What's Up Doc

I read Sweet Juniper. If I say nothing else about it that blog is a wicked intersection of what I like to think is the wry-est, cleverest and yet most impecably kind gang of parent bloggers. Sure we're sarcastic, I mean we put the what's up doc into the game of child rearing in a way few can resist.

But the intersection offered a turn of late. A five-car pile up really.

Last month I caught the link from Sweet Juniper to sweet|salty and began reading the diary of an amazing mother. A mother navigating something beyond sleep wars and job shares and schoolyard tears. I was in awe of what she told us and grew in a way a little sick of my own blog. Her tale so heavy, her words so true.

I know her only in words... as words. I wonder at times about how she told us. It is not an isolated thing really. There are others. Those brilliant mothers who explode the caustic myth that mothers might be authors of their children's lives. Those who faced the unfaceable and told us about it. I came late to their experiences and my respect is something, I reluctantly admit, I frame in distance.

Instead it was in this collecting of the memory for the small boy Liam that I most fully met the process(ing) of a mother. A blog is such a precribed recollection. Prescient almost. At the juncture today just after Liam's passing I need not scramble for words to share the experience with my husband or the many other readers swimming in some mist of abstraction. The words are there. They are her words. I hope the power to publish them helps Kate.

There are questions (and answers) swirling about whether blogging can empower. I don't have any answers to this question merely suspicion. Suspicion it does. That as we work behind our glowing screens we can say more here than elsewhere. That in a venue so potent for abuse and mistruths the opposite might prevail. And, that this is a route to power. Not conventional butt-kicking manly power but something else. Something precious.

The word I keep coming to is truth. I mean there is no making this up (and yes I know that's an understatement beyond all belief). Kate laid plain a wall of truth that blows me away, as I've said. Truth so sheer as to make me want to look away. But I am unable to abandon the stream of words that invite understanding. A sacrifice of privacy to gain nothing and yet something is created. Care, and that insufficient word, support. I wake today to read the words and question. I question that which seemed inalienable. That which told me yesterday that I was working to love my children as much as I could.

Then I see her words. I feel her words and know I have not loved mine as ultimately as she. I pray today and always that I never face, as she has with such eloquence, the love of mother to transcend even being. Tomorrow I face another day to love my children more than ever. In some part because of words in this machine. Bizarre.

In memorium. God Bless Liam.