un petit monde

At 38, I ought to be comfortable admitting a few things about myself. Years ago, I wrote a lot of nonfiction essays that were typically personal and confessional in nature, and I was quite comfortable with it. But I'm out of the habit, and in the last few years I've noticed an unwillingness to be so honest about my foibles and shortcomings creeping even into my own thoughts about myself; a drawer pushed shut on facts about myself that I would rather not acknowledge. That's no good; it keeps me in error about my own habits and nature. So let me see if I can still do this trick. 1. I'm not the mom I thought I was going to be. The no-screen-time mom, the always present, always engaged mom, the mom who pre-planned activities and crafts and outings and playdates for every day of the week so that there was never any question of what to do, the mom who spent her down time coming up with fresh ways to explore and play with the toys we have. That mom is not me, and though I stil...

I can't quite believe that here I am at 38  and starting a new blog, the same kind of blog I kept when I was 17. Just a simple little online diary. Keeping an online diary, more or less anonymously, appealed to me then, and it does now, though I'm still not really sure why. I'm glad Blogger is still around, and doesn't look too   different from what I remember. But Livejournal is no more (RIP). WordPress is unrecognizable from the mainly personal-blogging platform that it was when I first found it in the early aughts. And posting on Tumblr or X is not  blogging . Substack and Medium are for people who have a point to make, and I never do. I miss the old days when most blogs you could stumble across were just people's journals about their personal lives. They might have written about a particular interest or area of expertise, but that usually wasn't the only topic, and certainly it wasn't all monetized like it is now. People blogged because they wanted to wr...