It is — at least in the United States — Mother’s Day. My friend posted this New Yorker essay on Facebook, and it so perfectly captures the feelings we may have about this day. It’s about losing your mother, but I think many of the words also work for those whose children aren’t here:

It’s nothing, I tell myself. A day for advertisers. So I shrug off the sales and the offers, the cards and the flowers. I press delete. Still, I now mark Mother’s Day on my private calendar of grief. Anyone who has experienced a loss must have one of those.

Private calendar of grief. The days that mean something only to you, mixed in with the days that you acknowledge in a very different way from the rest of the crowd.

And this moment:

Every now and then, I try to recall what went through my mind as I was standing in that hallway, crying my heart out. (And if you think that the cliché can’t be real—well, then, you’re lucky.)

Even different kinds of loss sometimes hold moments in common.

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I lucked out at the library. I walked in on Wednesday, and Normal People by Sally Rooney was on the new release shelf. I had been waiting for it to come out for months. When I finally thought to put my name down on the hold list at the library, I was number 300-something on the list, and that was weeks before the release. Such anticipation.

So I’ll read today. I’ll buy coffee; grind it at the store. I’ll celebrate my mother — I am so lucky that I have her in my life.

Sending good thoughts to anyone who is having a hard day today. May you find time to slip into the library. Find the right book waiting for you on the shelf.

We have a neighbour, and every day, she walks her enormous dog. We’re around the same age, so I’ve tried over the years to befriend her, but we’re still in the “hello” stage of acquaintanceship. She always smiles at me when she walks past, but her body language clearly states that she doesn’t want to slow down and chat. It’s not unfriendly; I just haven’t been able to get a conversation going.

Josh noticed that she hasn’t been walking the dog. She still walks past the house mid-day, but there’s no leash. The dog, if still alive, has to be in its mid-teens, so it follows that the dog may not be alive anymore. Hence the missing dog on the walk.

I want to say something, to let her know that we noticed and express our condolences if condolences need to be expressed. But there’s something weird about starting a first conversation like that. We’ve been neighbours for many years, and we’ve only spoken hello to each other and had one other conversation about the dog. I don’t even know her name. I’m just really sad not to see the dog with her anymore.

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Stop procrastinating.  Go make your backups.  Don’t have regrets.

Seriously.  Stop what you’re doing for a moment.  It will take you fifteen minutes, tops.  But you will have peace of mind for days and days.  It’s the gift to yourself that keeps on giving.

As always, add any new thoughts to the Friday Backup post and peruse new comments in order to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

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And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “She was the ‘queen of the mommy bloggers.’ Then her life fell apart.” (Vox) — thanks, Lori!

Okay, now my choices this week.

Different Shores has a post about not being a mother in your 40s, and how it differs from not being a mother before this point. It’s such an interesting post about being an outlier. She writes, “Now I’m over 40, I’m fairly sure that none of my family or old friends gives a rat’s whether I’m upset or otherwise about not having kids. As I see it now, the only option is to try to own it, or be miserable.” There’s a lot of food for thought.

Anabegins has a post about all the things she’s doing to bring the vacation spirit into her life because she doesn’t have time for a vacation. And I just love this. I too have switched to reading mind candy for the moment. Letting things slide. Sometimes you need to do what you need to do to get by.

Dubliner in Deutschland has a post about keeping up with the news and how it gets under your skin. She explains, “I don’t often write about tragic events in the news on this blog, and sometimes it feels a bit insensitive or shallow to be talking about my day to day life as if I don’t care about what’s happening. The thing is I do care about it all, a lot.” She captures that need to keep informed, and balances it with the emotional reality of hearing bad news.

Lastly, The Road Less Travelled has a post about International Bereaved Mothers Day and why she kept her “literal and cyber mouth shut.” It is for a thoughtful, selfless reason, but it’s also because the world makes it so hard to speak about loss.

The roundup to the Roundup: Sad about the dog.  Your weekly backup nudge.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between May 3rd and 10th) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.

“Are you working on a book right now?”

No, I’m not working on a book right now. Not in the truest sense of the word. I have book ideas. I have pages that I wrote months or years ago that I say I’m going to return to and finish. I have the impulse to write and no time to work on my own stuff.

