December 16, 2006

You want to know? Me too. Maybe I won? Maybe not? I’m kind of left scratching my thinning scalp over the whole thing, this odd contest, the 2006 Weblog Awards.

As I mentioned before, the last thing I won was those Hall & Oates tickets in 1987. If anybody was really mad that JEAN MATTERN FROM NORTHEAST PHILLY! was the 17th caller, at least I didn’t have to read about it the next day in The Inquirer. (You know, one of those smudgey gray parchment things people used to spill their morning coffee upon before these godforsaken computers became portals to wherever we find ourselves now, this Lord of the Flies Cyberland. Chew and spew. Spit, don’t swallow. Leave a mess. Someone else will clean it up. Or not.)

I can understand the political blogs trash-talking and bloodying a few cyberschnozzes in the heat of competition—I haven’t lived long enough to remember a time of honor in politics—but there is something simultaneously wildly funny and horrendously depressing about terms like cheating slut being bandied about in the category of Best Parenting Blog. I keep bursting into embarrassed giggles and murmuring, Tramp! under my breath as I do the laundry and wrap the holiday presents and wipe human and canine bottoms and try to figure out what’s gone bad in the fridge. Cheating, grocery-shopping, toilet-scrubbing, blog-writing slut! Where do I find the time?

It makes me feel youthful, and that’s something, I suppose. I don’t know if I’ve been called a cheating slut before. I’m not opposed to the vim and vigor of the slur. It’s a cheerful slur, of the slurs out there. And I’m a playwright. I like colorful language.

But I like it in the right context. Call me old-fashioned. When potty language is out of context, man, it gets downright absurdist. And it’s hard on an idealist, too much absurdism in one week. I’ve been using my fast-acting inhaler way more often than I’m supposed to. It’s not good.

When I taught playwriting, I used to tell my students to make sure they earned every bleepin’ bleepity bleep that came out of every bleep of a bleep character’s mouth. Otherwise (as a very wise mentor taught me) it’s all just bleepity bleep bleep bleep. The walls go up, audiences check out emotionally, and no one learns anything new about the bleepin’ human condition. Art, 0. Humanity, 0.

I like the blog world because I am profoundly curious about the human condition. I peek in people’s windows at dusk too. But I try to walk my dog while I do it so it’s not so obvious.

I especially like to read blogs about people who have chosen to breathe the same airspace as kids. Babies. Children. I read the words of people who want them and can’t have them. I read the words of people who nearly had them but lost them. I read the words of people who had them and loved them for months or years and still lost them. I read the words of people who are giving up everything to try to bring home a face they’ve seen once in a picture, a face they already love. I read the words of people who thought they wanted them but—maybe today at least—are terrified because they don’t want them. Or think they shouldn’t have wanted them. But still love them. Even if their kids don’t love them back. Even if they don’t know where their kids are anymore.

Hearts are cracking right and left out there, is what I’m saying. Yours is and mine is and your child’s is and your lover’s is and Spot the Wonder Dog’s is and Jimbo’s is and Rockstar Mommy’s is and Rocks in the Dryer’s is and your mother’s is—oh my God, for sure your mother, trust me on this. Hearts are cracking right and left. Sit still long enough and you’ll hear them cracking across the way at your neighbor’s house, over the phone with your ex, in the words on a page, in the words on a screen. It’s tough out there. I’m not in the mood to make it tougher for anybody else, especially not for anybody who’s wiping bottoms daily, like me.

I read blogs to try to understand. I write a blog for the very same reason. I’m slugging it out, this parenting thing, sometimes slugging my way through with a clown nose on, trying to find words for the glorious, sometimes-soulful-sometimes-soulless daily muck of it all.

I am uninitiated and unanointed. I am just doing my thing, and it makes me happy when you do your thing and then dare to blog that you did your thing, and today, you maybe did not do it well, and there were tears or shouts or mounds of cat vomit under the bed. Or that today, you did your thing very well, and there were smiles and rainbows and ten-minute bedtimes and a discussion about God or the birds-and-the-bees that you sailed through, baby.

Yes. I am frequently inept, as a parent. I do not believe I am a cheating trampy slut—I believe I would be inept at that endeavour as well. One must know the difference between the front and the back of a thong undergarment to succeed as a cheating trampy slut.

I hope that my long-lashed deep-eyed confounding heart-breaking wonder lassies, Sophie Mary Rose and Hannah Evelyn Arden, will read at least a few of these posts someday. I hope that they will live long happy lives and know that their mother, inept as she was, loved them enough to play the clown sometimes and write about what she didn’t much understand. I may lose them. They may lose me. We may lose each other along the way. I know which ending I’d pick, but I’ve read your stories with tears in my eyes, and I know better now than to think that any of us get much of a say in the matter.

You’re a mess. You’re beautiful. Your fingers smell. You’re breathtaking and wise. You drink too much. You’re kind. You don’t call. You’re everything. You’re nothing. You broke my heart and I broke yours and we’ll all do it again, at the most inconvenient times. I love you for trying. I love me for trying. I love all of us for trying. It’s trying, this life.

So far, that’s all I know. You? Let’s keep each other posted.