Absence and the heart

"Oh, the liquor was spilt on the barroom floor! And the bar was closed for the night! The house mouse peeped from his little mouse house! In the glow of the pale moon light!"

What the hell is she singing? Pynchon and I exchanged confused looks as we zipped up the 401 to this unexpected musical accompaniment. The mouse, it turns out, drinks all the spilled liquor off the floor and gets belligerent, looking for the 'gol-darned cat!' Gramma had been coaching Munchkin on the lyrics the whole week she'd had Munchkin to herself Way the Hell Up North.

While Munchkin was on her holiday Up North, I was in England, at a conference, and Pynchon had to stay in Small City to work a ton of overtime, and so our whole little household blew apart to the winds for a week, with no Internet or phone connections between us. And when Pynchon collected me at the airport, and then we collected Munchkin at her Auntie Soosee's, we all looked at each other afresh.

Holding down the home front by himself for the week, Pynchon secured his dream job, full-time and permanent. On her holiday, Munchkin learned how to swim and was determined to now tip the scales at a full 50 pounds. Away in England, I tried to get by for a week with no Internet, by doing yoga on the pebble beach at Brighton. I got a tan. Things are different; we are different.

It's amazing what happens, sometimes, when you give everything a little breathing room.

So, err, yeah. You can see the segue into the blog business coming, right? The blog has had several months of breathing room. I didn't quit, but I didn't write. And now coming back and having a look around, I am both amazed by the detail and richness of the record of my life that's contained here and also by the really incredible community of support and friendship in which it circulates. Circulated? There's a lot of stuff from Munchkin's early years I would not remember if I hadn't written it down here; there's a lot of Stuff from Munchkin's early years I felt at the time like I would not have survived if you hadn't supported me.

But do you know the most amazing thing that's happened since I started this blog? I became Mom. It's a role I now inhabit fully, like I have mothering toes and mothering hair follicles and mothering knuckles. I don't feel like I'm ... pretending, or faking, or muddling, or not-quite-mom-enough yet. That feels pretty good--it feels natural, or at least naturalized, now.

(Yeah. We've got all our ducks all in a row over at our hizzouse.)

I certainly don't mean to suggest that I'm perfectly confident, or free of ambivalence, or well-accomplished, or not sometimes pulled in different directions by different parts of my life (mother, wife, woman, professor, sister, daughter, researcher). That's not it. Rather, I don't think that "Mom" is someone I'm not sure how to be. It's what I am, already, even as some of the tasks associated with the position are ones I haven't tackled yet. Dealing with ever-changing new stuff is part of "Mom," so I guess I'm doing it right.

And so, thinking about what "Mom" means has lost some of its urgency for me, and maybe this is why blogging has lost some of its urgency for me. There is a kind of irony in blogging, a kind of 'meta-' to it, as though writing about what it meant to be a mom would turn me into a mom that knew what it meant to be a mom. I think I know, now.

But I like doing this; I like writing about my family life, if only so that I can remember it later. I like sharing it with however many of you still haven't moved me to the 'defunct' folder of your reader. I have other things going on now, too, now that mothering has become more verbal, more interpersonal, and less physically and psychically gruelling. I'm doing a lot of yoga; I'm more and more engaged in my research work in social media; I am working on my home reno and interior design skills.

All the blogging guides tell you this: find your niche. Maybe it's your passion, maybe it's strategic, but find your little corner of the world and work it like crazy. Do that one thing and do it, do it, do it. So blogging as a new mother seems likely to succeed in the standard ways--pull together an audience, get some numbers, get known, in that small niche. That was then. Blogging for me now, like my mothering, is more diffuse, not so reliably niche-y. More like my life now: really full, but not of the same thing all the time.

"Mimi on the Breach"--it was about me, ostensibly, right from the start. "Me," when I started this (Christ--FOUR YEARS AGO), was about trying to get a toehold on this whole 'Mom' thing. "Me," now, is about more things, not instead of but in addition to mothering. So I guess we'll see what happens now.

Goodness, back when I started, 'Miss Baby' was two months old and went to bed at 2am. I had three reliable commenters (Her Bad Mother, CinnamonGurl-that-was, and Bubandpieand-that-is-now-Bea. Imagine!), and a total weekly readership of six people. Now I get more PR pitch emails every week than I used to have legitimate readers. Weird.

How about you? Are things changing for you? How are your families? How are your lives?