Why did I start this blog?

Mostly this blog will be about my insecurities. It will also be about the truth, "my truth" in therapy-speak. These days I am busy raising teenage boys, working a very brainpower-intensive marketing job with long hours (from home! which makes me extra crazy - haha!), and cultivating a romantic, domestic relationship that I hope will prosper forever. I squeeze other things in sometime, in the cracks, but not much.

The part of me that focused on my creative voice when I was getting my MFA is still there, strangely, and not bored either. In some ways I feel guilty that I do not mourn the downgrade of this voice's place in my life. But life is about choices and focus, and right now my poetics, whatever that means, takes the back seat. I love that alien, impartial part of myself that watches everything and just gets it, and can articulate it back to me in a shape that just makes simple sense to me.

It's really this dialogue between myself and that voice that I want to explore in this blog. This is the thing that is missing among all the chaos.

By "chaos" I guess I just mean life re-definition. I mean, we all go through a continuous process of redefining ourselves throughout our lives. Some must do this more than others though, and I find myself yearning for a consistency and finality in life that seems almost mythical. I think others either perceive that they have created a consistent, well-defined life, or they are comfortable in chaos.

I actually prefer chaos, because I believe this is the most honest state. The challenge for me right now is that I am laser-focused on providing a consistent, stable, forthright home for my kids -- the antithesis of chaos. I'm in this weird middle ground, where I am softening about ideas of stability and finding them easier to provide than I would have ever thought, but at the same time I am so untrustworthy of stability, and to feel stable puts me on edge.

Let's review a few contributing factors as to why this might be:

• Being born with a teratoma that resulted in immediate and subsequent physical trauma that put me on high alert to to this world from the onset.
• Having self-absorbed, childish parents, who split when I was 7 for trivial reasons.
• Having a super insecure and emotionally stunted father who abandoned two daughters when they were under 10.
• Having repeated, chronologically consecutive and serious medical issues in high school with little parental involvement.
• Losing most of my mother, but not entirely all of my mother, to a stroke when I was 19. Having parental role in my mother's life ever since.
• Being party to my mom's four marriages, and more importantly, being asked to change my sense of family after she ended three of her marriages. (She is still married to her fourth husband, but not that happily.)
• Losing my kids' dad, someone I had been close to for nearly 20 years, to mental illness and substance abuse -- slowly, in really poorly defined terms, involving several instances where he was cruel and abusive to me and to the kids (not striking me as a "wife beater" but does that matter?). And not lost completely, as in the finality of death. He lingers around. He is a shell of an idea of a person.
• Losing the family I had married into, who became my extended and maybe more real fantasy family. They have never acknowledged the reality of their son's problems, and I became a troublemaker for breaking away from him. I know now that I don't need their "forgiveness." They should need my forgiveness but they are blind.

OK, great! Now that I think we are acquainted with all most of the key issues, we can proceed with the blog at large! BTW I'm hoping to infuse a lot of comedy and fun into this thing.

So, why a blog and not just a 40-something woman's journal by the bedside like it's 1990? This needs to go on the Web, that's why. Fuckers need to read this and comment and such. I need that, because it will help make everything else real too.  

So here we go. Enter the cave of my mind. Let's get weird.