So my friend Britney issued a little challenge for herself (and anyone else!) on her blog: to write 30 blog posts in 30 days during the month of November for "National Blog Post Month" or "NaBloPoMo." I guess it's kind of a phenomenon in the blogging world, and it seemed like a great motivation to me to get back into blogging mode. Plus, I assume it's a bit of a riff on "National Novel Writing Month" (or NaNoWriMo), which I first heard about in grad school. For NaNoWriMo, you write an entire novel-length work during the month of November. My sister Megan and I have attempted NaNoWriMo a couple of times (though I think she's come much closer than I have), but we've never made it. How much easier it seemed to post something to my blog every day for thirty days.
Then I realized something, after waking up in my recliner for the last two nights after falling asleep at about 8:30 with a baby lying on my chest:
I am exhausted.
It seems strange that I wouldn't have realized this before. After all, I have an eight-week-old baby who, despite his very many charms, still doesn't quite sleep through the night, meaning I don't quite sleep through the night. Add to this the fact that he likes to be awake (and held) in the evenings, usually from the minute the other kids go to bed, and I am with at least one (usually more) of my delightful children from about 7:00 a.m. until 9:00 p.m. every day. And then I fall asleep on the couch. I stumble into bed and fall into a dreamless sleep until Cole wakes me up again, and then we hang out until he's ready to go back to sleep. What I'm saying, as you may see, is that if my eyes are open, I've got a child with me.
I hope you won't misinterpret this as complaining. I enjoy mommyhood, on the aggregate, and I actually quite treasure my extended evening time with Cole. Nevertheless, it's a tiring proposition, and I have little mental energy for writing or being creative, at least on any kind of consistent basis.
What this all means, I guess, is not that I've given up on NaBloPoMo (which is, incidentally, just the kind of abbreviation that I bet would annoy Jeremy if I said it too often), but rather that I've given up on posting every single day. Nevertheless, I still have high hopes to finish 30 posts this month, if only because--at the very least--I know it would make my mother happy. I have a hunch she knows just how I feel.
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3 comments:
Rachel, I love how these NaBloPoMo posts you're writing on virtually no sleep are about as well written and as interesting as blog posts get.
You have a gift.
Nobody told me about NaBloPoMo. Megan did mention that NaNoWriMo was coming up in the vague future (I guess the future is always somewhat vague) but she didn't give me the specifics. While I'm dubiously confident that I could write a novel in 30 days, I don't think I write one in 18 days.
"The sea was angry that day, my friends..."
I, for two, would love 30 posts on your blog. However, you have all my sympathy on the exhaustion front. Being a mom is no joke! Ever since I took care of Don and Amy's boys by myself for two weeks in Denmark I have had even more admiration for mothers than I already had in the first place. Not having one moment to oneself all day long is really, tiring (but great, also).
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