I get asked that question a lot when I’m playing life-catch-up with someone. The question makes sense. Once upon a time, I wrote books. And then I stopped writing books. I got other work that interested me more in the moment, and I went down that road. And those roads led to different roads, taking me farther and farther from book writing until it was something I was looking at from a distance, or, more honestly, looking at in photographs because it was so far behind me that I couldn’t see it anymore.

I feel guilty when I get the question because it feels like other people see that work as part of my identity. So it means that I’m not being Melissa anymore. Whereas I see myself as Melissa, and right now she’s doing X and a while ago she was doing Y, and before that, she was doing Z. But sometimes I wonder if that’s quite right.

I wish I was writing. Maybe that’s the theme for the week: I miss what I used to do. Because what I used to do was part of who I was. So if I’m not doing those things anymore, then I’m not really the same person anymore. Except I am. Or people change, but at the core, I’m still myself.

It’s this thing: I add new things, but I still want to hold on to all the old things. But if I never shed activities or interests or work projects, I won’t keep moving forward. And at the same time, I wonder if I can still call myself a book writer if I’m not actively writing books. And I miss calling myself a book writer, even if that work doesn’t excite me as much as what I’m doing in the moment.

I always think about writers who take years — decades — to write another book. In between, I still think of them as a writer, even if they’re not publishing new work in the interim. Maybe that’s where I am, the interim between books. Or not. I guess I’ll need to wait and see.

So… to return to the post on Sunday… blogging has changed but bloggers have changed, too. I was circumspect from the get-go — the twins were people in MY story vs. being the focus of my story — but I used to go through my day and sometimes internally note, “I am so going to blog that.”

A case in point: the potato chip factory tour fiasco. I knew while we still on the road that the story was going to end up on my blog. It captured one of my many many many spectacular moments of not-thinking. As we were living the day, I was noting, “this is so us.” I wanted to remember it. I wanted other people to know it because I felt like it captured our family: Josh ever patient, the ChickieNob having an existential crisis, the agreeable Wolvog happy if potato chips were involved, and Melissa exuberantly not-planning a factory tour.

There were other moments like that, too. The tooth fairy fiasco and the talk about evolution; times where I thought as the moment unfolded: I am so going to blog this. Or non-twin moments. When I got to be the press pool note taker. I knew as I was living the moment that I would end up writing about it.

I even had a t-shirt that I got at BlogHer one year that said, “I am so going to blog this.” It was totally see-through. It was immediately relegated to workout clothes.

The point I’m making is that I don’t go through my day thinking those words anymore. It’s not that exciting or funny things don’t happen. It’s just that the impulse isn’t there. The twins say funny things all the time. I do interesting things sometimes. And sometimes as things are happening, I have a vague flutter in the back of my head: Should I write about this? And then the internal answer: Maybe? Would anyone else find it funny? Do I even have time?

And then the moment passes.

I’m willing to bet that I’m not the only person who stopped thinking, “I’m so going to blog this.” Life is still just as full. It just doesn’t seem quite as story-worthy; either because it’s just one more example of something I’ve already said before or because I’ve entered a different stage in life. Not everything gets captured in the word net, thrown up on the blog for posterity.

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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Beyond the fact that I cannot stop snickering about the term “lady backpack,” I need to scream that I HAVE A LADY BACKPACK, which means that I am finally — FINALLY — fashionable. It will only last for a hot second, but I need to grab it while I can.

I hadn’t been using my lady backpack (lady backpack!) because I realized that I was schlepping around half of our house with me every time I went out, and I didn’t need most of it*. I didn’t need all of my notebooks; I just needed one. I didn’t need a laptop or iPad for a trip to the grocery store… ever. Even with my glasses anxiety, I could make do with one pair of backup glasses when I was under one mile from our home. I was like a goldfish, the stuff I was carrying growing to the size of my bag.

So I switched this fall to a small purse that fits just a handful of items. Wallet, extra glasses, a box of cinnamon mints, one notebook. I don’t miss carrying all of those things that I brought with me under the heading of “what if.” What if I need an entire first aid kit while I’m out purchasing groceries? What if?

But now I’m switching back. Not because I need that other stuff but because I want to be fashionable for once in my life.

How big is your purse? And how much stuff do you carry that you never use?

* Just to give you a sense of how much shit I brought with me that I didn’t need: I once discovered that sonic screwdriver I made out of toilet parts at the bottom of my purse and realized I had carried it with me for months — MONTHS — without knowing it was deep down in my lady backpack.

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts that are connected to businesses or are sponsored post.