Quote of the Day: "I could be more imaginative if there were no gravity." ~My ten-year-old son, Monet.I'm breaking my blogging fast with this quote from our drive home from choir this evening, primarily because it shows the quirkiness of my life and my children, and I thought it would be a fun way to fall back into blogging.
But after thinking about it, I find that it's highly applicable.
For the past year or so, I've had quite a difficult time blogging. Every bloggable thought or moment that enters my head is met by opposition. "That's not funny. Who would ever be interested in that? What if so-and-so reads it--what would s/he think? If you blog that, you'll hurt your child's/husband's/friend's feelings. If you blog that, you'll come across as unspiritual. If you blog that, you'll come across as too spiritual. Why would you blog something so whiny? Are you starving for attention or something?" And, finally, the kiss of death, "You don't blog often enough, so you've lost all interest anyway, even if you did blog about something interesting. There's nobody here but us crickets." ::chirp chirp::
(It doesn't help that in the four minutes since I've been up here and asked for privacy that each of my kids has come in at least once--the baby twice--and I feel like an ogre for being impatient with them. Is it really all that wrong to expect private time?)
Writing is catharsis for me. I have written through some really nasty times in my life. I began writing as a way of coping with my mother's chronic illness. When I was five years old, I wrote and illustrated my first story. "It was a sad day. My mom went to the hospital. We went up the elevator. I got to see her. The end." And there was a little stick figure me, with my terribly unruly curly hair, standing beside a stick figure Mom in her hospital bed, the elevator standing open in the background.
I wrote through the discovery of her death after our seven-year estrangement. I literally cried on my keyboard as I processed what was happening to me.
Oh. My. Gosh. My mother is dead. My name is there. She had a funeral. FOUR MONTHS AGO she had a funeral. My heart was sick. I just held my head in my hands. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it. I don’t know how to process this.
But I did know how to process it. I word-processed it, writing down every detail, ever feeling, at the exact moment I was having it. The words saved me, comforted me.
When I started this blog, it was a way to keep track of what my children did, a way to journal our lives for the sake of home learning assessments. But it got away from that, and became essays about life, and that's what my readers enjoyed most, the life essays, and I felt safe writing them, especially the humorous ones. And why not? After all, that's what I enjoy the most when I read. Why shouldn't others enjoy my humorous essays?
The trouble, of course, is that real life isn't always fun, and it isn't always interest and it isn't always fit to print. The argument I had with someone I thought had cared about me, or the victimization I felt about a certain treatment I received, or the nit-picky frustration I experienced when people would let me down. Those things aren't fun to read. And the fact that the other party just may recognize themselves in my words...well, I found that I could be less and less genuine in my writing. And who wants that?
These past two weeks, I've thought a lot about blogging. Is it worth doing, worth fighting for the time to do? Does it serve a purpose? Not just for others, but for me? Is it just a whiny, self-absorbed trend that will embarrass me someday, like legwarmers and feathered hair? Or is this a place where I can be safe to express myself, Devil may care?
"I could be more imaginative if there were no gravity."
grav·i·ty ( P ) Pronunciation Key (grv-t)
n.
Physics.
The natural force of attraction exerted by a celestial body, such as Earth, upon objects at or near its surface, tending to draw them toward the center of the body.
The natural force of attraction between any two massive bodies, which is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.
Gravitation.
Grave consequence; seriousness or importance: They are still quite unaware of the gravity of their problems.
Solemnity or dignity of manner.
If my writing carried with it less grave consequences, less seriousness or importance, I could be free to be more imaginative, more . But is that what I want? Would my writing have any meaning if I eliminated the gravity? Or would it simply float away with no real weight to keep it grounded?
But gravity is a natural force of attraction exerted by a celestial body upon objects, tending to draw them toward the center of the body.
Therein lies my dilemma. I want to be attracted by natural force to center of that celestial body, I want to have weight, to accept that weight, to document my circumstances and let gravity--whether pull or seriousness--have its way. I want to follow that natural law. I want to be honest, real, and dignified.
Yet I also want to be interesting, attractive, appealing, imaginative.
I'm still thinking about all this, you see, trying to find a balance. Balance. That, too, is all about gravity.
So I break my fast with these introspective thoughts, and I ask those of you who still continue to read to bear with me. I'm working on myself, here.
I'm feeling my own weight.
