why

Update, 8/21/14:  What follows is a post I wrote to explain why exactly I started this blog, from back in August of 2011.  I was charged with writing my mother's obituary.  The blog continued after those awful weeks as a way for me to talk about motherhood, and to grieve.  It hasn't been a terribly active place, but with ALS in the news every day of the last six, and all over social media and elsewhere, I came back.  

I started writing in a diary when I was about eight or nine years old.  I still have the first few books, but over the years it got harder to justify keeping some of the ranting, incoherent adolescent pages and I have discarded them.  I don't miss them.

While we're getting ready for the baby, the house is in total disarray, especially the second floor, which is full of landmines.  These don't explode, they simply reveal layers of the past that a person might usually forget under normal circumstances.  But it turns out I inherited that packrat tendency I thought I despised.

I sat down at my computer tonight to compose an obituary.  I've written so many things in my life, but this is new.  This reminds me of those stilted compositions from junior high.  Here's your topic, here are your parameters, make sure you double-space.  I have tried to write this obituary with a little color, a little life, because if the very last things said about a person are going to be in this couple of paragraphs, shouldn't they be crafted to live on?

I find that I have too much to say.  The obituary is a list of facts, a list of what is left behind more than anything.  This person lived, and this is what remains.  But I have too much to say about what was, and too much to say about what will be, and none of it fits the parameters of an "obituary."  I was always the kind of person who would get in trouble for saying too much, instead of too little.

So, this is why this blog is here.  My mother is dying from Lou Gehrig's disease at an impossibly young age.  I am pregnant with my first child.  There is so much to say that I find myself choked when I try.  I will do what I have always done - write.