Joining the Throng

I don’t know if there’s a timetable somewhere for midlife crises but 42 seems a pretty good age to embark on one. At thirty-one I was jetting around the country to promote a book (although the fact that I was doing this at my own expense and had to take a plane because I lived in another country slightly dilutes the freewheeling and successful image this conjures up). Now I’m forty-two and the only thing I’ve done in the past year or so that can be classified as “writing” is to waste the previous year waxing eloquent in emails sent to the other members of the board of my oldest daughter’s preschool about a variety of subjects that mattered not a whit to a single sane soul in the universe. Because these women also often found themselves deeply concerned about subjects that mattered not a whit to a single soul in the universe, occasionally one would be nice enough to profess admiration for my writing ability, but other than that I think it would be safe to say that my writing career, my avocation, my calling — whatever you want to call it — is pretty much dead in the water. Since it was hardly seaworthy at the best of times (can you say “literary fiction” and “midlist author”?) this is a pretty fucking sad state of affairs.

Perfect reason to embark on a midlife crisis, right? Running out to put a bright red sports car on the Amex has not been a viable means of getting through this period of my life; nor is taking up skydiving. So lately I’ve been asking myself: What would be the 21st century, cutting-edge way to indulge a midlife crisis? (In other words: is there a cool way of being so uncool as to question what the fuck you’re doing with your life?)

The answer of course — is to start a blog. If the cyberworld were an actual physical space, blogs would be the cockroaches that live beneath its floorboards and behind the drywall. There are millions of them. Each one has links to three more just like it. The obvious conclusion to be drawn from the number of blogs in the world is that nobody in America is doing any “work” — we’re all just punching clocks, literal, metaphysical or spiritual, so we can sit down and vomit out our hearts out to our computers.

Or put another way: Blogging is the new knitting! Some of us make lovely cashmere sweaters, others of us, unidentifiable lumps of overly-handled dingy yarn.

So why add my voice to this unholy clamor? We’ll pass over the naive greed that for about .73 seconds made me entertain the idea that writing a blog might actually be a way to make money from writing. (This turns out not to be the case, of course.)

When my oldest daughter was born, I found myself unable to surgically amputate my writer-self from the Mommy I had become, a state of affairs that did absolutely nothing for me but lead me down the primrose path of postpartum depression. In fact, sad refugee from academia that I was, I found myself unable to keep from examining the world in which I found myself as a potential narrative.

How do women write about motherhood? How do they talk about it?

The conclusion I came up with then, and could probably call my manifesto now (except that all you have to do is Google “mother” and “manifesto” to see how overused that concept is) is this:

We all behave as if the choice about how to talk about motherhood is easy, lies either in sentimentality or its inverse, some wry jocularity. I have to believe that the truth is more complicated than that, that it resides elsewhere, spreads and deepens, shifts and shimmers; watery enough to both sustain and drown.

I suppose I’m adding my voice to the calaphony because it still seems laudable, to wade through the bog of motherhood in search of that watery elusive truth. To figure out a way to talk truly about this messy business of mothering, called women’s work for so many millennia.

Besides, I spend most of my life with the under-six set. With who else can I share my observations about the deeper meanings of My Pretty Pony, Dear Reader, but you?