my hiatus

It's been a while. A long, long while. I first wrote this blog post over 2 months ago and I still haven't published it. Over 5 months of silence.

I guess you could say that I took a hiatus from blogging, just like real bloggers do. But that would imply a level of intention that is simply untrue. The truth is much less noble. I wasn't taking time to focus on myself, or my family, nor was I fasting from the internet. I hardly blog in the first place. I might write a lot, but I hit publish rarely. I didn't mean to stay silent so long. It just happened.

It happened because I'm pregnant - 26 weeks now and through the worst of it, finally. But it was a rough summer. A lost summer. July was spent sick, exhausted, miserable and packing. August was spent sick, more exhausted, miserable and not unpacking. I spent most days trying to figure out how to entertain Anna from bed, and just how much TV was OK for her to watch. I didn't do anything, and anything I did do was done in a daze. I don't remember a thing.

I wasn't violently ill like so many are, but somehow I was still in abject misery. Insomnia set in the very day I got pregnant and I have yet to make it through the night more than a handful of times. I didn't feel like a person of any description, and I certainly didn't feel anything like me. But WHATEVER, pregnancy is miserable - for all of us. I'm no exception.

But here's some advice. Don't be pregnant over cold and flu season. As soon as I started to feel a little better I caught three consecutive colds with just a couple days of health in between. Then a few weeks ago, the three of us came down with the flu. Ten days of fever, aches, pains, cough, stomach issues, headaches, etc. You name it, I had it. And now, FINALLY I am feeling healthy. Tired, but healthy. But it's been a long haul. I am so ready to be healthy again. Ready to be me again.

And it turns out I can't write when I'm not well, not myself. In "The Summer of the Great-Grandmother", Madeleine L'Engle talks about how she couldn't write when she was pregnant because all her creative energy was being used to create, well, a person. I'm not sure my excuse is quite so poetic but I'll take it. I would remind myself that surely I would feel like a person again one day and have some interest in actually living my life. Only then would I have interest in writing any of it down.

So here I am. Still tired, but feeling more or less like Sheri. Small victories, people.

I'm wanting to write down all the blog posts that I have written in my head over the past 5 months. I don't know if that will happen or not, but intention is a good place to start.

It sure is light years ahead of where I have been.