cacophony

I remember the day after Granny died, I went in the early afternoon with Mama and Daddy to her house. It seems, now, like there were so many people there. I walked in, down the couple of steps that led to the living room, and looked to my right. She had been there, in a hosptial bed right there in her own home, for so long — to a child’s mind, it seemed like that bed had been there for years, but I know it couldn’t really have been that long. And now she wasn’t there, and my vision went blurry. I turned away — look somewhere else, anywhere else, to avoid the void where Granny should have been. Turning my head to my left, I looked down the long hallway toward her bedroom. Gramps was walking toward me, talking to someone else as he walked down the hall. But as soon as he saw me, wildly looking for something to anchor my eyes, anchor my heart — he held out his arms to me. I went flying into them, nearly tripping over the step up into the hallway, grief bubbling up through my eyes and down my face in hot, salty tears. He pulled me to him, held on to me tight enough that, finally, I didn’t feel like I was going to go flying apart, and he said “We’re sure going to miss her, aren’t we?”

I don’t remember another time, either before or since, that he has just held me, offered comfort or affection so freely. I don’t remember what I said in response or how long it was before Daddy gently pried me from his arms. I just remember that for the first time since Daddy had told me “Granny died last night,” I felt solid. Looking back, as an adult, I recognize what a shattering loss he had just suffered, but he took the time — no, made the effort — to reach out to a desperate little girl. I am so thankful that I have that memory.

I remember when Gramps got married again, but not in any real sense, not in any detail. I was still quite young — maybe ten years old? I have a vague recollection of sky-high ceilings and impossible amounts of glass in the church, of his wife standing at the altar in a pale blue dress, of all my cousins in little bunches and clusters making noise. The only real memory I have of the whole affair is that I put a toothpick into the meaty part of my palm during the reception, like a freakishly large splinter, and the arresting pain that it caused. I used wads of monogrammed napkins to stem the bleeding. The marriage is almost less memorable than the wedding, save the animosity that bled through the entire family.

A home I’d once considered just as much my own as mine was now a place no one liked for me to be. If I went to visit, his wife shadowed me around (where before I’d had free reign) and told me not to touch things; when I told Mama and Daddy where I’d been, I got tight, thinned lips and distant eyes. Only my reception from Gramps never changed — I got the same distracted greeting and general nonrecognition that I was there that he had always given me. There was much comfort in its familiarity. Eventually I gave up visiting, as did most of the family, and by the time I was a teen I didn’t even remember to call him on his birthday, or Father’s Day, or any other day. I think there may have been times I went years without seeing him. He was no more to me, in action, than an acquaintance — though I mourned for Granny nearly daily.

I remember when his wife told him she wanted a divorce. I was married and mother to a seven-week-old infant by then; he was more than 80 years old and his wife of more than 15 years said “I want you to leave.” He was legally blind, nearly deaf, in poor health, and it was shortly before Christmas. Where was he to go? I was stunned by the news. I remember I was sitting in the living room of my parents’ home, hooked up to my breastpump, when my fahter came in the door leading his father, who was shuffling slowly along, holding tightly to Daddy’s arm. I have never seen a person — in gait, posture, air — look so defeated as my grandfather. Daddy was angry with me, but for once in my life that didn’t matter to me because I was too focused on Gramps, and on how sad it made me to watch him move into the room. During that short trip to Mississippi, I probably spoke with Gramps more than I had in the previous ten years combined, and it made me ashamed that I’d not made more effort before.

He complimented me on my son many times, always exactly the same words. “He’s such a good looking boy.” And one night, he shuffled over to us and reached down and took Nate’s hand — reaching out in a way I’d never seen from him in my lifetime, save that one moment in the hallway in his home — and asked Nate if he liked stories. “When you get older,” he said, “I’ll tell you The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. My sons used to love that story.” Daddy, listening, said “We just liked the voices you used when you told it, Dad.” Gramps just smiled, then let go of Nate’s hand and shuffled back to his chair. But then, at that moment, I knew in a way I’d never known before that he loved us, loved me and loved my son. The vision of him standing there, holding my son’s tiny hand, is the second most vivid memory I have of my grandfather.

