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Monday, June 4, 2007

Midnight musings

Urgh.

Not sleeping well the past couple nights. I think it's mostly because I've stayed up too late and gotten myself worked up over it. I hope that's all it is. I remember that I started sleeping pretty badly when I was pregnant with Wendy and it was all downhill from there.
I wonder when some whiz kid engineer at Microsoft is going to come up with a memory card for your brain. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to load all the stupid and brilliant things you think of at 3 am onto a flash card and then load it to your computer in the morning so you could sort through it all? The thoughts I have in the middle of the night are like dreams, half the time I don't remember any of it except that it was brilliant and it was there.
I also thought about this blogging business. The first time a friend of mine said they had a blog and would I like the password I felt flattered and appalled in equal measure. On one hand I relish the thought of getting someone's inside view of their own life and times. On the other it seemed a little creepy that anyone would make their diary public. But last night I recalled that as a teen I kept a journal and one friend of mine in particular always wanted to read it. She lived in another state so we didn't see each other often but when we did the first thing she always wanted to do was to pore through my journal. I let her read it even though I was of two minds. Part of me resented the intrusion on my privacy but part of me yearned for someone else to know my real thoughts. I did end up censoring myself to a certain extent, for better or worse I don't know. Looking back on my journals I can still tell where I've drawn the line.
In any case I'm here again, writing a journal, making it sort of public.

Another train of thought that went through last night was about the difference between the families we choose and the families we are born into. I've already opened this blog up to certain people, mainly women with whom I feel a bond though I know them only online but not in real life. My husband also has the link.

But I don't expect that I will ever choose to share this with my biological family. My mother stresses me out with her drama and her back and forth between mother-protector and needy dreamer child. My father doesn't irk me but I also think he would be bemused by a blog and not know how to receive it. My brother and I appear to be estranged. After a lifetime of making choices the other would not, it seems that he has built up years of resentment toward me and I, in equal measure, have built up years worth of disregard for him. I don't know if we will ever find our way back to some sense of respect for each other. I don't even know how much I care one way or the other. He has a busy life, I have a busy life. The choices we are making seem to have little common ground, our backgrounds are nominally the same and yet we might as well come from different families altogether. I was shocked to finally understand that the father my brother perceived growing up was not at all the same man that was my father. And to a great extent the same is true for our mother. So even though each parent loves us equally, it is like we're talking about a different set of people, and that diminishes our common ground that much more.

Anyway, I'm sure that most people at some point in time have thought about this kind of thing. It concerns me now because I want to know how best to make room in my chosen family for my baby daughter. She will never have exactly the same family as my first. My first has had a dog that she adored and who is gone. She has lost a sister already. She has lived a life as a privileged foreigner and speaks a second language as her own. Her parents have always been home, always have had the luxury of making their own schedule. This baby will not experience those things. She will have an altogether new life. Her family will not be constantly hosting strangers, her mother will do housework, her father may have to work away from home, she will not be the first child to stand, to crawl, to smile, to make her parents weep with love and thankfulness. She will not be expected, regardless of intentions to the contrary, to be a role model for her sister. And yet these two girls will be loved equally by these different parents. I guess that that is all I know for sure.

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