Bloviations

It has been a long, long time since I sat down to write anything here. I was listening to the Moth on the radio the other day and heard a story about a man who was a celebrated teacher and who went through a terrible ordeal because words from his blog were misrepresented and taken out of context and distributed to people in his community.

Oy. How disturbing, right? Well, it turned out well in the end. People who cared about him or who cared about what was the right thing to do in that situation actually read through his blog and discovered the content was benign. It did leave him with a new appreciation for being careful about what he wrote.

I have been stuck in a place of not wanting to write anything that offends or disturbs anyone for a long time and so the message of the radio program resonated with me. I don't write with every audience in mind. I tend to write thinking that people will assume some sentences are meant to be heard with a joking voice and some are more serious.

Anyway, that's why I have been putting off writing anything here. When I say I am a stay at home mom who is stuck in small town WI...I don't mean I hate my small town. I mean that I am doing my best to figure out what I have to contribute here. It could be worse. I could be in some small town in the Deep South with my Chicago accent. I could be in a remote village of the Ukraine. I would be just as lost but not as close to my hometown.

Not that my hometown is so much better. It's full of crime. It's a murdery place. It has rats running through alleys. People honk their car horns all the time. There is stifling traffic. Everything costs more there than it does where I live. I know all of that, but it is where the people I grew up with live. It's where my parents met. It's where my grandparents met. It's where I think of when I think of home.

I don't actually see myself as being stuck here. I just feel disconnected sometimes. I'm working on that. It's going along fine. I don't know if things are improving because I am less concerned with fitting in than I was when I had such high hopes of becoming something other than what I am or if I just added enough positive into my life to push away the negative. Life sometimes feels like it is understood in hindsight. Maybe I will understand later.

For now, things are just fine.