Losing my biggest fan

I have been terribly absent from this place.  I’m not sure anyone notices.  I’m not one of those big time bloggers who has thousands of followers and sponsors.  If I was, I’m sure I would have been fired by now.  I’ve always done this space for me.  Gathering thoughts, chronicling our lives, putting things out there in the universe to remind me what I’ve thought is important in our lives or the world.

But things they are a changing.  Many of the big gaps in my blogging are due to stupid mundane things like misplacing the magic connection cord thingy that lets my camera talk to my computer.  (This has happened way more than I’d like to admit….)  But ironically enough, I’ve also found myself go silent when big things, painful things happen.  I think a lot of people who blog might find this to be true, even if like me you suppose that only a handful of people, most of them related to you and therefore obligated, read what you write or look at the pictures you post.

me and Mom, Mt. Bonnell in the 90's

I’ve joked before that only my mother and three other people out there read my blog.  The total tally may or may not be true.  I let myself look at how many people were following me on Pinterest one day, then briefly compared it to my friends, and then realized how incredibly junior highesh I felt (Why didn’t I get invited to that girl’s party?  Why does know one like me?).  Now one of the really painful things makes that statement untrue, whether the overall total is right or wrong.  Now my mother is not here to read this.  She died August 29, 2012.  And that makes me incredibly sad.  

She was my biggest fan, and the most complicated relationship in my life.  She loved seeing pictures of my boys, and would occasionally say “I checked your blog, but you haven’t posted anything lately.”  I spoke with her often, but the pictures were another way to stay connected over distance. 

 the Grand Canyon, 1991?

So now, with her gone, I want to get back to blogging, but maybe do some of it a little differently.  Even before my mother died, much had changed or happened in my life that is important to me.  Much of it has gone unnoted here.  Although it’s been over two years, our foster daughter went back home to her family.  That event, and the experience with CPS and the previous 18 months she spent with us, were incredibly life changing and educational.  A little over a year ago, I went back to school part-time, trying to finally finish my undergraduate degree.  And this past summer, I got a part-time job.  A real, paying, part-time job, which I’m loving.  All these experiences have introduced me to people and ideas and websites and books that I think have value and are important.  I think I want to start noting some of these things here.

This does not mean that I won’t still chronicle other aspects of our lives here.  I still consider mothering my main gig, and if I do say so, I have some pretty handsome young men in my house and I’d like to keep including pictures of our adventures.  But it turns out that older children are a lot less agreeable to having you post cute pictures of them sleeping or perhaps dancing gangnam style.  And who knew, teenagers like their privacy!  While the 10-year-old is enough of a ham that he’s pretty amenable, and the teenager probably doesn’t me mind lauding more and more grownup type achievements, like getting his Learner’s Permit, I’m ready to mix it up more, and share some of the really interesting things I’m learning about through my college classes and my work teaching adults English, and just all the neat things I learn from the incredible people I’m privileged to call my friends and family.

So for the other 3 of you that were the loyal readers with my mom, hopefully I won’t bore you terribly, and you can carry the load.  She’s left a pretty big hole.

in memoriam

Peggy Joyce Harper Waller

April 11, 1937-August 29, 2012

St. Mark's Square, Venice