It’s estimated that two new blogs are created every second of every day.

There are parenting blogs and business blogs and photo blogs and music blogs and news blogs and tech blogs and art blogs and travel blogs and food blogs and political blogs and the one thing they all share in common is voice. Blogging, by its very nature, is a personal endeavour. Our souls color our words, for good or ill, and that is what makes what we do exceptional. All of us. Each and every one of you. You share your soul in every picture, in every semicolon, in every over-used ellipse…

Once in a while, though, one of those 70 million blogs, one of those ones created in the time you took to blink just now, one of those 38.5 million that are active today, one of them comes along and stops the world. You never know which one it’s going to be. I’ll bet Maggie Dammit didn’t know a year ago when she hit publish that it was going to be hers.

A year ago today, during one of those blinks of an eye, a girl named Maggie started a blog called Violence Unsilenced. She wanted to see a place where survivors of anything could come and talk, just share, just hand what they spent a lifetime carrying heavy on their backs over to someone else.

As of today, 101 survivors have spoken. Some do it anonymously, some do it discreetly, some shout to the rooftops. We all are at different stages of this game, after all, this letting go. It’s a language, and together we’re learning to speak it.

It’s not a language that anyone comes to easily. My friend Kelly once said, “silence is a weapon women use against themselves”, and there are few things I read that hit me square in the gut, but that one did. The less we share, the less we talk, the more silent we are about these things that have been thrust upon us here-I-come-ready-or-not, the more deeply they cut us.

I got tired of being cut. 100 other people got tired of being cut. 101 of us, so far, have banded together to accept that we aren’t the inmates, we are the asylum of things that wives and husbands, sons and daughters, friends and lovers should never have to house.

I will never, ever, be able to return to my mother the fear that she whispered into my head so she didn’t have to carry it anymore. I will never have the chance to give my father back his bloodstains and his degradation. What I can do is wash it off of my skin, rinse it out of my mouth, ball it up in my fingers and beat it to death on this keyboard. I can give it to you, to them, to those of us who have been convinced by god or man that it is ours alone to carry.

Alone is the most desperate word. Silence is the strongest weapon. Broken is something we can be, or something we can do.

I did. We did together. And we’re changing the world, one keystroke at a time.

Happy anniversary to each and every one of us, each part that making us all whole again.

Yesterday was a day like any other day. The kids went to school, I did some work, my pantry got cleaned and and my kitchen got a good scrub. My son checked the mail and found a package from Bonnie Burton and Lucasfilm in the box. We opened it, messed with all the Star Wars stuff inside, and then had dinner. I sent one picture of the stuff to Twitter and one to my ex, who is arguably the World’s Biggest Star Wars fan. He called, mostly to tell me I was a succubus, but partly to catch up, and as I hung up I wished him a happy 35th birthday tomorrow.

Right about then I really realized that today is his 35th birthday. That means it’s January 8th. It’s also Elvis’ birthday and the day that my boss and his wife find out what flavor baby they’re having. And if it’s January 8th, tomorrow is the 9th. For the first time, um, ever, it just crept up on me like that, when I wasn’t even looking for it.

One thing, with sickening predictability, has continued to lead directly to the other.

It’s been 18 years since January 9th. 18 years is a long time to be without your mother. 18 years is just enough time, apparently, for that scar to start to heal. January 7th was no less hard, no less frightening, and yet I managed to let the mundane little aspects of this new life I was re-born into 18 years ago drown that hardness, that fear, right out until just about dinner-time. Maybe there’s an actual reason that 18 is the year we are considered adults after all.

And while I was thinking about all of this last night, I realized that in two weeks my little baby nephew will turn 18, too. Hello, one thing…meet the other.

I just cannot believe that it took me all of this time to realize that 13 days after everything I ever knew and loved ended, everything he was ever to know and love began. That maybe in some weird way, that boy who was born in a hospital bed on January 22nd, 1992 in Fresno, California is the new version of the child that died on January 9th, 1992 in a telephone booth at the Philadelphia International Airport. That maybe that explains why I love him so much more than is reasonable for an auntie-in-law-by-adoption to love a nephew she didn’t even meet until he was seven. That maybe he’s the ying to my yang, my balance, my reckoning…maybe he’s my Phoenix.

