Open the Tab

I don't even keep the blogger.com tab open anymore. A couple of years ago, it was open all the time. Gmail, Feedly, Facebook, Twitter, Google Calendar, Blogger. Always there, prompting me to write, to look at the stats, to save a draft, to jog my mind. I closed it at some point, probably in a moment of overwhelm, and now, I have to push myself to open it again.

I've been busy actually doing things. In the last few weeks of summer, while the house was in its last stages of renovation and the kids got back to school, I squeezed in so much. Hannah and I went to an Idina Menzel concert, and I videotaped her huge smile as the crowd sang "No Day But Today." Marc and I saw a new musical, "Waitress," with music by Sara Bareilles, and I loved it and think it'll be a hit. On Marc's birthday, we attended a documentary called "Raise the Roof" on re-building a Polish wooden synagogue for a museum. I attended a Brandeis alumni event featuring Anita Hill, interviewing Letty Cottin Pobregin, on faith, race and feminism. I'd been so not-busy not-doing things like this for most of the summer, and this feels more like me again. It's good.

And I have been writing. I wrote something for Marc, that maybe he'll be able to use for an upcoming class he's teaching. I got my answers from last year's 10Q project, and have started writing them for this year (and I found the exercise very insightful and highly recommend it). Writing at work too, though for such a select and small group that it's a shame, because the writing is good. I still think in terms of blog posts; Marissa Mayer's two week maternity leave, Anne-Marie Slaughter's husband on what it means to be the lead parent, why this juggle still frustrates me when the school bus is late. 

Do you want to hear about these things? Does my voice add something meaningful to the discourse? I'm not sure. Maybe it's just hard for me to do less, when I did so much in 2013-14 to make Busy Since Birth an established thing, and now I don't write much. I'm not very good with the middle, I'm an all-or-nothing person. Maybe I need to get comfortable with middle. 

So today, I finally opened the tab again. I know it'll feel good to hit publish. Here's to the middle.