The New York Times had a fascinating essay last week about living an ordinary life.  That we’re pushed to want to be extraordinary, but the most satisfied life customers are ones who don’t aim for fame or huge accomplishments.  They’re just trucking along, living in the moment, being happy with what is in front of them rather than always focusing on trying to achieve something enormous.  They’re like pre-Gandalf Bilbo Baggins, happy to stay in his cozy hobbit nook in the Shire, vs. post-dragon Bilbo Baggins, who craves adventure and itches to do something really big again.

(The essay used the characters in Middlemarch, but I’m more of a Tolkien girl.)

The author points to a passage in the book and states,

It encapsulates what a meaningful life is about: connecting and contributing to something beyond the self, in whatever humble form that may take.

Most young adults won’t achieve the idealistic goals they’ve set for themselves. They won’t become the next Mark Zuckerberg. They won’t have obituaries that run in newspapers like this one. But that doesn’t mean their lives will lack significance and worth. We all have a circle of people whose lives we can touch and improve — and we can find our meaning in that.

I was thinking about this essay this week because my happiest moment was picking apples for the week with the kids on Saturday morning.  Not really remarkable to anyone else, but it made me smile as we made our way back to the car with 12 pounds of apple in tow.

The essay ends with words for students heading back to school:

You don’t have to change the world or find your one true purpose to lead a meaningful life. A good life is a life of goodness — and that’s something anyone can aspire to, no matter their dreams or circumstances.

It is a good life.  Sometimes a Bilbo-y Baggins sort of life (pre-Gandalf) because I prefer being at home.  But a good, ordinary life.

I used to be a very “good” mother, by my standards.  Once upon a time, I did all of my work while the twins napped or when they were at their grandparent’s house.  When they were awake, we were playing, and when they went to bed at night, I made them baby food.  And all was well.

They grew up and started to go to school, and I did all of my work while they were in kindergarten, pausing at 3 pm so I could be at the pick up door the moment they stepped from the classroom.  They aged into homework, and I helped them with math while I cooked dinner.  And all was well.

They switched to middle school and I decided to pick up more hours.  A lot more hours.  Why not?  I enjoyed the work and they didn’t really need me for homework anymore.  We were going to have to pay for college in a few years, and there was that retirement thing to worry about.  But now the work happened while they were at school and after dinner and on weekends.  It happened when they wanted me to hang out or take them to the pool.

And suddenly, just like that, I no longer felt like a “good” mother.  It’s funny how you snatch that status from yourself so quickly.  I slid into badness, and it erased and replaced everything that came before it.  Or I would think to myself, “You were a good mother, and now you suck.”

To be clear, while there is teenage-appropriate whining about my time being stretched thin, and general grumbling when I won’t drop everything to bake a batch of cookies, there is no one in my world who describes me as a bad mother except myself.  It’s my own little, judgmental moniker.  Everyone else is a good mother.  I am a terrible mother and a distracted wife and a long list of negative adjectives attached to various life stations including sister, daughter, and friend.  Everyone else has better work-life balance, better boundaries, better methods for getting things done.

The point is not for you to jump to my self-esteem’s aid and say, “But Melissa, I think you’re a good mother.”  First and foremost, your opinion about me (“you” being everyone who is not me) is not as important to me as my opinion about me.  But secondly, I’ve been thinking about that old version of blogging; where you put it all out there and admitted your foibles.  That version of blogging that made us feel less alone.  We have lost that side of things; now the Instagrammable life rises to the top and it’s all we notice.  We think that’s normal.

So no contradictions of my feelings, please, though I will take company on my blog front porch.  Sit down if you also suspect that you are not doing sections of your life particularly well at this moment.  Me too.

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

*******

There are some dates you want to remember and mark because they bring you personal happiness: your birthday, anniversary, special accomplishments.  There are other dates that you wish you could forget but you can’t because they were life changing events: death dates and other losses.

There are dates that you swear you’ll never stop marking that sometimes slip away with time.  Our miscarriages were like that.  I couldn’t tell you the dates anymore except for one, and that’s only because it occurred the day before a Jewish holiday, which makes it somewhat easier to keep in mind, though only the Hebrew date and not the American one.  The others pass on the calendar without acknowledgment even though I thought I would never forget those dates.

