I’ve just spent the weekend potting flowers. Incredibly hard to believe it, but it’s true. Hard to believe because:

1) I hate gardening
2) We’re talking the waking hours of 9am – 1700pm, which equates to roughly (minus lunch, pee breaks, pause to weep copiously and ponder paving over our garden) 8 hours per day, so that’s 16 hours of the little buggers
3) How much time does it take to pop a plant out of styrofoam and plant it anyway, lady?

Getting ready for summer – which is unlikely to appear here anyway, given that it was hotter than the sun while we were in the States – is so exhausting I’d like to know when the relaxation will come.

I’ve been ferociously busy with work. This is no way complaining nor am I remotely bad mouthing anything. You probably know how it is – there are some times when things are just bobbing along, you work your 40+ hours a week, and there are other times when it heads upwards of 70 hours a week. This is one of those times.

I’ve also been quiet as I start to construct life the way it should be for me, moving forward. I’ve spent the weekend tearing down sheaths of my photos and making them private, particularly anything self-portrait-y, anything remotely racy, and anything involving the children’s faces. I think it’s right – although I am proud of a lot of those photos (and let’s be honest, a good number of them are crap) I work in the type of position where it’s not immoral or unethical to have those kinds of photos, but it won’t exactly help my street credibility if I’m trying to strong arm a meeting and someone pulls out a photo of me wearing precious little.

The blog is changing too – comments are only open for 3 days (that’s a way of helping deal with the spam more than anything else) and I will also start to password protect most of the posts from the past that I have written here, apart from ones that do not indict the following: family, my mental health, presidents, the dog, my ex-husband, and the beatification of the avocado, which I am a full supporter of. Santa Stories, recipes, and some posts will remain all that is open and online as well as posts moving forward. The archives will exist under password and I am happy to hand out that password. This will sound strange for someone who’s been blogging for donkey’s, but the truth is this: the past is the past. Who I was eight years ago is not who I am today. I am not ashamed of who I was although yes, my screw ups were many, and I am not embarrassed to have gone through a lot of the things I have and to have explored those things out here, for the world to see. It made me who I am today. It healed me.

But that’s who I was. That’s not who I am. If we are a sum of our parts, fine, but my parts don’t need to hang around as a constant reminder. I can’t delete the posts because re-reading them reminds me of the journey I’ve been on (pause while I gag and vomit because I’ve just written the most naff and clichéd sentence ever). But I am aware that living life, as it were, so publicly can only mean that one day it will all get discovered. It already has been found by a few colleagues. I’m preparing to be a bit more open about being a blogger and about having a site. I’m not going to throw the doors open, but once they do get opened I’d prefer not to spend all my time hiding who I am or – worse – deleting the whole thing. I’m also going to start to post some of the fiction that I’ve been working on, mostly to gauge if there’s anything worth trying to publish. We’ll see how that goes.

Mostly, this site is going to be mine again. I used to post 5 days a week, every week. I no longer do that and doubt I will return to that, even if I did have the free time to do so. Saying that, the one thing I miss is a place to park my observations and musings – about life, EDS, nature vs nurture, why no one has given me a robot that cleans and tidies after every meal… This site will be that, a place to do exactly that, and those observations will be public and open for the wider internet. My parenting posts are going to be more anecdotal, because as three and a half year olds, the development posts are more for me than for them. And while I am only human and naturally take criticism with difficulty (who doesn’t? Is anyone so thick skinned that they don’t care?) what I don’t like is the criticism of my two little people. I get that this is the internet and people have opinions, and that writing about things on the web opens things up to opinions. But I don’t have to love it when people give me shit that they’re not doing X, Y or Z or that maybe one of them has a problem. There’s no relevance in saying that no, they’re not potty trained but can solve quadratic equations and recite pi to 100 decimals*. They are a huge part of my life, though, and it’s a shame in a way that some of the honesty will be privatized, but they are my little people and they will be making the occasional literary appearance.

But for now – work.

And recovering from gardening which, holy hell – that’s some hard work, Ubu.

-S.

* Lest I start getting the hate mail on my pretentious two, although yes, they are both potty trained (which happened practically overnight, when they decided they were ready), no – of course they can’t solve quadratic equations and pi, in this house, is something that you eat.