Apathy, blogging, life and deep thoughts

When my sister and I were growing up, our parents had this tradition where they'd let us choose two Christmas ornaments each year - one that had the current year's date on it and one that we just really liked. My mother kept a master list of those ornaments and the year each was purchased, telling us that someday when we were grown up, she'd give them to us for our own Christmas tree.

One year when we were both moody teenagers, my mom realized that Christmas was fast approaching and we had not yet bought any ornaments. Sarah and I sort of shrugged and said it was no big deal. We didn't HAVE to get ornaments. It's not like the tree was bare or anything. My mother was irritated with both of us, but for whatever reason, we were unmoved by her pleas of "But it's TRADITION."

Finally, she threw up her hands in defeat. She pulled out the master ornament list, wrote down the current year and then beside it wrote "Year of Apathy." She's long since given us our collection of ornaments and bought new ornaments for her own Christmas tree, but she still has that list. And all these years later, decorating the Christmas tree will still usually warrant a mention from her about the "year of apathy" and our refusal to pick out ornaments.

That's kind of how I've felt about blogging lately. It's not like I've spent the last two months just staring at the walls. There's plenty I could have blogged about. I didn't have any major emergency that kept me from blogging. I don't even really know why I stopped writing. I just did. I felt bad about it, but not motivated enough to log on and post anything. I guess, just like with the Christmas ornaments that year, I was feeling apathetic. That's really the only explanation I have for going two months without a blog post, when I'd written on a far more regular basis for years prior to that.

The other day, as I was taking a long walk all by myself (peace! quiet! the ability to think without interruption!) I realized that I missed writing. Not just blogging, but writing in general. I don't write much these days. So I decided that perhaps it's time to log back on, post more, and write more.

I've also come to the decision that blogging as a way of documenting our life is both a good thing and a bad thing. It's a great way for us to look back later and remember the good times, and it's a great way to keep our family and friends up to date on what we're doing. The downside is that I'll never be able to capture it all. I'll tell myself that I'm going to come back and share photos of something once I've had time to sort through the 100+ pictures I took, but then I get busy and I forget. This bothers the perfectionist in me. It's why I could never keep a diary as a kid - I would start one and then feel that I was leaving out too much, so I'd end up tossing it in the trash. Weird, right? I mean, it's not like I was writing a diary for an audience, so who cares if I missed a few days or a week here and there?

It's not just events and photos that I've sometimes left off the blog. From the very beginning, I've censored myself where this blog is concerned. At first that was mostly because of the blog audience: our family. I didn't feel comfortable writing about things like how scared I was that my dad would die before Meredith was born because I knew he was reading every word, and I didn't want to make HIM feel bad. Later, after he passed away, I held off from writing a lot about his death both because I usually ended up crying over my keyboard and because I didn't want my mom to read a post that might upset her. On a lighter note, I also tried to avoid airing dirty laundry and writing about arguments with my husband, even though I might have been tempted to start more than one post with "Men are stupid. Here's why." I figured he wouldn't appreciate that, and well, once he started a blog of his own, I didn't want to give him a reason to retaliate.

That's not to say that I have great plans to turn our blog into a giant confessional or anything, but moving forward, I do hope to write more in-depth posts instead of just "Gee, look at these cute pictures of my kids." Not that there's anything wrong with cute pictures of my kids, mind you, but hopefully I can strike a balance between what I'm really thinking and more superficial things. How does that sound?