Maybe my nephew is what makes all of those awful years, all of those terrifying hours, okay. Or maybe it’s the dishes that always have to be washed and the baby dolls that have to be played with and the newsletters that have to be written and the toilets that have to get unplugged. Maybe it’s this new life that is so much more real and consistent and predictable and mundane than that old one ever was. Maybe it’s this family which isn’t glued together with a shoddy DNA code and the stickiness of fear, but that it’s my family, my choice, and we hold each other together with so much more love than I ever thought the world was capable of feeling.

Whatever it is, it’s working. I almost forgot that every January has a 9 in it. I was almost able to let it pass my by this year. Tomorrow my husband and I will leave the kids tied to the radiators and go out to dinner. We’ll drink a bottle of fabulous wine and eat something with unpronounceable ingredients in it and we will celebrate this life that is perfect and wonderful and all I ever needed, this life that only took the shattered remnants of an old, ruined one to build itself up on. Maybe we’ll go to the gym after, maybe we’ll come home, watch a movie, and catch up on 9 days of New Year’s sexolutions.  Whatever happens tomorrow, well, it just happens.  This life will keep marching on and I will keep living it.

Come what may, I will keep living.

The decade ends tomorrow. I’ve seen the 70′s, 80′s, 90′s, 00′s all roll out. Christ, I feel old.

The 70′s taught me to hate tie-dye and to love Joni Mitchell. The 80′s taught me that you can’t trust anyone, not even your own flesh and blood, especially not men who wield Aquanet. The 90′s taught me that I can hold down whiskey, but not vodka. The 00′s taught me that I was wrong about everything I’d learned up to that point.

I learned to love with everything I have this decade. I learned that I do know what I want to do with my life, and that I’m capable of it. I learned to forgive, I learned to accept blame, I learned to accept help. I learned who I am at the peak of my game and at my lowest point.

The best thing about this decade was that I lost my husband, my marriage, and most of my mind….and I got it all back, plus. If you were there for that, thank you. Thank you to each and every one of you that held me hand through it. You know who you are.

The best thing that happened to my husband this year is that his job got yanked out from underneath him, and then re-offered to him. In another country. You know when you first take on a project and you do the very best that you can with it, but the next time you have to try that same thing again, you realize that you’re a bazillion times better at it the second time around than you were in the beginning? That’s his career right now. His last gig, in Canada? Was fine. He was good at it. This one? He shines. He smiles when he comes home from work. He knows he’s doing something right; he’s not doubting himself all the time, he’s confident and kicking some ass. It’s pretty fucking hot, I’ll admit.

The best thing that has happened this year to my oldest son was going to junior high. He gets up every morning and brushes his hair. He puts on cologne and arranges his hat just so. He tells me he thinks he looks like Chris (his godfather) when he wears his hat a certain way. He washes his face and uses astringent. He generally gives a rats ass.

The thing with this kid is that he’s very cocky. He’s very confident. He very much so does not give a flying fuck what you think. (I wish I was more like him.) But getting on that school bus full of strangers and getting asked out by some girl on his very first day in the biggest school he’s ever seen in his life has changed him somehow. He’s becoming a young man, and it’s beautiful to watch.

The best thing that’s happened in relation to my youngest son is that he finally hates math. See, he’s the kid that will tell you that your dinner is FANTASTIC and SO GOOD and he CAN”T WAIT FOR MORE and all of that means that he will not eat one stinking bite of it, but you won’t realize that because he’s so busy LOVING it that you can’t see him hate it with all his might. He’s brilliantly manipulative that way. And when he comes home, day after day, singing the praises of math class because it’s HIS FAVORITE and he’s SO GOOD at it and he CAN”T WAIT FOR MORE math class, I know he’s struggling. And a few weeks ago, when I asked him to practice math facts with me and he ughed at me, I asked him why he was being so crabby. He said, “Because, mawwwm, I HATE math.”

And now that he is willing to let down his guard and not try to charm his way out of this, now that he can admit it, we can finally make some progress.

The best thing that’s happened with the girl is that she’s totally sick and she slept with her daddy last night.

She loves her daddy. She loves him a lot, but he’s pretty busy most days scrambling to provide Every. Single. Thing. from Q-tips to cars for 5 people, and that takes up about 27 hours of each of his days. She doesn’t see him a whole lot; none of us do. Naturally, when she’s sick, it’s all momma. But about two months ago, daddy lost his job and we got shipped across a country for the new one and he had just about a month during that transition time with us, at home, every single day. She remembered who her daddy is. And last night, burning with fever and restless from exhaustion, she wouldn’t be anywhere but in his arms as she slept.

