To be continued

I wouldn’t use the term ‘schedule,’ though let’s just say that it’s become a trend for Hartley to fall asleep for the last 2 minutes of an outing, a nap which he will happily continue in his pram near the open back door so long as I can manage to get the entire operation inside without too much hassle.

Given the transient nature of baby trends, I am even more hesitant to decree this unexpected period of rest ‘me time,’ except that I need to start thinking seriously about writing – writing anything at all – before the urge is entirely discouraged out of me.

Lately I feel no impetus to turn every last detail of my life into a blog post. Partially this is due to the fact that I can’t seem to keep on top of processing the rapidly expanding details, nor locate a familiar frame of reference by which to pin them down. Partially I just can’t be bothered. My inner life is not so interesting anymore – at least not in the way you’d want to magnify, and Hartley’s inner life is mainly only interesting to me. Even so, I scramble for moments to myself to record what I can - moments that are quickly snatched away before an epiphany of any kind can resolve.

I read the headlines every day, and bits from the Guardian on weekends, but events only serve to illustrate how specifically focused my life has become and, as such, untranslatable. Motherhood is truly not of this world – we walk around duck ponds and grocery stores, form bonds of convenience and sing songs without a shred of dignity or cynicism. Conversations are always to be continued, and you continue them with about as many mothers as you come across until you are satisfied, except you are rarely ever satisfied.

See? It’s fairly nonsensical. You have to be there.

But that’s not to say I’m not having the time of my life, or that I’ve capped my pen and welded it shut for all eternity. There are plenty of people with children who write (you only have to type ‘baby’ and ‘blog’ into a search engine to see how many) and plenty of people with children who write (how often are works of fiction dedicated to children?), so I hold out hope that one day I too will fall into one of these camps.

So now that we got that straight. I have a grizzling infant to rescue.