No baby. No blog. What, then?

In the time since I last blogged, I could have had a BABY.

Nine Months. Enough time to make an entire human being--and I don't even have a lousy blog post to show for it.

It's like the opposite of being pregnant--a concave stomach that sucks more and more inward until my stomach is stuck to my spine and I have to lean backward just to keep from folding in half. No baby. No blog. What, then?

What is my grand excuse for not documenting these precious, never-can-get-them-back months of my offsprings' fleeting childhoods?

Now, don't think I'm going to go pawning the blame off on someone or something for this deficiency. I take absolute full responsibility. My fault. My problem. All me.

But there is this one little hiccup.

It's the constant running dialogue in my mind between myself and the hypothetical 'anyone who cares' (or even 'doesn't care but will listen anyway.') I yap on and on in my head, sharing my thoughts, observations, opinions and sentiments with this great hypothetical listener, and darn it if this hypothetical ear isn't such a great listener, that my thoughts don't get very far past it. Who needs the therapy of pounding away at a keyboard when such efficient telepathy exists?

But thinking instead of writing means the moments are lost and Jim Croce frowns down upon me from his great pillow in the sky as I bypass the closest method we have to saving time in a bottle. That's what blogging comes down to for me--making moments stick that otherwise disappear, and here I am letting them go.



Oprah is likewise displeased. I was three years behind on Oprah shows when her last-ever episode aired, but in my heart, I've been a committed Oprah fan since the days she kept me company during endless hours of nursing my first-born child. The least I could do was send her off with a few tears. And of course she sent me off with a few of my own. These were her final instructions:

"I want you to know as this show ends: Each one of you has your own platform. Do not let the trappings here fool you. Mine is a stage in a studio, yours is wherever you are with your own reach, however small or however large that reach is. Maybe it’s 20 people, maybe it’s 30 people, 40 people, your family, your friends, your neighbors, your classmates, your classroom, your co-workers. Wherever you are, that is your platform, your stage, your circle of influence. That is your talk show, and that is where your power lies. In every way, in every day, you are showing people exactly who you are. You’re letting your life speak for you. And when you do that, you will receive in direct proportion to how you give in whatever platform you have."

Her words resonated deeply with me. I am a mother and my family is my platform. It is my job to savor each moment, maximize the experience, and use every moment of every day to serve my circle of influence. But as my heart thumped a rhythmic sound of triumph and renewal, I realized it was not my heart at all. It was, in fact, my three year old scraping something against the outside windows, over and over again.

I checked.

It was a knife. A really sharp one.

And he had slashed two out of three screens covering the front bay windows.





So much for my personal platform.

I felt drained. Withered. Defeated. Betrayed. This is what I get for turning my attention to a TV show for five inspirational minutes! (And you wonder why I had to give you up in the first place, Oprah?) In that moment, I felt smaller than the world's cutest hot dog.



Oprah was Oprah, bidding farewell to the tens of millions of lives she had touched with her show, and I was...me...staring at slashed screens and realizing that my own small circle of influence was currently not influencing much good.

It took all the energy I didn't have to firmly tell my son "we don't use mama's sharp knife."

He promptly stopped what he was doing and took the knife inside through the side door. Wow. That was a fast, cooperative response. Sure the screens were slashed, but did you hear how quickly he obeyed?

I went inside the front door to continue our lesson on not slashing screens but he was nowhere to be found. And then, the same scraping sound as before. My stomach dropped.

Now he was at the third screen.

At this point I was beyond a failure of a mother, but before I could check myself into an institution, I noticed one small detail. My son was now using a butter knife.

He didn't know slashing screens was not okay. We hadn't gotten to that point in the reprimandation. What he did know was that "we don't use mama's sharp knife" so he replaced it with a dull one. He had been exploring his world and learning that knives cut mesh screens. (Awesome discovery, by the way.) And if sharp knives weren't okay, then butter knives must be. Pretty smart logic if you think about it.

So maybe my platform was still intact in its own, humble little way.

I promised Oprah that day that I would get back on the blog wagon. Mostly because it's the best way I know to commit these moments to memory. I didn't start during summer vacation because of that key word "vacation"...but now it's back to school for the kids, and back to the keyboard for mom, where I will busily plunk away at documenting the good, the bad and the mom-ly.

So out with the thinking and in with the writing. We get one chance to bottle time, and I don't want empty jars.