The Blog

I’ve taken some heat lately for neglecting Less on the Floor, which I promised myself (and, perhaps, others) I wouldn’t do.  I let an entire month go by with nothing at all, a first for this blog.  Which is why I’m going to go ahead and hack this one post out: to have something on the board.  Something to prove that I haven’t given up on the thing that brought me to where I am today.  It might be crap but it’s a return, which is something.

After all, this blog changed my life.

My kids changed my life, of course.  My kids took everything I knew to be true about myself and the world and tossed it all up in a kind of Life Salad, and where I used to have an orderly Cobb — chicken in this corner, avocado over here, eggs sliced neatly on top — I suddenly had an all-you-can-eat-salad-bar grab-bag, where there are red beans (only in salad bars, no?), and the feta cheese kind of conflicts with cheddar-flavored croutons and the beets stain the lettuce and the bits of baby corn, and you know you should just use the olive oil and vinegar but you kind of want the ranch, and only too late do you realize there’s a special Greek something at the very end that just doesn’t belong anywhere but you try to squeeze it in anyway.

For a long time I stared at that salad and tried to figure out which parts of it I wanted to eat and which parts just didn’t appeal to me anymore, or which ones just plain didn’t fit.  And by a long time I mean years, years when I pondered the salad in one corner of my mind while the majority of me went through the motions of life: organized the childcare, went to work, loved my babies, put them on schedules, tended to their meals, regulated their TV, and so on.

The blog was the salad bar.  The place where I parsed through the feelings and told the stories and looked for the nuggets of wonderfulness in the confusing, cluttered bowl before me.  A place where I worked out when to go back for more and when to just stop loading up.

I’ve never been a big journal-er — and to be honest, the thought of reading my old, self-conscious journals makes me cringe with embarrassment and horror  — but I read back on the blog quite a bit.

I wrote a birthday post a few years ago asking the question: “What is life, if not a series of becomings?”  Reading back over five years, back back back to 2010, when LittleMan was still in his crib, just discovering Cars and his gift for words; when the blog consisted largely of recipes (!); when Babygirl was barely an idea; when I worked not at all, then part-time, then full-time, and back again…I can see the trends in my life as a mother and also the pivot points.

I realized early this year that at some point late in 2014 I became again.  Became a writer and an editor on my own terms.  Became a parent to two bona fide children (not babies).  Became brave enough to take a massive personal and professional leap (and re-discovered in that process the great blessing of my marriage, and the support of my husband).

And beyond the things I became in 2014, there are the things I came to realize I always was: the parent of a child with certain special needs; the advocate; the de facto Director of Family Logistics; woman behind the man with the Bigger Job.  These things were always there, they were lurking in the salad somewhere, just on the fringes of consciousness, but over the past twelve months I dug them out and acknowleged that they are massive and integral parts of the whole.  That understanding and owning those parts of myself — of my job as a parent and a wife and a human — will  (and has) changed everything.

In January I attended my first-ever bloggers’ conference in Salt Lake City.  It was a crushing experience in the best way: exciting and overwhelming and inspiring and frightening all at one time.  Standing at the open window of my hotel room on a frigid January morning, the Utah mountains just turning pink in the rising sun, I thought how I never, ever imagined back in 2010 that the blog would become The Thing.  That the journey was, in fact, the destination.

All this to say, I’m sorry for neglecting the blog.  It deserves better, and I have missed it.

I promise that after this I will get over my mooning and turn back to the things we love about Less on the Floor: the anecdotes, the snippets of life.  I thank you for taking a moment to indulge what has really been a year’s worth of honest, soul-searching work to finally get a grasp on who I have become.

Thank God for the blog.