Parenting Without A License

If This Keeps Up, I May Have to Take Up Scrapbooking

Posted by Kimberly on March 31st, 2008 — Posted in Kipple

I’ve been sitting here for an hour trying to come up with something to write about today, but what I find myself thinking about is all the things I haven’t written about in the past few months. All the milestones and moments that have passed by unrecognized and unremarked on as I sit trapped inside my own personal Bell Jar.

There was Facebook Guy’s party, Best described as “Home by 11 and it wasn’t even a school night.”  First I got lost 2 blocks from his house and had to call a cab to get there Then, about an hour later, I fled the scene (also via cab).  I tried, I really did.  But the only person I knew in the whole crowd was Facebook Guy, and he was busy hosting.  I tried to talk to people, and even made a new Facebook Friend, but after a while, I could just feel the panic starting to set in and I had to leave.

Oh yes, the panic attacks.

They’re not exactly panic attacks.  Certainly not the fullblown, oh my god I forgot how to breathe! variety I was subject to during the Oncology Odyssey. But lately I’ve found that when I’m out on my own I can feel that sort of hyperventilating feeling stirring in the back of my head.  Fortunately, it’s not like I get out much, so it’s really not that much of an issue.

Regan turned four nearly a month ago now and I have yet to talk about how that makes me feel.  My baby is four. And no longer much of a baby at all.  She is, in nearly all respects, a Big Girl now.  And much though I love watching her grow up, I cannot help but mourn the loss of the baby she was–an attitude that feels ungrateful at best, if not flat out tempting fate.

There are experiences both big and small that have fallen by the wayside.  Blog fodder that has not been forgotten rather than shaped into an amusing or heartwrenching anecdote for the internets.  On the one hand, the argument could be made that it’s healthy to concentrate on living life instead of constantly reflecting on it, but really, didn’t someone say that the unexamined life is not worth living?  I wouldn’t go that far, but it sure is more fun to turn it into a series of amusing stories than to simply sit around in pjs all day waiting for the next thing to happen.

Plus, I’m feeling guilty–a feeling that often goes hand in hand with depression.  In my case, I’m feeling like I’m failing The Ladies not only in not creating enough moments for them, but also in not preserving the moments we do have.   So, when I do blog, I feel like I’m spending too much time thinking about my life and not enough time living it.  And when I don’t blog, I feel like I’m letting those moments go too easily.

So, Depression 962 Kimberly 2.

But still fighting.  There’s that.