I remember when he got married for the third time. After a long, ugly, bitter divorce was finalized, he was determined to start his new marriage quickly. At 86, an age where most people considered him far too old to be setting out in a new marriage, he stood at the altar once again and made vows to a woman he loved. I don’t think I remember hearing him say a single word the entire day other than his vows. Watching him and his wife at the reception, I knew that this marriage was a good thing. I was struck by how sweet and how caring his wife was, how interested she was in getting to know and be part of his family, how easily she seemed as if she’d been part of our lives, and his, for a long, long time. I knew this was good, and it made me happy.

Gramps turns 88 years old today. He will not, barring something completely”miraculous” (for lack of a better term), celebrate his 89th birthday. He is currently in hospice care (though at home), suffering from advanced stage Parkinson’s disease, and the estimates from the doctor on “how long” range from 3 weeks to 6 months. He has good days and bad days. There is something of a war raging between his five children about how the end days of his life should play out, and there is a fringe of sadness in my mind every time I think about him.

But I cannot be truly sad; I can’t be heartbroken. He is suffering, and when he returns to the Earth that suffering will be over. His life has been an incredible adventure. He followed many of his dreams and had an amazing array of experiences in his lifetime, things that I could only dream of doing. He spent much of his time pursuing his great loves (like fishing, and gambling, and owning hotels) and there are not too many of us that can say that is what we spent our lives doing — chasing our passions. In his lifetime, he owned a bowling alley, a Vegas casino, a resort, multiple hotels, and things I am sure I am forgetting. He had private planes and boats and beach houses available to take him to the water, put him in his nirvana, at a moment’s notice. He knew the love of an incredibly strong, passionate, amazing woman — with whom he had five children. He has the love of a lovely, caring, warm and delightful woman to carry him through the last years of his life. He did the things he wanted to do in life, and has a rich and fascinating tapestry of a lifetime to look back on now. He has five children, 18 grandchildren, and 24 great-grandchildren that have shared his life and will now “carry on” his legacy.

So, today, I will celebrate the man he is and the life he’s had. I will mourn, a little bit, that I didn’t bother to pursue a closer relationship with him. I will remember those very few, but cherished, moments of stunning connection that I have had with him. He is the last of my living grandparents, and I am lucky to have him as a grandfather.

Happy birthday, Gramps. I love you.

I went to the mountains;
I looked to the children, I drank from the fountains.
There’s more than one answer to these questions,
Pointing me in a crooked line.
–The Indigo Girls, “Closer to Fine”

I went back to see my RE (reproductive endocrinologist — read “fertility doctor”) yesterday. It has been over four months since he confirmed what I’ve, really, known for a long, long time — that I have PCOS. I remember the very first time I read about this disorder, I thought “Holy shit. I have this.” But it took me over a year to make it to a doctor to ask about it, and another six months to find a doctor who would, instead of smiling and nodding, actually run some tests and do something to treat it.

PCOS is polycystic ovarian syndrome. It’s the most common endocrine disorder in women, and I’ve seen it estimated that as many as 10% of women have it. It’s a metabolic “disease,” of all things. Basically, it means my insulin is fucked up. Now really, no one should be surprised that I have fucked up insulin — the history of diabetes in my family is very, very strong. I have believed, in a fatalistic way, pretty much all my life that I was doomed to get diabetes and there was nothing I could do about it. What I didn’t expect was that I could start having problems with my insulin long before I had diabetes.

So my insulin doesn’t work very effectively, and my body reacts to that by releasing much more insulin than I need — biological overcompensation. (This tendency will eventually cause my insulin to work less and less well, which essentially means that yes, I’ll eventually become diabetic.) The combination of the poorly working insulin and the overproduced insulin does VERY strange things to my body. It’s a little surprising, in reality, to realize all the things that it has an effect on.

