On Digging, Blogging, and What to Do Next

As we came around the bend, hopping on and off the wooden planks that keep our boots from muddying up, and seeing our dogs up ahead, heading for the place where, yesterday, Swirl found a critter’s hole and erupted with gleeful digging, I asked my husband what I should do about my blog.

“Do you think I should quit it?

I expected a quick response from him. Of course not! It’s too wonderful to quit. You must continue writing. Your words are a gift to the world.

He didn’t say any of those things. Instead he asked, “Do you have something to say?” He went on, “If you still have something to say, then you shouldn’t stop.”

Many years ago, I took a writing class with five or six other earnest people who apologized before, during, and after they read their pieces, almost always childhood memories, odes to their parents, long, rhyming poems about the advent of spring. I (unapologetically) read a poem about my chronically depressed mother pulling weeds up and down our gravel driveway in summer’s mid-day heat. I called it “Wishing for More Weeds.” It was the beginning of a long ‘career’ of what a friend of mine once called pretty dark writing.

It is true that writing – both on my blog and elsewhere – has been a primary tool for managing my emotions, protecting my mental health, and making sense of the world. This meant writing about adoption and my job as a mother and then about the loss of my hearing and the depression, lack of self-confidence, and withdrawal that resulted. Sorting through old relationships was part of that enterprise as well, there was plenty of that. An angst magnet – that’s what my blog has been.

So many nights over the past ten years, I’d bring my blank self to the keyboard, having no sense of what I wanted to say, but somehow writing a few coherent essays, some of which have stood the test of time. It is true, the famous adage attributed to Joan Didion: “I don’t know what I think until I write it down.” It was only in the writing about my mother pulling the driveway weeds in the broiling sun that I realized why she had done it, day after day, until there were just the smallest new sprouts of grass left to pull.

So, do I still have something to say? I don’t know. If the past is prologue, I’ll only know when I sit down to write something – when I find that critter’s hole and start digging. Let’s hope it turns out to be, like Swirl’s, gleeful or, at least, sane-making digging.