Have you ever had a friend you talked to regularly, with whom you shared a lot of your life? And then, for whatever reason – opposing schedules, illness, vacation, depression – you fell out of your regular pattern of conversations and then just… couldn’t get back into it? After a while, you feel like you have so much to tell your friend that you can’t really find a solid block of time for the surely Epic Catch Up you are going to have. And then, after even more time passes, you feel a little… embarrassed. Like maybe you weren’t as close as you thought you were, because clearly it’s OKAY that so much time has passed without talking. And maybe your friend won’t even be interested in all the mundane details of your life that have accrued since your last conversation. More time passes, and you begin to a) feel like the little things you normally would have shared with your friend are meaningless and stupid and not worth sharing and also b) forget the things you would normally have shared with your friend. And maybe some Big Things have happened during your communication break – but they feel too big to share casually on a catch up call; they should have merited their own immediate phone call. And maybe you have gotten really into How to Get Away With Murder or have started going to bed really early and you just aren’t sure how to work regular friend conversations back into your life.

But you miss your friend. You have to pick up the phone at some point and be your dumb, normal, overly awkward self. And hope that your friend won’t be too disappointed in/annoyed by/indifferent to the prolonged stretch of silence.

I stopped blogging back in May because I was having a tough time. Nothing was Specifically Wrong; my family and I are very lucky to continue to enjoy good health. I had just become mired in one of the bogs of sadness I periodically find myself stumbling into, and then everything – gestures wildly at The Entire World – grew so overwhelming I didn’t know how to grapple with it here. Writing about Good Things seemed like it missed the mark. Whining about feeling overwhelmed when I am one of the lucky ones seemed like it missed the mark. Posting my Pandemic Dinner plans seemed wrong. I don’t know. Nothing felt right, so I stopped.

And then Officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement took center stage, and popping back up to talk about the extreme awkwardness of Zoom meetings or plans for my daughter’s birthday cake seemed intensely off topic and inappropriate. Black lives matter. But talking about my own response seemed equally inappropriate; no one needs another overprivileged white woman chronicling her bumbling attempts at anti-racism. The things that I am doing – filling Carla’s summer learning sessions with Black voices, talking to her about racism, explaining to her what’s going on in our country and how Black people are marginalized and criminalized and killed; buying and reading books by Black authors and other people of color; interrogating my own internalized racism and taking a cold, hard look at how my own privilege has enabled me to ignore what for many people is a life and death situation; looking for ways I can become involved in anti-racist activities in my community; working out how to get past the inertia/laziness and uncertainty/fear that keep me from being an active force for change – are small and inadequate and hardly worth talking about.

However, I started to worry that NOT posting that Black lives matter was wrong, too. And I found I was on a seesaw between “you must say something or saying nothing says everything” and “this is a time to listen to and learn, not to say something just to say it.” The kind of extreme, all-encompassing ambivalence that leads to paralysis.

What it comes down to, for me, is this: this blog is not really a space for deep thinking; I’m not over here excavating deep moral and ethical topics and inspiring people to change their lives, and I don’t pretend to do so. This space is for frivolous and mundane things like dinner plans and mooning about my kid growing up too fast and proving how socially awkward I am. It’s an escape, for me — and, I hope, maybe, for you — from the constant barrage of awfulness we get from all sides. Or, if not an escape, exactly, perhaps a gentler exploration of some of the less (ha) fraught things we’re going through — grocery store trips, mask wearing, socially-isolated childcare — in These Unprecedented Times.

Well. All of this has been swirling around in my brain these past two months. I stopped writing, and the longer the silence has stretched, the harder it has been for me to know how to break it.

But I do miss this space. And I miss you. So, like it or not, going about it the right way or not, I am going to try to fumble my way back into blogging again.

Well. I can’t promise anything. Maybe the next post will be about cake.

P.S. Thank you so much to all you lovely people who have checked in on me via email or comments. I appreciate you more than you know.