It causes my body to produce too much testosterone. Too much testosterone, in people with girly parts, isn’t a good thing. It leads to things like: hair on the face, extra weight around the midsection and a body shape more like a man than a woman, acne, and a slew of other things I’m forgetting right now. While I don’t (luckily) have all those symptoms — my level of testosterone is not terribly bad — I have a couple, the most notable being that I carry my extra weight in my midsection. It can cause high cholesterol.

It causes my ovaries to essentially go batshit insane. Basic biology lesson: when a woman is born, she already has all the eggs that she will need for a lifetime — she never produces anymore (unlike men, who are constantly “reloading” their supply of gametes). Ovulation is the process of releasing those eggs. In a “normal” woman’s cycle, several follicles (which contain egg cells) begin to grow in the ovary toward the beginning of the cycle. As the cycle progresses, ONE (and occasionally more) of those follicles continues to grow larger and mature, while the others essentially disintegrate. (I have no idea how the lucky follicle is chosen.) That follicle accumulates fluid and grows quite large, until a surge of a particular hormone (lutenizing hormone, to be exact) causes the follicle to reach maturation and burst (along with the wall of the ovary), thereby releasing the egg. As you’ve probably figured out by now, this is not how it works in women with PCOS. Our ovaries get “stuck.” Instead of having several follicles which start to grow, and one follicle which completely matures, we have a LOT of follicles which begin to grow — and none that mature. Our ovaries are left with multiple small follicles that are going nowhere. On ultrasound, these tiny follicles show up as “cysts” — leading to the “polycystic” label. So — most women with PCOS don’t ovulate, and because we don’t ovulate, the hormonal cascade that begins with ovulation and ends with menstruation doesn’t happen. This means we tend to have very, very irregular cycles (a lot of us can go months and months without eveer having a period). I am completley unclear on the mechanism by which the problem with INSULIN leads to the hormonal problems with testosterone, estrogen, and other hormones involved in this process — but it is well documented that it does.

So there’s no real test for PCOS. They can check hormone levels, and free insulin levels (though from what I understand that’s a difficult thing to test), and they can do an ultrasound to check for polycystic ovaries — and if they see those things (particularly the cysts) then they can say pretty confidently “Yes, you have this syndrome.” But the reverse is not true. If they don’t see all those things, they still can’t say for sure “No, you don’t have it.” Even the polycystic ovaried are not required to be present for a diagnosis of PCOS. There is a quiz, that can help you determine if you likely have PCOS or not, and when I took it I scored sky high. Even though I was pretty confident that I had this disease, I was stunned when they did an ultrasound and one of my ovaries showed up with “lots and LOTS” of tiny follicles — as the doctor said, “VERY polycystic.” (Only one, though. The other ovary was normal.) I can’t say why it shocked me so much, but I was fully expecting to have totally normal ovaries — and nearly cried when he told me about the cysts. I can’t explain that reaction, but it was there.

So what’s the treatment for PCOS? Unsurprisingly, it’s the same as the treatment for diabetes — diet, exercise, and a medication called metformin which help your insulin to work better. The best treatment for it is to lose weight — though, as the doctor said, it’s like the ultimate cruelty — you tell a group of people that weight loss will help immensely to treat their disease, but in the same breath tell them the mechanism of the disease will make it very, very difficult for them to lose weight. It does kind of make me laugh. But if the metformin does what it’s supposed to do, and helps my insulin “behave,” then it should be easier to lose weight because I won’t be trying to fight my body every step of the way. And then he threw a number out there that stunned me. (I’m not going to get into specifics about what that number is, or how it compares to the number I see on the scale now, because I’m just vain enough not to want to — and embarrassed about being that vain.) A number I haven’t seen since I was in high school and my mother was calling me her “anorexic child.” And that has really thrown me for a loop– because I can’t imagine it. And I just don’t know how it’s going to be possible for me to achieve a goal that I can’t, even in the vaguest way, visualize. And then I get scared that if I can’t make it that far, to that number, it’s not going to do any good anyway and I’ll never get “well.” So I’m trying very hard to put the number out of my head, and just focus on the next baby step in this journey back to being healthy.

