Pondering my ponderings...

I blog about momming and teaching and fostering and wifing and cooking and goating with my particular Catholic and ex-unrepentant heathen flavor because these are the things that I do. I hope I don't come across as a self-proclaimed expert because I am certainly not one. My main point, in most of my posts is to think out loud, share what has worked for me and what has not, smile at my shortcomings, and hope for the best. That's it, really.

I feel that I am pretty okay at mothering. I have my good days. I know I was a pretty decent school teacher because I had these yearly evaluations that told me so. I make a poor excuse for a wife, I'll admit. I know I wouldn't want to be married to me, so I give credit where credit is due for any success there: the Sacrament, my husband's forgiving nature, and a whole lot of reading up on the real experts. Most of my wifely posts are me preaching at me reminding myself to get doing what I know I am supposed to be doing.

I thought somebody out there might have enough in common to laugh with me or even enough common sense to laugh at me at times, but I knew I enjoyed the company of others' thoughts on the ethernet and thought I might be able to contribute a thought or two, too. It's all a little awkward though, this blogging thing. I can see how easily it might degenerate into a roadblock to family time, a popularity contest, a vanity feeder, or an idea narrower. I really don't need any help finding new ways to fall short, so I do try to keep the pitfalls in mind. At best I guess, blogging is a bit like writing magazine articles, but it has a more intimate appeal to it somehow. When I read a good blog regularly, I feel the stirrings of something very like friendship with the blogger.

If this were the 1950s, I'd have you over for coffee and tea in the afternoon and we could laugh over the mountains and molehills of the daily grind together. But this is the Post-Modern Era. We are so neatly modern that I sit here in my home and type, you sit there in yours and read, and we share a moment displaced. It's much less entertaining this way. Much less civilized. All this social networking and blog reading feels cozy and homey, but is it enough to battle a certain modern loneliness we all have?

I don't know. What I do know is that I've been privileged to share some of my inner workings here. I feel very grateful and sometimes apologetic towards the people who have read what I've written. I hope you all, like my husband, find me just entertaining enough you can forgive me my shortcomings and, like real friends, point them out when they show, so I can tuck them back in again.