Happy Birthday, blog

My blog is a year old today! One of my babies, and we didn’t even have a party. It’s odd, actually, since I am still blogging about the very same things, a year of babies and books and asking why.

One of my friends, Carolyn, suffers from terrible depression. She and I and a couple of other friends had coffee together this afternoon, and she talked about reading this trilogy of books, evidently incredibly disheartening books, and oppressive to all womankind. I promised I would come home and look for my most life-affirming book and send her either the title or the book itself. I came up with a couple of half-hearted suggestions, Anne Lamott’s Plan B, and a friend offered up The Mists of Avalon, although we both had second thoughts about that one again since things turn out pretty badly in the end. Three English professors at the table, and we couldn’t come up with a book to cheer somebody up. A year ago I told my students that happy smiley literature was boring. Can it be literature and be happy? And why does happy seem to mean mindless and simplistic in literary studies?

If blogs and online journals are a new literary genre—and I think they are—are they and the books they produce “literature,” and especially can they be life-affirming literature? If women write about their ordinary lives as women and mothers, does that offer me a new vision of what my life might be? Catherine Newman’s Waiting for Birdy: A Year of Frantic Tedium, Neurotic Angst, and the Wild Magic of Growing a Family, Bitch Ph.D. and her Pseudonymous Kid, the author of Chez Miscarriage? And does that literature of mothering have relevance to people who aren’t mothers? My sixty-something year old friend who never had kids—can I hand her Waiting for Birdy, which I found hilarious and wonderful, loving but honest? And what about my friend who’s struggling with infertility?

I was in my narcissistic mode that afternoon, so I offered Carolyn my blog, because keeping On Comprehending Gravity has become so important to me, a reminder that I can take time out of my work every couple of days and write something about my life, the life of my family. Writing is a way of thinking, and here I write my life into some permanent form of existence. My purposes over the year have changed; OCG started as an example for my American literature students of what a blog looked like, but even then I know I didn’t write it for my class—I wrote it for myself (one reason why I never turned the comments on: I didn’t really want to hear what my students thought about my life).

Writing for yourself when you have no idea who else is reading is an interesting proposition. Pissed off at your kid or husband? Careful how you present that! Having trouble at work? Better not go there! I buried a link my blog far down in my teaching website once briefly and pulled the link down later, imagining my dean wandering through my website for a technology Commission on Higher Education Performance Funding report. And none of those audience issues addresses the larger question—what kind of life am I writing here? Who do I understand myself to be? One day I hope my children will read this—what sort of wacko will they think their mother was then?

Happy Birthday to my blog and my year-old self. A year is barely enough time to learn to stand on your feet—maybe next year I’ll learn to walk.