Finding the Missing Piece of Me and the Belated Two Year Blogoversary

Life has been a bit of a haze.

The Tackler, age 2, in honor of the belated blogoversary.

Thanks to my sabbatical/hiatus from blogging, my two year blogoversary passed by without so much as a post or comment.

Two years of blogging.

It doesn’t seem possible.

That means my children have gone from this:

July 2010

To this:

July 2011

And now this:

July 2012 – And no, Lil Diva has not yet had a hair cut. My son also spent a day part cyborg.

The Tackler has transformed from a three-and-a-half-year-old I wanted to send to boot camp every day to…. a five-and-half-year-old I only want to send to boot camp once or twice a week. His Good versus Evil switch still exists. Days can be amazing and wonderful, or make me reconsider not having alcohol in the house.

He is still known to tackle his sister.

Lil Diva has gone from a teething crawler, to a little girl capable of keeping up with her bigger brother. She walked, climbed, and talked early and has paid careful attention to her brother. His catch phrases and complaints are now hers.

Monkey see, monkey do.

She is also capable of tackling him. Or turning on the tears even when her brother is on a different floor and saying, “He hit me!”

Payback.

My son is still the bane of most teachers, though a few had children like him and “get” him. He begins public kindergarten in the fall and I have no idea how that will turn out.

Lil Diva charms every teacher, saving all of the drama for me. They all want to take her home.

This blog began with the terrors of potty training The Tackler.

Lil Diva has been sort-of-potty-training for over a year.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Unlike my son who never displayed a single urge to use the toilet, she does. So I wait for the day she decides panties are better than diapers.

Waiting… waiting.

I’ve transformed from a gym junkie trying to lose baby weight to forcing myself to go, so out-of-the-habit I’ve become with my To Do List.

I’ve gone from two kids napping, to neither.

From writing every day, to every weekday, to almost two months of silence.

I have a confession to make.

It taught me a valuable lesson.

I need writing.

It is an outlet for me and without it I somehow became less-than-me. A small piece, left to stagnate, and the rest of me fell into disrepair. Things I enjoyed ceased their allure. Stress ate at me. The smiles diminished. The extrovert in me withered and I only wanted to be alone. The stories in my head dried up.

The more I stayed offline, the easier it became. I stopped reading emails, blogs, twitter, and facebook. I didn’t know how to come back. I sat countless times, a funny story about my children at my fingertips, but couldn’t bring myself to type the words.

They weren’t the right ones.

They were not what I wanted to say.

Why did my two year blogoversary whimper by?

Because I didn’t care.

I didn’t want to paste on a happy face and pretend, because it is not who I am as a person. I am honest and blunt to the point of annoyance to many, and to be fake with a “Whoohoo! Two year blogoversary!” would be the height of hypocrisy.

I despise hypocrisy.

I have not been happy, but it took a while to realize it. Much of the cause I have no control over, which I hate. The helplessness.

I can control how I cope with it and now I know writing has to be a part of it.

I wondered if I should go to Canada this year. The excitement, the glee I danced with a year ago was missing.

All the signs pointed at me to stay home.

And even when I arrived, I doubted.

Things I hoped and wished to happen, didn’t. Things anticipated and planned altered again by life beyond my control.

I wanted to cry.

I did.

Then I visited this:

Not pictured: the sound of the glacial water trickling down through the rocks behind me.

There is something magical and healing about the mountains.

It helped me find myself again.

It opened the floodgates of writing, blocked for so long.

Life looks different.

Joy over the simple things—sleeping in, writing on a deck, or inhaling the breeze—has returned.

Seeing my children grin over Skype as we video chat and they show me their pictures brought a full smile, not the pasted-on variety.

I hope, once the mountains are far away and I’m back in the 100 degree weather, I can carry their magic with me. Because somehow it makes everything possible.

Writing a book, doing the 4.79 millionth load of laundry, accepting things you can’t change, or potty training a Diva.

I can always have an awesome blog bash next year.

And hopefully celebrate the end of potty training.

* * *

So enough about me, how are y’all doing?

Linked up with: