harsh

I have inwardly smirked at people who take “blog breaks.”  And then tell us they are going to.  Then start blogging again 3 days later. 

I always thought, “Why announce you are taking a break?  Just take it and come back, already!”  I truly wondered why they’d need a break from something as easy as blogging anyway, I just couldn’t comprehend the big deal?  I can just be so mean sometimes.

Kinda mean, but kinda funny, too??

This may sound haughty at first…

I started blogging November 29, 2006 and have never taken a break.  Not that there haven’t been “breaks” since I don’t blog every single day, but because I never set a quota for myself of how often to blog (some bloggers feel intense responsibility over this), there is never really any particular pressure.  In fact, I have to withhold from blogging, actually, because I could post a lot, probably 10-14 times a week, without batting an eye.  But I try not to, because I really do know that not everything has value to anyone other than me, maybe.  Most of it really just is part of the brain-collage that is swirling in my head: random thoughts, silly observances, ideas strung together like Family Circus’ Billy running an errand for his mom (a “Billy-path” as it were). 

And I have written  my head off for 4 solid years without ever wanting a break!

“If I don’t write to empty my mind, I go mad.”  Lord Byron  English romantic poet 1788-1824

I had always “written,” loved writing, but I ventured into blog-land (my first real public offering other than a couple of published magazine pieces or church newsletter contributions),  because my mom wanted to hear from me and letters had gotten few and far between.  I began because I couldn’t fathom how to say aloud the things in my broken heart after a devastation, but knew God was working something there and I wanted to be able to share it with my family, my children, my closest friends.  I wanted to somehow be able to explain, when the spoken word was too too too much.  

I started it when I couldn’t even say certain things out loud because of all I had just lost; when the know-it-all part of me had had the wind completely knocked from her lungs.  Yet, I knew there were important things to record for posterity, for my children and theirs, but also for me: to expose the unfruitful works of darkness against my soul for the purpose of complete and utter freedom from the bondages sent to destroy me.  I started it as I was barely crawling back onto solid ground from a soul-tsunami that nearly swept me out to the depths of a sea from which there might have been no recovery.  I started it to say, regardless at how inept the attempt might have been, “I am weak.  But God, as always, has been faithful.  And He is strong.”

And I had to write.  I had to.  Songs and writing are my love languages (even though no one has ever identified those two things as “official” love languages – they mean love to me and are how I communicate love, too, so if I sing you a song or write you words…) and sometime leading up to the meltdown of ’06, I had lost my song.  And my courage.  And my ability to say words out loud without bursting into tears.  So, writing was a must.  I HAD to write.  And blog.  And post maniacally.

“What a lot we lost when we stopped writing letters.  You can’t reread a phone call.”  ~Liz Carpenter

And I still write for my mom and so the kids will have volumes to remember me by when I am gone; so the grandbebes can read and realize “Oh THAT’S why our family [insert whatever behavior-mystery makes them wonder here]”.  I write now to save the memories.  For understanding, for explanation (sometimes sharing an old recollection suddenly brings light!).  And I write because sometimes God gives me things to share and there are some people who follow what I have written because they are the intended recipients (and recognize that).  Humbling.

In the end, to me at least, these swirling bits and pieces Mod-Podging themselves to my brain in free-form collage make a whole thought.  But getting there, can be, well….multi-faceted.  Yes, I think I will let that word describe my meanderings.  Multi-faceted.

True.

About halfway through the year just past my mom said, “You sure aren’t writing much,” which immediately aroused my defenses.

“How can you say that?” I asked her.  “I posted 8 times this week.  There are pictures of my garden, of the grandkids in the backyard, reports on Heaven Fest.  I write constantly.”   I mean, I posted more than 275 blogs in 2010 (not counting yet-unpublished drafts).  I reached my 1000th blog post on my birthday in October.  I am the most grapho-maniacal person I know.  I LOVE to write.  I think about writing constantly.  I love pen to paper or a brand new Word.doc., a very sharp No. 2 pencil and lined notebook paper are an invitation to delight… time to open the admin area of my blog is luscious to me.  There they are ~all these opportunities ~ just waiting for me to word them up. 

Still my mom continued to hold that I wasn’t “writing” like I used to.  She brought it up several times.  I ignored it because I currently have 38 drafts in my folder of things waiting-to-be-shared.   That, I told myself, is proof that I am writing.  I am recording the events and celebrations of our lives.  I am journaling the very thoughts collaged (as opposed to to neatly filed)  in my mind.  I am opining and editorializing the mundane and the majestic.  I AM writing.

