motherhood – Katie L. Carroll

Time has a way of changing when you become a parent. The minutes tick by slowly but the years fly by in a flash. Time seems to move at glacial speed when your child is sick or misbehaving or when you have a stretch of rainy days and the dreaded boredom kicks in. The hard moments feels like they’ll never end. But then one day you look back and realize your baby is 4 or 10 or even 20!

Then again this contradiction is indicative of parenthood. You want to spend every minute soaking up your child, but you can’t wait to get an afternoon or a night away. You strive to raise an independent, self-sufficient human being, but it hurts to let him go off on his own. You push him to experience all the world has to offer, but you need to protect him from all the bad things, even though you know you can’t. You show him unconditional love, but also have to be a disciplinarian.

You love your child more than you thought humanely possible (that’s the easy part), but being a good parent is really, really, really hard. You make mistakes, and by doing so you become a better parent. But no matter how long you are a parent, there is always some new challenge to be tackled.

Parenting is messy and impossible and beautiful. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done!

What are your worst and best parenting moments?

The Observation Desk (which you may not know is the official name of my blog) has changed a lot since I first started it back in May of 2008. First of all, I was still on blogger back then and it was more of a personal journal than anything else. I wasn’t always consistent on posting either.

Since I moved to a full WordPress site in June of 2012, the Observation Desk has definitely moved in the direction of being a place for other writers to come and share their thoughts and experiences in addition to my personal journal. I try to keep a nice balance of the two with one of my posts early in the week and one guest post later in the week. I’ve really enjoyed my couple of blog series: Confessions of an Author and Females in YA.

Even after six years of blogging, I’m never sure how personal to get on my posts, but I’ve found that some of my most personal posts have gotten the most response (in both number of hits and in comments). Notably my post called “How Does a Mother’s Love Grow?”, which voiced my fears about having a second child, was terrifying to publish and so uplifting when people wrote nice messages to me in response. And, of course, any time I’ve had big writing news, you all have always responded so kindly to those posts.

So what’s with all this reflection about the blog and when am I going to finally get to the point of the new writing venture that this post title so directly mentions? (Whenever I ramble in a blog post, I always think about THE CATCHER IN THE RYE and how Holden had that speaking class and yelling out “digression” whenever someone got off topic.) Anyway, enough digressing…to the point…

Since becoming a mother, I find I have the urge to write about it. Often just little things come to me during the day. And these thoughts feel significant to me and I feel the need to record them. But I’m not much for keeping a physical journal and writing by hand, well, bothers my hand. But this blog doesn’t feel like the right place for these little thoughts either. It’s not that I don’t mind talking about being a mom here (you all know I do that here), but I save my more long-winded thoughts for here.

The more I thought about my desire, which has quickly become a need, to express these little things, the more I realized I needed an easy and quick way to do it. Because I want to do it frequently when the mood strikes and I don’t always want to have to haul out my laptop because, frankly, some days there just isn’t time for that. And when I do haul out my laptop, I want to be able to write and not have to take all my little thoughts and record them.

“Digression!” No, really, all this blabbering is on topic, I swear. So I’ve decided that Tumblr is a good place for these motherly thoughts. I plan on keeping them short, almost poetic in nature. No need for full sentences or even much coherence (which is in short supply when you have little ones). I chose the Tumblr blogging format because it’s well suited for snippets and I think it will be easy to access and update from my phone (which will be key in me posting often on it). I’m not sure if I’ll be able to post daily, but maybe almost daily…we’ll see how it goes.

I’m calling it Observation Mommy and the link is http://katielcarroll.tumblr.com/. My first post will be on Wednesday because that’s The Boy’s third birthday and I thought this was a good milestone to start on. I hope some of you will check it out and visit frequently. Of course I’ll still be posting some motherly thoughts, and the adorableness that is pictures of my sons, on occasion here. But I think this new blog will satisfy that craving I’ve had for more writing about parenthood and kids in a manageable way.

Stayed tuned for more writerly news coming soon as well. I’ve got a fun new collaborative project I’m involved in and will announce that soon. Yay! Any good news for you all?