My nine year old is a Pisces. That means that he’s emotional, and that he’s conflicted, and that everything in his life is driven by his feelings. My eleven year old is an Aries, which means nothing goes further than his thick head. He finds reason for everything, he thinks everything through, and emotions run about a 2 on the Importance Scale in his life.

I was born 15 minutes off the cusp of Pisces and Aries, so I’m about as close to both as you can get without having an evil twin growing out of your throat. This just means that I get both of my kids pretty well. This also means that we all have birthdays in the next 44 days; just sayin’.

*ahem*

The differences in my children make my life totally complete, absolutely fascinating, and consistently inconsistent. They need two totally different styles of discipline, affection, encouragement and socialization. My oldest son can (and does) get lost in design and programming and science. My youngest son needs people. He needs physical interaction just to maintain his sanity. He needs friendships and he needs love.

Conveniently enough, he found both this weekend.

He’s been fairly epically in love twice before, which is saying something since the kid hasn’t been alive for an entire decade just yet. His first One True Love was Sam. They were five and she taught him how to french kiss on the playground at school one day. She was a troubled little girl from a troubled little home and he was, well, him, and those waters run deep. They were soulmates, best friends, two halves of a whole and he still refers to her as the great love of his life, four whole years later.

The second girl was Natalie. Natalie looked almost exactly like Sam, but didn’t have the troubled-childhood thing under her belt. She was older than him, popular, athletic and smart. She was the girl that every little boy wanted to have the attention of, but my son was determined to win her over. We talked a lot about how to treat a girl, how to win her heart, and he agreed that it would be best if he was just nice to her. He went out of his way to include her in their playground games, but didn’t treat her like “a girl”….he just played with her, like she was every other kid. He didn’t nag her, but he didn’t ignore her, either, and he didn’t tease her like most of his friends did. And then one day, once the groundwork was laid and she knew who he was, he wrote her a private letter. He told her that looking at her was like looking at angels, and that when she was near him, it was as if he was in heaven.

The boy’s good, yo.

Aside: I only know about this letter because he left it at his friend’s house and that friend’s mom found it. It was so adorable, she actually hand-delivered it to Ms Natalie. After she called me to read it to me.

But then we moved, again, and 2of3 has been reluctant to make new friends here. You move a kid far enough away from everything he loves enough times, and he starts sheltering his heart.

He’s got a few buddies here; not anyone close enough to get into really good trouble with, but just enough to have a kid or two to eat lunch with. 2of3 is the kind of kid who needs one person, just one, that is all his own. He needs that soul-crushing, all-consuming connection with someone, and without it, he’s just not the same kid. Which sucks, because he’s manically awesome when he’s whole.

When we had some friends over for dinner on Saturday, we assumed their daughters would be friends with our daughter. She’s 4, they are 6 and 7. We figured our 11 year old would lock his door and hide in his room the whole night, and we figured that 2of3 would spend the night showing the grown-ups how far he can shove his fingers up his nose while the girls all played together.

Wrong.

By the end of the night, their 7 year old and my 9 year old were in a tent out back with a flashlight, a board game and some popcorn, just hanging out. They played video games together and played tag with each other and had juice boxes together.  They met, they wooed, they made exchange of video game cheat codes.

He absolutely adored her. Admittedly, she IS pretty flipping adorable, but after they headed home for the night, I went up to the boys rooms to send them to bed. I found 2of3 on his brother’s floor, slowly and deliberately pushing a little skateboard up and down a little Tech Deck ramp, and I asked him if he had fun. He sighed. I asked him if we should invite the girls to his birthday party, and he didn’t even look up at me when he said, “Mom, I think I have a crush on her.” I said I thought he did, too, and he said, “But she’s only seven. I’m going to have to be really nice to her, huh?”

Yes, kid, yes you are. I have a feeling it won’t be all that hard for you to pull really nice off, though.

File. Transfer. Protocol. The three scariest words in the Blogging Language. FTP is the Freddy Krugar of your blogging dream. Speaking of which, did you see that there is a new Elm Street movie coming out? Sorry…you can tease me with all the Michael Bay you want; there ain’t no way in hell I’m doing that shit to my brain.

Anyway, FTP. If you use a hosted blog platform like Blogger or Squarespace, you will never have to worry about this science-fiction double-feature. Go read something interesting {may I recommend some Polite Fiction?} and have a happy Friday. If you’re a slave to the Wordpress, or other fun platforms that make you upload shit to your server just to function, please join class after the jump to learn how to survive the claw-handed, backwards clothes wearing, wiggedy-wiggedy-wiggedy wack nightmare that is FTP…..
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So, yeah, I was having a crappy day on Monday. Mostly, I think it was just the goodbyes of the whole thing. I really enjoy the isolation that my little suburban life in the outskirts of Texas is affording me, but sometimes I need a friendly face. One on the body of an adult. And this weekend last, I got it, bigtime. And then I got two of my favorite people in the world waking up in my house, having coffee with me, giggling in early morning sunshine. When that ends, it’s a little bit soul-crushing.

My life, it’s complicated. I usually go Spock when I get overwhelmed, logically thinking through why my face has met the quagmire and the steps I have to take internally to remove my head from my own ass, but sometimes you just can’t fight the Kirk. Monday, I was Kirk, just without all the alien tail to hit.

Alien tail makes everything better.

But I didn’t move to New Mexico, I moved to the 4th largest city in the US where UFO’s never appear because they always wait for some toothless, unsuspecting Kansas farmer or West Virginian to mozie out to his outhouse in the middle of the night and that’s when they strike, because no one will believe them. It’s high school alien T.P.-ing at it’s finest. And then all those toothless farmers and Deliverance-livers will collaborate to document the sighting no one will believe, and they’ll submit it to the government and the government will call it Project Blue Book and people like me will finally have one way to track down their relatives, because they are all quoted in that book.

