A couple of very lovely bloggers I have come across in the last few weeks – Katie and Miranda – are doing For the Love…of Blogging this week. Since I’m such a nerdy joiner I thought I’d play along. Plus this whole mommy blogging thing is new to me so I will probably learn a few things along the way.
Today is “Meet Me Monday” so if you came over from For the Love…of Blogging, here’s a bit about me.
I’m Robin and this is my second blog. Well, technically it’s my third blog but I can’t remember the URL for my first blog from years ago and I think I only ever got 3 posts into it. My other blog is the work me – it’s about internal communications and I started it mostly to have a space to write just for me, and that seemed like the most logical topic. As you can see if you clicked that link, I don’t update it a lot. I think it’s because there’s too much pressure to seem smart.
Then a few months ago I came across The Momoir Project and started to suspect maybe my story was more about being a mom. This is odd, since being a mom hasn’t been a fabulous success for me. Don’t get me wrong – I love my kid. Being a mom is just way, way, way harder than I thought it would be.
I kept my story to myself for a long time. I finally admitted I wasn’t doing so well, to myself and a couple of others, and started trying to find a solution. One of the things I’m really good at, though, is denial. You ever need help with denial? I’m your man. Er, woman. So I didn’t really follow the right path in getting help. (Blah, blah, blah – you can read more about that here.)
Ultimately my story is about having a baby, ending up with postpartum depression and losing whole pieces of myself in the process. I have found a few of those pieces by sucking it up, admitting I have a problem, taking medication and trying to find an appropriate balance to the exercise/chocolate-inhalation equation. I still have a few more pieces to find. Some of them are probably under the couch with bits of Lego and dried Playdoh. Some of them probably aren’t coming back, and I’m trying to reconcile myself to that.
But so many of the pieces of me are coming back through this blog and the community of women I’ve met since starting it. It’s like a whole new world to me. And this blog is only three weeks old!
I don’t know where this blog is going. I don’t want it to be a total downer. I also don’t want it to be all about PPD, necessarily, but for right now that’s what my story is. What I do want this blog to be is honest. Some days that’s hard, because people I know read it. But on those days I hit “publish” and pretend they don’t.
So far there’s only one thing I want to write about and haven’t. Probably won’t, at least not for quite a while. The rest of this is true to me. I know it is because when I look at the little tags on the right the three biggest words are “admissions,” “meltdown” and “routine,” which is pretty much what my life has been like for the past 2 1/2 years.
And that’s me.