When I went in yesterday, I’d lost 18 pounds since the first visit, according to his scale. And he’s thrilled, and I’m thrilled — but it hasn’t helped yet. I’m still not ovulating regularly — occasionally, but not regularly. He laid out all my options for me — and there are so many. I can keep doing what I’m doing, and just wait — he says I’m still very young (it’s funny; I feel so very old to still be in this baby chase) and we have time to see if continued weight loss works magic. I can increase my dose of Metformin. I can do some more testing to see if there are other factors involved. I can start on an ovulation inducing drug (though with PCOS patients, particularly those on Met, that leads to a significant risk of multiples). More than one answer to these questions . . . And he is comfortable with whichever I choose, because he doesn’t think I need to be in a hurry. When my son is asking me every day “Is there a baby in your belly yet? Am I going to have a baby brother or sister? When is my baby brother going to be here? When I have a baby brother or sister I’m going to . . . ” then it doesn’t seem like I have much time. Every day that ticks away is a bigger gap between my children, and I’m struggling to accept that. But. But. That’s not a good enough reason to rush into things, because no matter how wide the gap — they will still be siblings.

In the end, we decided to increase my Met doseage from 1000 to 1500 mg a day.

So now I just wait, and see, and watch those days tick by without a damn thing I can do to stop them.

“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” Henry David Thoreau

“What do you want to be when you grow up?”

I have been hearing that question, it seems, forever. People started asking me (and, I imagine, most everybody else) when I was very little. Certainly much too little to have a reasonable answer. When you’re five, you don’t have even the tiniest inkling of the real world of opportunities out there. But still, I had an answer. I wanted to be a teacher.

That answer changed over the years. I went through phases, as I imagine every child does. There were times when I wanted to be a doctor (a pediatrician, to be exact), wanted to be a singer, wanted to be an astronaut, wanted to be an archaeologist, wanted to be . . . . I could go on and on. But those things were just phases, things that caught my fancy at some point. They were never things I was driven to do.

Somewhere in my growing up years, though, I found some real dreams. I discovered the things I was driven to do. And one of them was that same thing I told people when I was five years old — I wanted to be a teacher.

My mother said she wouldn’t pay for me to go to college if I was going to be a teacher. So I packed that dream away and studied chemistry, and then went on to graduate school — and I woke up one day and realized “I really want to be a teacher.” So I went out and did it, and making that happen was probably among the most fulfilling things I’ve ever done.

I also always knew that I wanted to be a mother. It took me what feels like forever to get there — many if not most of the people I went to high school with had babies in their early 20s. I did not get pregnant until I was 26 and had been married for 4 years. At the time, it felt so old. Now I am turning 31 in a week, and I still have only one child. This is not where I expected to be in my life. I always assumed I’d be done having babies by the time I was 30.

What farce it is to make plans like that.

But even though my family is not as I pictured it, I am a mother; and it is just as big, as much, as I thought it would be. It is, I say repeatedly, what I was born to do, and I can’t imagine anything more right.

But. I don’t think I’ll ever be content if “mother” is all that I am.

The final dream I remember having in school was being a writer. I desperately wish, even now, that I could make my living writing. I call myself a writer, and I do write. But I’ve never made a cent from it. That probably makes me nothing but a filthy liar calling myself a writer, but I’m pretty comfortable with that. Still having one dream, though, that I haven’t achieved? It pushes me. It makes me want to push myself so that I can get there, so that I can say I have accomplished all my childhood dreams. I got a typewriter for my eighth birthday from my parents so that I could type my stories. My father used to tell me that my writing was his retirement plan. I was SO passionate about writing as a high schooler — it makes me embarrassed that I’ve never published anything, that I’ve not done any serious writing since high school. (And the stuff I wrote in high school is . . . . bad. I reread some of it recently, and I was appalled. I can only hope than in the intervening decade plus, I’ve gotten better at it.)

