The (Virtual) Pages Of My Life

Earlier this morning I was reading a friend’s livejournal, when Connor snatched the mouse from me, clicked some random buttons and brought me to my own livejournal, in particular the “just plain weird” category of my own LJ. I haven’t used LJ regularly for years, the most recent post was from November of 2006 complaining because my heavily pregnant belly was in the way of any lady garden shaving attempts.

I flicked through the posts, there was an intense hatred of Bobby Flynn (that’s still there, just typing his name makes me want to go out and stamp on bugs just to release the rage), there were silly conversations I recalled with my husband and my coworkers, there were posts written by newly married, newly pregnant 20 year old whose primary concern was the fact that someone with stupid hair and more than a passing resemblance to Eric Stolz in Mask was a favourite to win Australian Idol.

I said fuck and didn’t worry about offending my mother, I posted pitures of myself instead of hiding behind the camera – I was hot and pregnant and everyone needed to see it, I wrote posts in the ten minutes between arriving at the office and the clock ticking over to nine and receiving a glare from my boss indicating that I had to start working immediately.

At some point, and not just since Robyn, that confidence has started to dwindle, it made a steady progression downwards until taking a nosedive of Ricki-Lee proportions on the nineteenth of February when I discovered I was about to give birth to a dead baby.

Posts now sit half written in my browser for two weeks just because I couldn’t find the right image to go with them. Declan repeats something funny to me and I stop myself from posting it because it seems disrespectful to write about how funny my kids are when one of them is dead. Connor (finally!) started walking and I never even mentioned it… because Robyn never will.

Dan and I said within days of her birth that we can’t let this define who we are, it’s far easier said than done. I don’t cry about it often any more, but it’s still there, this constant nagging feeling that I should be watching my daughter roll over around now, I should be buying ridiculous amounts of size 00 clothes in purple and I definitely shouldn’t have enough free time to be working on a new business and attending markets at the weekends.

Today is a fresh start, I don’t think I’m going to ever get back to the care free 20 year old (particularly now that Aus Idol’s gone to shit!) but I would like to get back her blogging style. The one without obligation, the one where I don’t linger over posts for weeks and most importantly, one that actually represents who I am right now at this moment in my life, because although at times I’m paddling madly under the water, sometimes I’m hanging out on the sand and just enjoying my kids and the positives that I have in my life. THAT is what I need to remember when I look back at this in five years from now, not how overwhelming the sadness can be.

I think a new shiny blog layout is called for