2010.

Yet, inspired by another blogger who gathered her “favorite posts” into an end-of-the-year list, I started scrolling through my posts.  2010?  Lean.  There just isn’t much.  It is pretty bare.  I could hardly find anything written from my guts (from where it is most intensely satisfying).  Yes, I like referencing other writers in this blog, most all of whom say everything better than I do, and yes, the romantic in me is in love with papering my blog space with garden photos and quotes from true literary artists and deep thinkers.  I am even glad, for my own remembrances, to have shared other websites and links, exciting discoveries, funny videos and good reading.  But there is just hardly anything here of me {the real part}, these recent past months, a year, maybe more…Oh, yes, I am glad to have written birthday love letters to my familia.  Yes, I am happy I didn’t just quit since this is the best I have ever done at journal-keeping.  

There were a couple of posts that I remember writing from my heart, but you could count them on one hand:

• On Mother’s Day  I got to write an ode to my biggest cheerleader, my best friend, my momma
• One month later, on June 8, which was very coincidentally my mom’s birthday, I wrote a post called Digging In that I like in the re-read.
• Way back in January, the 22nd to be exact, I referenced my 800th blog post and remembered “aloud” why I write.
• Song for a Sunday ~ “Make You Feel My Love” that came tumbling from a deep place in my heart.
• Maybe the one that did mean the most to me personally, was “The Crushing” on July 26

But it is not like it was.  I have allowed myself to go in to hiding, to write around the things in my heart.  I have built walls around hard things and drawn the curtains on personal stuff.  I have been ever-so-glad to invite you in for a planned soiree, but only in a very carefully orchestrated fashion, tables set with my chip-free dishes.

I am feeling like a preacher rummaging through old sermon notes and dusty illustration books on a Saturday night, but what once bowled him over with gratitude, what once changed him forever, but is now neatly repeated with three points and a poem.

My blog. 

I love my blog.  I love blogging.  I love going in through the back door where the admin secrets are revealed and just pecking away.  I love writing about things important and  not-so-important because in the scope of the whole, they mean something.  But one thing I always wanted it to be was honest, transparency keeping me from glossing over what’s real. 

But I haven’t been doing that very well.

Just kinda faking it…

So, I am taking a break.  From blogging.

A break.

There.  I said it.  {are you rolling your eyes at me?  no, of course not – you are not as haughty as me}

I want to write my real stuff.  I want to be true.  I want to be telling the truth and I don’t want to be so prideful, so afraid to let you see the real me in all my weak, disdainful, muddled ridiculousness.

Saying out loud to Dave (let alone myself) that I would be taking a break, was petrifying.  I don’t want to put a time-frame, but for…awhile. 

It won’t be a break from life, for life shall rattle loudly (joyously and maybe even sorrowfully) on.  Of course I will post something for Averi’s 3rd birthday coming up soon.  And behind-the-scenes, I plan to ponder the blog and probably throw quite a few of the unfinished drafts into the trash – at least any of them that were smokescreens, attempts at painting pretty, but less-than-whole pictures.  But it is a fast of sorts, I guess.  Yes.  I am fasting my blog.  To “feast on” my life*, the imperfect, messy, just-plain-folks day-to-day existance granted to me by a loving God. 

It is a fast.

“I lived to write and wrote to live.”  Samuel Rogers, English poet 1763-1855

Hunter is displaying his negative-space mosaic from art fun with Nonna!

Recently, hanging out with Hunter Magoo, he asked me “What is so special about your blog anyway?”  And though I tried to explain that it would be the record of our familia, that it would explain things to him about where he came from and what our whole family was about, even as I communicated the importance God places on one generation proclaiming his faithfulness to the next, that like the apostles, I write for the joy, those things~

“…which WE HAVE HEARD, which WE HAVE SEEN with our eyes, which WE HAVE LOOKED AT  and OUR HANDS HAVE TOUCHED—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. 2 The life appeared; we have SEEN IT and TESTIFY TO IT, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. 3 We proclaim to you WHAT WE HAVE SEEN AND HEARD, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. 4 WE WRITE this to make our joy complete.”  1 John 1 

Or at least that was the original intention.  Maybe this “blog fast” is time to reflect on Hunter’s question: What’s so special about your blog anyway?  And figure that out.

And then, grapho-maniacal as I am, I will be back, maybe even  “with a veangance?”    I hope you will come back and read, too.

* “Feast on your life.”  A phrase suggested by the poem by Derreck Walcott , which I found inside the front cover of Audrey Niffenegger’s book, The Time Traveler’s Wife