But I’ve grown, too, in the many years since high school — and I can’t say how thankful I am that this is true. (I have heard many people say that high school was the “best years of my life.” It has always made me sad to hear that, and as a teenager I feared that I would be one of those people — and I found the thought frankly terrifying. I am so very thankful every day that my life has not turned out that way.) I have added some new dreams — and they almost all center on one common theme.

I am driven to create. I want to be a photographer. I want to be an artist. I want to be a master knitter. I want to be a bookmaker. I want, I want, I want . . . I want to take this force that is inside, that pushes at me and makes me so discontent, that pulls at me until I want to scream with the power of it, and use it to bring new things into being. There is so much in my head, in my spirit, that I struggle to find expression for — and these dreams, these desires, are among the strongest I’ve ever known.

I have a huge new dream — I want to get an MFA, in one of three areas — book arts, photography, or creative writing. The most likely of those three is photography, and it would make me over-the-moon happy. This is a crazy, impractical, probably impossible dream — it would essentially be throwing money away, I’d have to find a way to make my life work around it, I may have to get another undergraduate degree to even get into a program, I may not be accepted to a program even if I did have another degree, and and and . . . there are so many reasons NOT to pursue this dream.

And only one reason to do so — because I WANT to.

I don’t think that’s a big enough reason.

This is my life history spread out on my kitchen table:

Seventeen years of personal history.

Seems like it should be a bigger pile — but there were some long silences.

The first journal is the purple one at the bottom, with the lock. Looking at it tonight, I realize that at some point I tore out about half the pages. So while it’s true that I have been keeping a journal since I was in the sixth grade, I actually only have entries dating back to the seventh grade. That makes me a little sad.

The first eight entries are all about a boy — the rise and fall of a relationship in 10 days — at least, that incarnation of the relationship. Those particular entries happen to be about Thomas William, the first boy I kissed, the constant boy in my life from the first day of seventh grade until the day I told him I was getting married. (I haven’t talked to him since. He was, apparently, even angrier with me than I realized that day.) This journal is filled with scintillating writing such as “March 12, 1989. Nothing much happened today. I sat around and moped, watching TV, playing Nintendo, reading, imagining. Imagining a lot about Tommy. I still like him, but I hate him for breaking up with me. It’s not fair. I’ll never talk to him again.” High quality stuff. That journal ends with — shockingly — “I’m falling more and more in love with Tommy every time I see him.” (And, in the end, that continued to be true for many years. I can’t think if a single moment in high school that doesn’t have Thomas William woven through it.)

The journals got better. I got more real with myself. I got more honest. The small book with flowers all over it is among my favorite material things in the world — and there’s not a single “entry” more than two paragraphs long. It’s just a collection of random thoughts, images, and dreams from my last year of high school and my first year of college. The journal with the heart on the front is almost solely letters to an ex-boyfriend, in which I came to terms with some nasty stuff in my past that was affecting my ability to form solid relationships. I don’t ever reread that journal; it is too painful. There’s one book that I kept while I was in recovery from depression, finally getting treatment, and I read through that one whenever I want to be astonished by myself. There’s one that is more an art journal than a personal journal — and I love that one. I love to leaf through it; the riot of color is fun.

I love these books. They are mostly boring as hell; they contain nothing earth shattering, and very little even interesting. They can be humiliating in their superficiality, but every so often they are stunning — at least to me — in their truth. I would not be who I am without this history, captured in just this way.

I love this photo.

It’s not great photography — The logo on his shirt is distracting, the knee in the frame is distracting, he’s on the wrong side of the bench, looking out of the frame.

But. I love it anyway. I love the color and the backlighting and the DOF and the texture of the bench.

And I love the expression on his face, and the gesture with his hand.

