Sunrise, Sunset... (Dispatch from Utopia)
I’ve been quiet the past few weeks because our family was up to our necks in the mucky ending of the first semester and I had to go into Family Project Manager overdrive mode. We all got through it, to greater and lesser degrees of success. I won’t go into detail, because my kids are in 11th and 7th grades, and their academic comings and goings aren’t my business to share in public.
Really, very little about my kids’ lives is mine to share in public anymore. I ask for their permission before I post photos of them on social media (and it’s rarely granted), and I resist the urge to repeat the funny things they’ve said without their consent. The kids still feel like a part of me. In my head, their lives are still completely entwined in and dependent on mine, but that simply isn’t true anymore. It’s just nostalgia and habit on my part. Their stories are theirs alone to tell.
When my oldest was born, I had a blog. Many, many photos and stories about him went out onto the internet. He became the star of the show. By the time the second was born, the blog was dead, and I mostly posted baby photos and cute quotes on social media. When I did that—both the blogging and the social media post—it was ostensibly about the kids, but really it was always about me. Me as a mother. Me as reflected in my babies. Natural, normal, fine. Motherhood felt like my entire identity when the kids were younger, because it was what occupied most of my waking hours. So of course much of what I thought and said and wrote was filtered through that lens.
That changed as the kids got older, but I didn’t fully register the shift until recently, when a younger writer friend whose kids are still quite small asked if I was writing something from a “mom angle.” And no, I wasn’t. In fact, my first thought was, “Why would I do that?” My perspective of myself and my writing and the way I tell my own stories in the world has changed so much from the days when everything was about life as a mother because I was soaking in it—and some days drowning in it.
So much of my kid-focused writing in the early parenting days was about needing to be seen—to be assured that I wasn’t disappearing—but feeling like I had only my kids and the domestic to put forward as proof of life. (It isn’t a coincidence that I finally finished and sold my first novel when my youngest started preschool.)
My blog started out, pre-kids, as a knitting blog called Dogs Steal Yarn. (Those were strange and wonderful days on the internet.) When we left New York for Portland when my oldest was a year and a half old, I renamed the blog Dispatches from Utopia. The title was a joke. I hadn’t wanted to leave New York. I hadn’t wanted to move to Portland. I was unhappy in Portland at a time (2007) when all of the breathless press releases would have you believe that Portland is the perfect place to live. (It wasn’t. It isn’t. No place is.) The blog became a place where I pretended to be happy, hoping that if I could convince others, I could convince myself. I was trying to talk myself into loving my new city. It didn’t work.
On one of the last personal posts on that blog, someone left a comment saying that they were “tired of [my] utopia.” The implication was: “This isn’t what I read your blog for. Dance for me, blog girl.” You know what? Years later, I’m still pissed about that comment. Fuck her, whoever she was. Anyone with any reading comprehension could have seen how unhappy I was, and how hard I was trying. I dropped the personal blogging, even though I had a pretty large readership and it had brought me community and friendships over the five years I’d maintained it. I moved over to Twitter and started posting about my lunches and what the kid was doing in 120-character bites.
So I went from one validation-seeking engine to another. And here I am still: human. Happier. I still don’t love living in Portland, but my kids do, and my husband does, and so it’s fine. It’s fine.
These days: new joys, new terrors. The oldest is a high school junior, and I’m occasionally struck, even overwhelmed, by the fact that we are somehow almost done raising him. How is that possible? He only has a year and a half left before he goes off to college, and though he’ll still need us, the relationship will change. (Cue “Sunrise, Sunset,” not a dry eye in the house.)