My family; we’ve made some progress.

As for me? Well, it’s been a year. I’m glad it’s over. We laughed, we cried, we hurled. I suppose I should figure out what the best thing that happened to me in 2009 was, huh? I don’t know if I could pick just one.

• Best internet tool in 2009: MySpace. Why? Because of MySpace, I found my long-lost brothers, that’s why. Truth is, I found them in 2007, but we really found the connection again in 2009. When the last time you saw someone, you were changing their diapers/getting your diaper changed by them, it’s hard to just pick up where you left of, 25 years previous. We did, finally. And it is good.
• Best overplayed inside joke that no one gets and certainly no one thinks is funny anymore, but we do: Hey! Did you know that me and Greeblemonkey used to be neighbors?
• Best neighbor to have find you online, if you happen to be so cursed lucky as to have your next door neighbor find you online, twice, even though you’re totally anonymous: Luke In Van.
• Best cooking blog to find that just so happens to be written by a guy who was in your wedding: Christopher Cina {dot} com Especially if you haven’t really seen him since.
• Best blogger to find out you’re sleeping with half-way through a conference that all of your peers are attending, by way of whispers and hush-hushed conversation: Busy Dad. Because even though you’re devastated for, like, an entire 10 minutes, not just because a rumour like that discredits one of your most valuable friendships, but it also discredits everything you’ve done in the past two years to save your marriage, and no one warned you so you didn’t even shave your legs that weekend, after those 10 minutes are up you get to take a really quick inventory of your life and decide what actually matters, and that’s when you realize that your friendship does. As so you take your husband’s advice, which was, “Fuck. Them.” and you proceed as usual. And you win. And your fake internet mommy persona gets to fake internet sleep with the one of the hottest fake internet dad persona out there. Coattails, Jim…coattails. I ride them.
• Best blogger to actually sleep with every night of a conference that all of your esteemed peers are attending, and most of them are sharing a room with you: Tanis. Especially when she mistakes you for her Boo and burrows her fluffy blond head under your chin and drools all over your nightshirt. Because nothing says, “I love and value you” like, “I find your chin-stubble to be convincingly rugged enough to allow me to mistake you for a 30 something Canadian lumberjack.” Also? I’ve never slept so well in my damn life. That’s how you know it’s true love.
• Best hour and a half I spent this year: Speaking at that conference about health and those of us whom, occasionally or not, blog about it.  Never, NEVER in my life have I been more moved by the power of what we as bloggers can do. Never have I been so touched by so many amazing women and their stories. Listening to her speak and watching her be truly brave and just being able to participate in something that, well, big….it was an honor. Well worth the nightmare that getting the paperwork to leave Canada was.
• Best thing I did to totally fuck up my chances of ever doing anything cool for my kids ever again: Letting them hang out at EA for a weekend and then with Tony Hawk for another one. It’s going to be really ugly when they realize it’s all downhill from here on out.
• Best blog I’ll ever have the honor of being associated with, even in some minuscule sort of way: Violence Unsilenced. THIS is the reason blogging matters. This is where there is change being effected and a difference is being made.
• Best list I’m ever going to appear on, because at some point, someone is going to catch on to their mistake and I’ll fade back into obscurity and go on being Greeblemonkey’s Pony-Boy, which is all I ever really wanted anyway: The Babble Top 50 Mommy Bloggers. Partly because now I can say that five fucking years of doing this shit and someone finally noticed, but mostly because I’ve struggled so much with being labeled a Mommy Blogger. I don’t think of myself as one, but you know what? I AM ONE. And I think I’m finally ok with it.
• Best post that will keep me from shutting this blog down, no matter how many times I want to every single day: On All You Need, by ZoeyJane.
• Best thing I was ever kind of trapped into doing, even though I knew I had to do it eventually: Tell my mother in law my blog url. I mean, I walked out of my bedroom and she said, “Good morning! So, what’s your blog url?” I kind of had to give it up then, right? And you know what? I’M GLAD. I’m glad it’s out. I’m glad that it’s all on the table now, that I don’t have some big secret hanging over my head anymore. Because seriously, do you have any idea how hard it is to keep something you do daily a secret from 95% of your family for five years? And now that she knows (everyone say Hi, Sarah!) the rest of the family is going to know and that will be the last of my super-secret-stealthy online identity. I will be public to those whom it matters most, my family. And I don’t think anything will change. At least I hope it doesn’t. You’ll tell me if it does, right?