My boy is a storyteller. He loves to make up long, rambling tales in his head and share them with anyone who will listen. And I do mean anyone who will listen. He talks to everybody. All the strangers we see in a day — at the store, on a walk, in the doctor’s office — if there are people there, he’s talking to them. For his Mama, who is painfully shy, this is a difficult habit of his — I have to battle with the need to shush him, or to apologize for him, daily — even though he’s doing nothing wrong. I am learning. He teaches me, challenges me, as much as I do him, I think. I am a better, more complete person for being a mother to this child.

He was out riding his tricycle when he decided he wanted to rest on the bench for a few minutes. Crouched down in front of him, I asked him what he was thinking about. And there’s my little storyteller. He tells me about the race he’s in on his tricycle, who’s winning, how fast he can go. He gets so excited. He’s got that grin on his face, and in that moment, I don’t think he remembers that I’m there. He’s lost in the world in his head, seeing things no one else can see when he looks out at the street.

This is one of the things I love about photography, particularly people photography. This is a glimpse into his world, and at the same time, a glimpse into my brain. I love looking at photographs because I love seeing the world through someone else’s eyes. I love taking photographs because I love capturing what the world looks like through my eyes, for just a moment. No one else would have taken exactly this photo. Someone else would have seen something completely different.

I learn a little something new about the world every time I look at a photograph.

I guess it’s an indication that I’m growing up, or have grown up, but when the phone rings at 11:30 pm, it gives me that tingling feeling on the back of my neck, makes my shoulders scrunch up and my mouth go dry, and my stomach feels like it does when I’m on a really quick elevator. As it happens, I was on the phone last night when the other line beeped at 11:30.

“Oh shit. Hold on a sec; that’s my sister little; this is BAD.”

“We’re at the ER. He’s got a fever of 102° and he can’t breathe for shit.”

Funny that; now I can’t either.

. . .

Nine days ago a surgeon split my father’s sternum in half and did all kinds of nasty things to his heart. It’s supposed to make him better. He had his aortic valve replaced, had a bypass done, and had a procedure done that is supposed to fix his afib problem — which involved the surgeon essentially making lots of gashes in his heart tissue. He was recovering well and got to go home exactly a week after the surgery, on Monday.

But last night he ended up in the ER with a fever and short of breath. Now he has been readmitted to the hospital with pneumonia.

This is not supposed to happen to my Daddy. And it’s completely selfish of me to feel this way; I’m angry. Angry that my rock, the larger-than-life solid presence that has been there, unflinchingly, all through my life, is flinching. It makes me crazy with grief, and fear, but also with anger, and that makes me feel ashamed.

. . .

I was probably eight. We were at the beach house in Pensacola. The sky was the most vibrant blue, like a watercolor painting, stringy pitiful white clouds moving chasing each other around on the horizon. The wind was the kind that puts some stiffness in your back, makes you set your shoulders. I didn’t want to go in the water because it looked angry, churning and swirling around like it was just waiting to have a chance to destroy something. There were a few brave surfer souls out on the water, and I watched them fall, get knocked down, get dragged under, over and over again and I didn’t want to go in the water.

Daddy said “Yes. You’re going,” and he picked me up and carried me out into it, while I kicked and both tried to get away and clung to him at the same time. When he got far enough out that he was hip deep, he peeled my arms from around his shoulders and dropped me into the water, holding my hand so tightly that I was afraid I was going to start hearing bones pop. I don’t remember the exact words he said. He told me to feel the water, feel what it could do to me if I didn’t respect it. He told me that I shouldn’t be afraid of the water, but that I should remember that it could be very scary and I should respect how powerful it is.

I couldn’t keep my feet. I was knocked around like a rag doll, my only anchor Daddy’s arm, and I clung to it. He kept my face out of the water, but didn’t help me stand — he let me feel the water pounding me, tossing me, pulling me every which way. And he stood, immobile, feet planted and acting quite literally like my rock. He wanted me to learn about the water that day. And, in an abstract kind of way, I did. But I learned something much more important that day, something I already knew but that became sharply focused in my mind and has never gotten fuzzy again, even after all these years. I learned that Daddy is my rock, my safe place. Daddy is all powerful, protective, strong and wise.

