A dozen years of words

Time flies when you’re having fun deep in the parenting trenches, wondering if you’ll ever see the light of day, and if the walls of said trenches are greased or just layered in the tears of previous years. Regardless, time flies. The hours are long, the days are short. Sunrise, Sunset. You get the idea.

I hit a milestone this week. Yesterday, in fact. January 8th, 2006 I opened up a new Blogger account and started writing. I had no focus other than to put words down in the community of bloggers I’d been reading for a year. At first, I used the blog as a kind of Facebook, sharing short snippets and amusing quizzes and commenting on others’ blog posts with a post of my own. The writing was…meh. Eventually I moved into more long-form writing, more considered writing, oftentimes screaming into the wind. It was about then that I began to write more on gifted issues. More writing led to better writing led to a book led to freaking out about writing led to another book contract led to hating myself for not writing more led to remembering that writers write, dumbass, sit yo’ ass down led to a lot of personal journaling because when you think you’re losing your mind due to exhausted executive function you don’t necessarily want to share that with the world led to where I am today.

A dozen years of words.

So now what? I am pretty positive my editor and publisher right now are shouting at the screen, “FINISH.THE.DAMNED.BOOK!” and yes, they are quite correct. I will and I am. Self-care and the needs of parents raising these amazing G2e kids is too important a topic for me to remaining sitting on it. Plus I have several other ideas for writing tucked away that I won’t touch until it’s done.

But beyond that? I’m not nearly at the end of parenting, but I’m pretty much at the end of writing about it; the last several posts here had very little to do with raising kids. I no longer share stories of the boys, because privacy is definitely an issue, but also because they’re really not likely to have granola fights in a crib anymore. And trust me, you do not want to hear the penis jokes. I DON’T WANT TO HEAR THE PENIS JOKES, yet here I am.

I’m approaching a crossroads in my life, similar to the one waaaaay back when I was eyeing Jack starting full-day kindergarten. You know, the kid who will be a freshman in high school this fall. Dear god, I really have been writing here forever. But it’s a reality…in 4 1/2 years we will have launched two young men into the world (pleaseohplease and yeah, they could be slow to launch but I have to go with the actual dates for my sanity now hush), and…I will be more me and less (hands-on) mom. What do I do? What do I want to do?

So I’ve been working with my friend-colleague-life coach Kate to poke sticks at my life and try to figure it out. (BTW, she has an online free group coaching call every week and if you’re not jumping on that sucker you are missing out). She is so good at what she does, and with her guidance I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and journaling and number crunching and brainstorming and cursing and I’m starting to see possibilities emerging from the parenting haze. Vague shapes, but they don’t have teeth and they appear to be friendly.

There have been a dozen years of words here, and I hope to add another dozen to the mix. I’m not entirely sure of the focus, much like when I first started, but figure it’ll come to me. At least now I have more experience, though blogging is so, so different now than it was then. I know I want to build a community, to connect, but the details are still deep in that haze, hiding behind those vague shapes.

Thanks for riding along with me these twelve years.

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