peevish mama

You may or may not have noticed that new column over there to the right, down a bit, yep, there. I just sort of slipped it in casually, pretending it’s been there all along, half hoping you wouldn’t notice because God knows, I certainly don’t want to diminish my tenuous, paltry readership by pointing you in the direction of other, better blogs! To tell the truth, when I started this blog, I didn’t read many, if any blogs, so a blogroll didn’t even occur to me. Then as I started to wade around in the murky waters of the internet, I realized just how deep it is, just how vast. Wow, I could swim in this! Shit, I could drown! Fashion blogs, mommy blogs, literature blogs, food blogs, political blogs, design blogs, funny blogs, sad blogs, freaky blogs.

Easily overwhelmed, I was overwhelmed. Easily demoralized, I was demoralized. What is the point of adding my voice to this chattering chaos? Who cares? Who is ever going to find me and hear me? Maybe I really am spewing words into the ether. So I had a little freak out and stopped writing for a while until I realized, no, remembered, that spewing words feels pretty fucking good – regardless of whether anyone is reading. So I started spewing again, and here I am. Spewing and also pointing you to other, better blogs. I am one ballsy and reckless fool today.

In my blogroll live both friends and strangers whose words I have come to really like and anticipate. I have figured out that there’s a little clique of mommy blogs – funny, irreverent, mommy blogs that don’t make me want to stick my head in the oven à la Sylvia Plath. They all seem to know each other and love each other and hang out all the time and go on crazy adventures, notwithstanding the fact that they’re scattered around the country. I feel like the girl on the playground sullenly looking on with her fingers crooked around the chain link fence and one knee sock drooping down around her ankle, wishing they would ask her to join in. But they don’t know me. They don’t see me. They’re having too much fun sharing links and laughs and witticisms and Bonnie Bell Lip Smacker. So I’m just gonna turn around, sit on the crabby crass, behead dandelions and scratch my mosquito bites. 

One of the funny popular girls is Finslippy, who recently raved about a blog by a friend of hers (see? they’re all friends – I’m not making this up) called The Diamond in the Window, and because I trust Finslippy, I checked it out. It really is wonderful. It’s a blog about books and girls and books for girls (to be fair, boys too) and is written so beautifully that I just want to crawl into my yellow beanbag chair and read The Little House on the Prairie. This woman clearly loves books, but what I find magical is that she is still breathtakingly in touch with what books meant to her as a girl. Maybe it’s because she has girls, but I think it’s because you never really out grow being a bookworm. This blog brings me right back to that heady feeling of pedaling home from the library on Deep Wood Road, my backpack filled with treasures, shimmering and shivering to get out. I loved books. I read at the table, on the toilet, in the tree, in my bean bag chair, on a shag rug, in my bed, in my parent’s bed, on the bus, in the car, at recess. If I had a good book in my armpit, the only thing I could think of was finding a spot to drop and tuck into it.

If you are, were or are raising a bookworm, check out this lovely blog. 

And now, back to the playground. Mama had a baby and her head popped off.