Crazy is as crazy is related to.

Back to Monday. I went Kirk for a long time on Monday, until 50ish people failed in every way to follow directions reminded me of why I chose to do this in the first place. So, thank you all for your virtual fistbumps.

I’m one of those saptastic people that makes grateful lists when life seems jolly rotten, because I know there’s something I’ve forgotten, but it wasn’t coming Monday. It came Monday night, my Pointy Eared List Of Clarity, and the top 50 items on my list were those 50 comments on that last post. A couple emails and a really good phone call thrown in to boot, and I’m feeling much better. Like, I don’t want to quit. Like, I want to prioritize a little better and make better use of my time on and offline. Like, I don’t think I could quit because you guys have this amazing ability to make things better in my life that you don’t even know you’re touching.

My life, she is grand. Perhaps I’m not going to know the classic definition of “success”, but perhaps I don’t want to. Perhaps I don’t want to be classic. Perhaps classic isn’t in my cards, but if I measure success by the amount of lives I’ve touched and been touched by, I have a cup that is running the fuck over.

And it’s all your fault.

I didn’t get to attend the Mom 2.0 Summit in Houston this weekend because I’ve only lived in Houston for three months, and still don’t know my neighbors’ names, let alone who can babysit for me long enough to go get schooled. I did, however, get to attend some of the later-night get-togethers, and I got to watch the conference over twitter.

I took a bit away from this weekend’s conference; less than the attendees, but more than I expected to.

In one of the sessions, I couldn’t tell you which one, Goon Squad Sarah kicked out this little gem:

And I felt that. Apparently, she started her blog so she could have a blogspot account to comment on someone else’s site. And now she’s doing what she does so so good. I’ve always held that one should do what one does well, and what I do well is cocktail waitress. So that’s what I always did. I held my head as high as one can as a professional waitress and acknowledged that some people can balance ledgers and some people can design buildings and some people can remember 1000 people’s drink orders at the same time, and all of those things are valuable contributions to society. I never, not in a million years, guessed that I could write. In fact, when I met my husband, he was trying to write the Great American Novel and I was trying to get promoted to full time bartender. But here I am, however many years later, writing for a living in corporate America and writing for shits and giggles on the internet and trying, and failing, to write the Great American Non-Fiction book.

And I just never thought that anyone else started into this thing, not knowing they could do it. Not caring if they could do it. Not trying to “be a writer”, just trying to leave a goddamn comment on Google’s ridiculously un-navigable comment forms.

I also learned, from sitting on the peripheral, that I think it may be time for me to think about exiting the blogosphere.

I don’t mean that in a whiny, talk-me-out-of-it way, I just mean that I listened and watched as these women, these serious, professional women, did something. I looked around at my peer group online and realized that I’ve been doing this a lot longer than most of these women, but have actually done less in my time online. I looked at amazing photographs delicately framed on walls, and I followed streams from packed panels behind grand hotel doors, and I saw my own shortcomings. Sure, I have a fantastic following of what I think are some of the greatest minds online, but outside our little black-on-white world here, I’m not doing anything. I’m talking to myself, and you all are kind enough to listen. But no one’s asking me to speak at their conference, and no one’s hanging my pictures in galleries, and no one’s invited me to write on the mega-online website for women, and I know that it doesn’t matter because that’s not ultimately why I’m here, but when I sit squarely facing those women who have been doing this as long as I have and I see how far they’ve come, how much they’ve accomplished, I wonder what the fuck it is I’m doing dumping a bunch of time and energy into something that doesn’t really matter when I could, and apparently should, be doing a whole fucking lot more, based strictly on comparison of ROI. I know I can write, I know I can write amazingly well when I try, and even though I’ve been doing it publicly for FIVE YEARS, it’s not getting me anywhere, when it is most certainly getting mostly everyone I know somewhere indeed. Maybe it’s not why I think I’m here, but it could be why I’m supposed to think I’m here, you know?

Washing my dishes right now would actually do something for me, and yet I’m typing this. I think my priorities are grossly askew.

Also, this is not up for debate, so skip the comments on it, please. It’s just me thinking outloud.

Lastly, I realized that, to a large degree, I hide behind my camera in public. I learned that I like the narrow, grey lensey take on reality much more than the actual, real reality right in front of me. I realized that I am much more comfortable documenting that I am experiencing, because it allows be to be no where near involved in the moment I am standing in the middle of. My camera gives me a reason for being wherever it is that I am, so I never actually have to be there on my own merits. It’s my introduction and my segue and my crutch. How did I realize this? Because once it was all said and done, once I was home and tucked back within my own, quiet walls, I noticed that I’d taken 305 usable pictures at BlogHer, and ONE at Mom 2.0.

Rachel from A Southern Fairytale, who is exactly as lovely as she looks.

Because I wasn’t hiding, and I wasn’t filtering. I wasn’t uncomfortable, and I wasn’t afraid, and I wasn’t intimidated. I don’t think I tripped over my tongue in front of Mom 101 once like I usually do, and I made an absolute fool of myself when I met Momslant and I was totally okay with that. Gwenbell got a hearty fistbump, and at best Laura Meyes got a frantic wave across a crowded room. And I was okay. I didn’t hide and I didn’t lurk and I didn’t worry, for once. I didn’t feel like the odd man out for once. I was with my peers, with women whom I respect and admire, women who normally scare the shit out of me with their incredibly beautiful minds, and I was humbled and inspired and unafraid.

For once in my life, I walked into something and I wasn’t documenting it….I was entirely too busy living it.

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.