One Year Later

One year! This blog began one year ago, yesterday. Oops, please excuse the passive voice. I started this blog one year ago, yesterday. (Surely, the "I" is central in blogging: something that still makes me nervous). One year of sharing my reactions to dramas big and small in my family, in the media, and in the world.  I'm not sure what possessed me. I'm sure it doesn't feel like a year.

This is actually my second blog. The first one was meant to be an expat-family-log, and only lasted a few posts. When we were preparing to leave New York, a friend told me I should blog about our experiences, and it seemed like a good idea. I stopped because I felt very self-conscious writing about tiny everyday things as they were happening. Our two-and-a-half-years in London were enlightening, life-changing, even--but I was barely able to register how, and in what ways, back when we first arrived.

I knew I wanted to write while we were there, and instead of journaling about the present, I began writing fiction. I wrote story after story, and then, a novel. Just about everything I wrote took place back home in New York. Interestingly, though I had two young children and was pregnant within that time, I wrote very little, if anything, about motherhood. My writing tended to focus on young adults, forging their emerging identities. Perhaps part and parcel of the impulse that kept me from writing about my life in London. Ah, to live the life of the expat writer, examining the familiar from afar.

So, thinking back to a year ago, I wonder what changed. I began this blog soon after I decided I wanted to be a childbirth educator (and have since, indeed, become a LCCE -- Lamaze Certified Childbirth Educator). I imagined a forum in which to write about why birth is important, and why every mother deserves a good birth experience. Identities are formed and re-formed throughout life, and the identity of mother is a big one. How that begins, those first minutes and hours and weeks of motherhood, matter.

But then, as I began to write about the world through my two central identity lenses (that old classic, the Jewish mom), I found that the topics on here varied far and wide from pregnancy and birth. The becoming is still interesting to me. But the journey is equally important.

I love reading everyone's responses to posts, and the feeling of community--that we're all in this together--is heartening, indeed. Thanks for reading, and for giving me the support I've needed to keep it going.

Blogging Break

This blog began one month ago, yesterday. A month of blogging! And guess what? I'm exhausted. Oh, I love the writing. And I love, after years of writing for an audience of myself and my writing partners (fiction, but still...), hearing from readers in comments and emails. As I said to a former writing teacher, "funny, everything I write, now, gets published!"

But, I've come to realize that that blogging requires, or attaches the blogger to, a level of internet connectivity that is hard to control or turn off. For years, I would log on to Facebook only when someone contacted me, or tagged me, or friended me. Lately, I'm checking the FB app like it's my email (i.e.: too much). I've also had an education in Feedburner, Twitter, Hoot Suite, LinkedIn, and Google+. Yes, my head is spinning, too.

Lucky for me, my family is going on vacation next week. Thanks to good ol' George Washington's birthday, we're in for some good ol' R&R. For me, among other things, that will mean a break from blogging, and from newfangled social networks. The old-fashioned kind--that is, conversation with friends and family whom I can see and touch--will do me just fine.

I may even read a book. On paper. (No, let's be honest: that won't happen...but I'll read on the Kindle--the kind that doesn't have internet--rather than my phone.)  Baby steps.