Read at your own risk

Disclaimer: The following passage you are about to read contains perhaps inappropriate confessions regarding my own insecurities and narcissistic qualities. Read at your own risk, understanding that you may well find yourself angrily yelling at your computer screen, “Get a grip girl!”

Over the last couple of weeks, I have been toying with the idea of scraping the whole blog project and just closing up shop. I share this not as a means to dredge up more supportive comments from friends and family to “Keep at it,” but just truly as a confession that has been nagging at me mercilessly. For those Catholics out there, you can understand the freeing nature of a one on one acknowledgment regarding your short comings. As an active Catholic parishioner in college, I chose to give myself a confession session for my 21st birthday. What does that tell you? I bet therapists far and wide would have a hay day with that information, such an act on the eve of my legally permissible alcohol purchasing adulthood. I still remember Father Dan laying his warm dry palm over my bowed head and absolving me of my mistakes. Whether or not I needed the priest for the wave of peace that followed didn’t matter, I felt resolved.

I find that I am not sure just what the function of this blog is. Is it a place to practice writing prompts, a forum to appreciate the comings and goings of everyday life, another mommy blog, or just a place for a mediocre type of self promotion. “Hey, look what I noticed today? Aren’t I clever?” Originally, it served as a motivation for me to write each week, a goal to post something, anything, to the blog to just keep me plugging away.

And yet, now it feels like an excuse, a way to put off actually working hard on writing a piece to submit to a publication. I tell myself that I’ll work on something more next week, it’s Elizabeth’s birthday, the holidays, I don’t feel well, etc. I’ll just throw something up on the blog and put forth more effort later is what I tell myself. Unfortunately, “later”, as so often is the case, has yet to arrive and present me with a bouquet of flowers and a box of chocolates.
The reason isn’t complicated. It has everything to do with pride, fear and lack of follow through. I’ve started and stopped so many things in the last few years. I started a masters program in special education, only to find that perhaps that was my mom’s dream, not my own. I then went on to pursue a masters in social work. I found the classes inspiring, my brain on fire, neurons happily zipping across the barren dessert of my stay- at- home- mommy- mind, and yet a tiny nagging voice wondered if I loved school or the new professional field?

In the process of my own self discovery, and the various masters classes, I started writing, stretching past the daily journaling, to hopefully, something more substantial. As a result, this summer I decided to take a year off from the social work program and take a stab at writing, see what I could do with it in twelve months.

My confession is this, so far, this is it. Right here, this is what I’ve accomplished. I’ve blogged, entered one writing contest, taken a writing class, in which I didn’t finish my story, sat down and wrote a list of goals with Josh, and then crossed off only the “easy” ones.

I don’t know. I keep going through this crazy back and forth, wishing no one knew that I was even trying this, feeling so embarrassed, willing exposed by it all. Like a crabby night nurse with aching legs and swollen feet, the question, “What the hell am I doing?” makes the rounds of my consciousness quite a bit lately. And then there is the opposite desire, wanting so badly to push through it, kick the nurse in the skins and remember my own tendencies to throw temper tantrums when things get hard. To remember how easily I succumb to pity parties, in which I marinate myself in home-grown self-absorption and gain 3 pounds of anxiety weight.

So that’s where I am. I don’t quite feel resolved. I guess the blog is no Father Dan. I have to hope that the better side of me wins out, that I kick some shins, wrap up the party and get to work. But then again, I still have Christmas shopping to do…