Here’s to a new decade, a new adventure, a new me and a new you and a new us.

Mr Lady, out.

Because bricks are quite handy. You can throw them at thy foes, you can trip over them, breaking your big toe and getting to use the crutches that you’ve always thought everyone looked so cool using, and all you have to suffer through is some armpit chaffing. Also, a broken big toe. You can deliver that crucial memo from the 14th story of your office building to the 3rd story of your office building with lightening-fast efficiency by using nothing more than a $0.002 rubber band and any old brick you find laying around. Or kill your boss. Either way, you’ll be in line for a promotion.

I like bricks. More specifically, I liked aesthetically pleasing configurations of bricks. Did you know that I once had an aptitude for and a very promising career rut carved out for me in mechanical engineering? True story. You wouldn’t believe what I could do with a ruler. In fact, if I had enough balls to go digging through my storage closet that is most likely, by now, host to 3 out of 5 of Canada’s most deadly spiders, also my Christmas decorations, I’d be able to find a stack of old blueprints with, like, 1990 written in the date. And drawn in pencil. *gasp* See, back in the stone ages when I was dipping my pen in the blueprint ink, people still used drafting tables and mechanical pencils and T-squares. Now there are twenty four versions of Autocad out there. I once bought Autocad for Dummies, thinking it might be fun to try my hand at it again, and I couldn’t understand the acknowledgments page of the book.

You know, it’s kind of messed up that the very same people who can doodle out an entire city, or an aircraft, or a satellite in their spare time can’t think of a way to make the lead in mechanical pencils stronger than a dried spaghetti stick.

An then I married an Ivy League architecture major and we’ve been happily employed in the restaurant industry ever since. At least my wasted education was free.

But we do both find ourselves drawn to the linear. The only pictures we have hanging in our living room are of houses, or parts of them. My bathroom has a big ass schematic of the Brooklyn Bridge hanging in it. All of the furniture is square and all of the frames are level. We’re sort of neurotically straight, actually. The clutter all over every square inch of our lives offsets it nicely, though.

I also find myself, on occasion, taking pictures of buildings. I’m normally a portrait sort of girl; I wouldn’t take a picture of grass or water drops unless there was someone in it. Every know and then, however, I find some building that strikes my fancy and I can’t help myself but shoot it. Like in Mexico, when I found a cathedral with this entrance.

I actually love the fact that there’s a big, fat thumb smudge right in the middle of that picture, so shut up. There’s this building that I stumbled across in Chicago this summer.

Pretty freaking cool, isn’t it? There’s this shot of the Chinese Gardens in downtown Vancouver, and I love it because I can’t decide if it’s the very essence of serene or if it’s the fucking creepiest sort of “crawling out of these trees to get you” picture.

Either way, I’ll take it. My neighbor Anjou took this one in Cairo, but it’s all rights reserved so if you want to see it, you’ll have to click. It’s totally worth it.

And this one I love, I love so much, because if there’s anything I appreciate more than gorgeous detail, it’s religious irony.

But holy crap is that every gorgeous. Even if it is in abject defiance of the second commandment.

We woke that morning and held our children’s hands as we danced in and out of clouds. We soared with the birds, high above the earth, basking in sunlight we’d never seen together.

We sat together later that night, away from the things of man, under the dust of the Milky Way and Sagittarius’ arrow, silent and still. We fumbled around in the dark for words that would not come. We offered our oldest son, the one that brought us to that day, to the sea to be swallowed and reborn a man, and the sea accepted our gift and gave us back a child changed; eyes slightly wider, stance slightly taller, made new in our eyes and in his own.

That night, when the world went black and the house moved in time with the breaths of our sleeping family, we lay next to each other in the thick salt air of night and listened to the waves crashing against our door; calling for us, coming for us. As the moon pulled itself into the sky and brought with it a new decade in our lives together, I took your hand in mine and with a whisper wished you a happy anniversary. Under the light of that moon and the weight of those waves, we drifted into sleep and out to sea.