writing mother blog

More and more as I write this blog, I find myself preoccupied and dreaming about what needs to be written. I can hardly sleep at night, my mind engaged at all times, hearing the words accumulate one and then another until there is a sentence, a passage, growing steadily, a story taking shape.

But what is the shape of this story?

I am rushing through the entries, doling out parcels of my life--today, yesterday, the recent past, far past, the future--messy little chunks of my life without design. Every day I feel that I must find a structure to illuminate the relationship between the parts of this story that began with my placing an ad for a mother but then I remember I must just write in this box and hit post every day or at least most days. No more full notebooks exploding in my filing cabinets, works-in-progress waiting to be read. No more struggling over each word to the point where I am afraid to commit to anything. No more judgments that the writing is too simple, not intense enough, detailed enough, aesthetically pleasing. No more insistence that I must write this story all at once and since I don't have the time to do that, then I must walk away from it. This is the time to just let the story come, to surrender to its possibilities and vision, entry by entry. One strand takes dominance for a time and in the process another is forfeited. How do I learn to accept this and not insist that it is too long to wait for a completion? How do I learn to shift my writing schedule and style to my new life as a mother?

I find myself wishing that I had started the blog when I was pregnant the first time or when I initiated the search for a mother or when I was pregnant with Sasha or as soon as I delivered and Janet joined my life. I find myself wishing that I had more time every day to write about each narrative element simultaneously: my past with my mother and grandmother, my new motherhood, my quest for a mother that began as a child and led me to place an ad, my writing. I find in general that I often write in woulds, coulds and shoulds. Why does this say about me? I am focused on expectations and recommendations and the past. What should have happened but didn't. Unreal or unlikely situations. Things that weren't attempted or weren't done successfully. Fears and regrets and fantasy life. This is where I am--in my mind. How much does this sentence structure reveal the state of my mind? Is this my philosophy of life? If I change the way I write about my life, can I change my life?

Who will I become through this? Will I be the same woman as I was at the beginning? The same mother? The same writer?