There are about five missing days from the past 157 that I've posted for my Year of Meaning blog.
I began this blog project on December 10, 2010 - my thirty fifth birthday. Since then, 157 days have passed and I have completed 152 blogs. Five blogs are currently missing - most of them already half-written but not yet posted due to unexpected but normal happenings: sick kids, moving, visitors in town.
I never thought this would be a problem because in the past, Blogger has catalogued my posts according to the days upon which I started to write them... meaning that if the post was started on May 16th it would slide nicely into queue in the right place even if I didn't get it published until the 18th.
Apparently with Blogger's recent ineptitude and 24 hour site lapse, this has now changed.
From this point forward, if I start a post on May 14th, it needs to get published before midnight if I'm going to count it for May 14th. And while this seems ethically correct, it adds a bit of weight to the life of a full time stay-at-home-mother of three children under age 6 who is also a content writer for my husband's company AND soon to work 'on the side' as a private tutor as well.
I'm feeling anxious then, knowing that either (a) I have to change the format of this 365 blog, or (b) I'll have to work even more ferociously on content every day in order to keep up the original plan. This news = less sleep and more stress.
This is the kind of thing that happens all of the time to mothers. We have put together a plan - a good, sensible plan which includes contingencies for all kinds of potential problems - but then something unexpected beyond our control (poopy diapers, vomiting children, schools that call to ask us to pick up our children or send letters home about lice in the classroom, tantrums, kid projects, Blogger site outage) happens and we're left to juggle as fast as we can.
Moms are always supposed to have all of the answers, right? We fix everything, even problems that we had no part in creating.
In fact, I believe if Blogger.Com were run by stay-at-home mothers this kind of nuisance (a site outage for 24+ hours and lots of lost posts and pages) would perhaps never happen because, frankly, MOTHER'S DON'T HAVE THE TIME TO DEAL WITH INCOMPETENCE. We're too busy chauffeuring, grocery shopping, doing laundry, playing with children and teaching them their alphabet. We're too busy cooking, nursing, gardening, helping with homework, ironing and mediating sibling fights.
We don't have the luxury of letting things go wrong. The buck stops with us all of the time, whether we are sick or exhausted or feeling depressed or just really busy living.
My son just came into the house to tell me that his 23 month old sister has killed the ladybug that he was quietly observing. He is apoplectic with grief. "It had such nice eyes mommy, nice straight eyes!" he is sobbing.
This is a life and death situation, literally. I need to go and comfort him, perhaps bury the ladybug so he has some sense of closure, and make certain that his little sister hasn't in fact ingested it. It's time for me to wax rhapsodic with them about the value of life and the meaning of death, and also what it means to kill a living thing.
I don't have time for Blogger crashes, lost posts, changed dates... and that's the truth of it.
From here forward then - my humble apologies for all blog posts that may eventually come online after their official date has passed. We'll have to call them the "Lost Entries" ~ something to differentiate them as unique and representative of the days in which I was so busy mothering, I didn't actually have time to write about the process.
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