This is one of the most powerful memories I have.

Over the two decades between then and now, I have learned some new things. I have learned that Daddy is as fragile as the rest of us, and that sometimes he can’t be that strong and I need to be the strong one. I have learned that he won’t always be able to keep me safe and that sometimes he is wrong. Even knowing those things already, though, seeing him lying in that hospital bed enrages me. I want to throw a temper tantrum, kick my feet and scream and cry and close my eyes and plug my ears — maybe, maybe, if I don’t acknowledge it it won’t be true. Maybe if I throw a big enough fit then Daddy will fix it, make it better, put it back the way it’s supposed to be.

But it doesn’t work like that. It is what it is, and we can’t make it any different. So in the end, I sit by his bed and I hold his hand and tell him I love him, and we move back toward normality one teeny tiny step at a time, and just try to have faith that we’ll get there.

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.” — Anaïs Nin

So the question has to come up. Why? Why do this? What’s the point? What’re you trying to achieve? These are all things I’ve asked myself while considering and putting together this blog. If you think about it, the personal blog is a funny thing — the private diary made public, in real time — but then again, maybe it’s not. Writing intended for publish, even in this rather inelegant way, can’t ever really be private — so it becomes less about writing for myself and more about something else. Is it a basic human need to communicate, or is it just some of us who are wired this way? Is this some kind of search for validation? I don’t know.

I am and always have been enraptured by personal writing. Diaries, journals, logbooks, collections of letters — they are a well of endless fascination for me, always serving up something I can use to quench the need for connection that I have. I am in love with the idea of personal journals, records of the journey and how all of us travel it differently. I’ve kept a journal, on and off in some form, since I was in the sixth grade. I’ve always had conflicting desires — lock them away in the most secret hiding place I could devise AND share them with anyone — anyone! — I could find to sit still long enough to listen. For years, all the journals sat in a filebox in the garage or in the attic or somewhere locked away. Right now, they are all lined up on a bookshelf, next to knitting magazines and books about bookmaking. I leave them there trusting no one will pick them up. I think I’m going to have to move them soon.

So I couldn’t do anything but be infatuated with blogs, ever since I first learned of their existence. It’s been a fascination that I’ve explored from the outside for years — reading other people’s blogs, reading about blogging. It was inevitable that eventually, finally, I would end up here — publishing my own public personal journal, throwing my words and pieces of myself — my own constant cacophony — out there into the world to see where it leads me.

I don’t know why I’m blogging. I don’t know why I keep journals. I don’t know where the force inside that pushes me to record, to explore, to “spill words all over myself,” came from. I only know that it is a siren call and I will follow merrily.

This could be a blog about many things. It could be a blog about infertility (secondary IF, to be exact) and the quest to have a child. It could be about coming to terms with a PCOS diagnosis, and what that means. It could be a weight loss blog. (Or at least, I hope it could. At least it could be a blog about struggling with weight.) It could be a photoblog. Or a parenting blog. Or a political blog, with particular emphasis on the politics of education. And the stay-at-home-mom as feminist.

It could be a beginning runner’s blog, or a blog about fighting toward a more solid grasp of CSS and XML. Or about the process of moving into a new house and making it a home. It could be a blog about a thousand more things as well; all those things that — note by building, blaring note — add up to the cacophony that is ever present, ever playing in my brain.

But it won’t be. There will be nothing that this blog is about, no defining theme that can be used to classify it, to say “the people who will be interested in reading this blog are these people.” Because my brain doesn’t work that way. There is no theme, no unifying thread, no way to pull it all into something cohesive. There is just this unrelenting noise, and that is what will spill out onto this computer screen.

This will be the blog of a 30-year-old scientist turned teacher recently turned stay-at-home-mom, who has no idea what she wants to be when she grows up but definite ideas about how she wants to get there. I don’t know where the experiment that is this blog will take me. I don’t know that anyone but me cares. But I’m looking forward to finding out.