L is for Life, Unscripted

Sometimes blogging is easy. Some posts just come.

Sometimes, they don't. Those days, blogging is an act of will and makes me question my sanity. "Why did I say I'd blog every day?" I ask in despair. "WHY?!?" The computer screen seems to mock me and my worldlessness.

Some posts are good. Some I look back on and think, well, at least I posted. That's something, right? I mean, A for effort.

But everything's kind of like that, isn't it? Some days you cruise through with ease, as though you won the Life Lottery. Everything is perfect. You find the pants that make your ass look good. You get an extra long lunch. You get a letter from a friend. You have glorious plans for the evening and life, my friend, surely does not suck.

Other days you just get by and the amount of effort and grit that are required for the just getting by are epic and you sort of feel like you deserve some kind of kudos just for showing up.

Because that's life.

Because that's how it works. Not every day is rainbows and unicorns. Some are dog poop and thunderclouds. And that's okay. I think the problems come when we convince ourselves that every day should be special and accomplished and so we knock ourselves out every minute, trying to wring all of the magic out of it or to force it into a container of awesome for which it was ill suited.

I once found a friend of mine crying in her kitchen. "I've never taken my son to a museum. I'm a bad mother."

Her son was two.

The three of us had spent the afternoon playing racecars in the living room, where the predominant sound was one of his goofy giggle-y laugh.

I'm not an expert on parenting, but I think that he enjoyed that more than he would have a museum... and I thought she did too. But she had convinced herself that every moment had to have meaning, or she was a bad parent.

There's meaning in every moment, though, isn't there? The great ones and the horrible ones and the ordinary ones. There was something special in the day they would take him to DisneyWorld*, there was meaning in the day she would first have to ground him for something he did, and I would argue that there was something special in an afternoon of cars on the rug. They just don't make knicknacks and postcards and tshirts for the last two, but maybe they should because that's where real life happens. That's the cupcake and the frosting. Everything else is just -- sprinkles. While sprinkles are nice, sprinkles do not a cupcake make.

It all makes me think that I'm thinking of my struggles with the blogging the wrong way. Maybe the easily formed posts are the sprinkles. Maybe the ones I fight with -- the ones that I agonize over, rewrite, mentally crumple up, toss aside, and pick up off the floor to smooth back out -- those are the cupcake.** That's where the magic really happens.

In the fight. In the grit. In the just showing up.


*I'm not a big fan of the House of Mouse, but I get that for parents and kids it's a huge deal.

** Sorry if I seem obsessed with cupcakes... I'm dieting and right now I would sell a kidney for a delicious cupcake.