But there is something about September 11th that pokes my back and says, “Remember me.”  It doesn’t matter that it isn’t a neat milestone like 10 years or 15 years or 20 years after the fact.  Even at the oddball 16-year mark, it demands that you notice the date on the calendar.

Are you doing anything to mark the day?

*******

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.

My heart is in Florida this morning with friends and family who are weathering the storm or watching from afar with little sense of what will be waiting for them when they finally make it home.  It is unfathomable.  You get warnings sometimes, sure, but there is nothing you can do beyond the most basic steps of making sure you have food and water, boarding up windows, evacuating.  And then just waiting because there is nothing you can do to stop it from barreling over your life.

Once upon a time, there used to be one news story; one big event that dominated the news and the whole world seemed to focus on it.  But now it feels like the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, like a big crowded mass of news stories standing in front of a grave; North Korea and DACA and Harvey and Irma and the earthquake and Charlottesville and… the list goes on and on.  There is no world focus; no time to comment on one event before the attention turns to the next event.  Before you’ve had time to contribute to one relief effort, another one lines up.

People keep repeating that this isn’t unusual.  That it’s not that there are more bad things happening; it’s just that we have faster communication and therefore know about more things.  But it doesn’t feel that way.  At least not today.

Sending so many good thoughts southward, and holding whole states of people in my heart.

I was speaking with Morra Aarons-Mele, and I mentioned that I was excited for her book, Hiding in the Bathroom.  My copy would be here in a few weeks.  “Want a copy now?  I can send you one of the galleys.”  Um… YES.

So it arrived in the mail this week.  It is amazing.  I haven’t read Susan Cain’s book, Quiet, though it has been high on my TBR pile for a while.  But this book?  This book speaks to my heart.  I feel like it was written for me.   Have you ever had that happen?  You pick up a book and feel as if the author wrote the book for you and only you?  That’s how I felt starting this book.

It’s first and foremost an enjoyable, raw read, like delving into the best of the old blogging world where people were brutally honest and branding wasn’t a consideration.  And like that old blogging world, her words make me feel less alone.  It is hard to be an introvert worker.  You can pick and choose your social engagements, but you can’t pick and choose parts of your job.  It is hard to stick to your boundaries; to set up the work space you need in order to be productive.  And this book is full of “you’re not alone” moments as well as actual advice.

I’m passing this along in case you are (1) an introvert, (2) didn’t know this book was coming out, and (3) are feeling overwhelmed because you’re an introvert worker needing to function in a extrovert-friendly environment or career.

And yes, reading this has bumped Quiet to the top of my TBR list.

*******

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.

*******

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:

• “Good things only happen to some people. They don’t happen for people like us.” (Alaskan Blueberry)
• “Bittersweet Past and Present” (No Kidding in NZ)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Delayed But Not Denied has a post about Kate Middleton’s third pregnancy announcement.  It came right as she was prepping for surgery, and it makes her think about the three people she wanted to be pregnant before they announced their pregnancy: her sister, a schoolmate, and Kate Middleton.  And now Kate Middleton is on her third child.  She looks back at old journal entries, charting her changing reactions to each announcement and birth.  It’s a great post giving the emotional scope of a journey.

And I didn’t get to post these from last week:

Inexplicably Missing has a post about belonging, or feeling like you’re a part of something.  The post takes a deep look at our community; whether we are set up for people to belong.  Certainly, there are people whose situation is different from mine, and I don’t belong to their subgroup.  But individually, we belong to each other, if that makes sense.  I look at it in terms of the individuals making bridges between the subgroups of the ALI community, holding all the various situations together.  At the end of the day, I belong because I can say something and all of you get it without needing to explain it.  We see the world through a similar lens, and I can say, “X makes me sad,” and you know exactly why X makes me sad.  So that’s my take.  What is yours?

Lastly, Different Shores has a post about the right to have a child (or, really, why people bristle at that idea).  She writes: “But in the back of my head I’ve always thought: surely deciding to have a baby IS, actually, clearly defined as a basic human right? Anyone can have as many children as they like, when they like, however wretched their condition in life. Can’t they?”  And yet, people argue about whether a person should have a right if the action doesn’t happen without assistance.  It’s an interesting look at the argument.

The roundup to the Roundup: A book for introverts in the workplace.  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 September 1st and 8th) 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.