Truman has been in our family for 3 years this week.  He’s a little over 3 since he was about 6 weeks when we brought him home, but we don’t have his exact birthday.  He is my furry companion, my little love bucket who begs for a treat every single time I stand up.  He loves back rubs and alfalfa cookies.  Happy birthday, Truman, and we’re so glad you’re here.

Look at that face!  Isn’t that pure love?  I mean, sure, he sort of looks like he’s just enduring me and waiting for me to leave him alone so he can go back to licking himself clean.  But isn’t he so cute!

I went to the White House Media and Toy Summit this week, and I’m still trying to process all of the statistics and discussion I heard from the excellent panels.  Some of it will make you shudder and want to take immediate action, some of it will make you hopeful for the future.

In the meantime, while I didn’t take many photos from the day, I did take this one of a slide from a panel.  It’s from Meredith Walker of Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls.

“Change the world by being yourself.”  Isn’t that a great sentiment?  I mean, everyone can do it, since the only thing you need to do is be yourself vs. trying to be someone else.  It’s so simple but brilliant: For kids, certainly, but also for every adult.

I posted this on Facebook, but I also wanted to post this here.  I was feeling a little out-of-sorts at the beginning of the summit.  I don’t often venture out of my comfortable little bubble of home and yoga pants.  At the first break, I was standing by myself, staring off into the middle distance while I ate a bag of Cheerios, when LISA FREAKIN’ STONE walked up to me.  She was at the summit, too.

And suddenly I felt so grounded.  It was the best hug ever.

It made me realize I go through the same thing every single time I go to the annual BlogHer conference.  I feel so nervous going, and then I either see someone from the community in the lobby of the hotel or get to the opening keynote and see people like Elisa, Jory, and Lisa on stage, and I suddenly remember: “This is where I am supposed to be.”  This is home, too; albeit without yoga pants.  But those people are home, and those ideas are home, and being part of a supportive site that nurtures writers is home.

I’m so grateful Lisa was there because it brought me out of my shell, and I ended up meeting so many cool people during the day.  I’m so grateful that Lisa, Elisa, and Jory started BlogHer and that Denise brought me to the site to write.  Because it is such an awesome space, and whenever I’m feeling a touch lost, it guides me back and reminds me that I have a voice and I should use it.

A side note: If you haven’t been to the annual conference and wonder if you should go, the answer is yes.

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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:

• “Karma” (A Half-Baked Life)
• “Why I Won’t Rate My Hotel” (Illustr8d)
• “Airbrushed” (Saltwater and Honey)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Res Cogitatae has a moving post about life forcing you to your knees.  She has a particularly moving part about her stillbirth fears, pointing out that, “The odds of stillbirth are 1 in 100. The odds of being born with one kidney are 1 in around 1,000. I don’t know what the odds are of having colon cancer that doesn’t behave like colon cancer, but I imagine they’re pretty high. And my father’s accident defies belief.  So why wouldn’t the baby die? It would actually be a more likely outcome than anything else that’s happened in the last couple of months.”  Yes, but is all I can manage as a response.  Because I don’t want it to be true?  Because it is easier for outsiders to hold your hope?  It is a very moving post.

Wild and Precious Life has an update about living as a family of five when others see you as a family of three.  It is about the exhaustion and elation of early days, and she explains: “Perhaps it’s obvious from this rambling post, I am so in love, exhausted, filled with wonder, worried about being the best parent I can be, and keeping him safe that I feel like a jumble. A fortunate jumble.”  I smiled through the whole post.

Lastly, Page, Stages, and Rages has a post to her mother to mark the two year anniversary of her death.  She writes, “I’m getting along — like you told me to, but you never taught me how to get along without you so I’m winging it most of the time.”  It is such a bittersweet post, and I sobbed heavily reading it.

The roundup to the Roundup: A really good quote to live by and seeing Lisa Stone at the White House Toy Summit.  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 April 1st and April 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.

Who is telling your story?  Is it you, on your blog?  Are you controlling the narrative on your social media feeds, presenting the you you want the rest of the world to see?  Is it someone else, writing about you?  Is no one telling your story?  Does it matter if stories are told if they’re going to be forgotten a generation or two later regardless?

Sit with that for a moment.

I am really loving this month’s BlogHer Writing Lab theme, especially on the heels of Hamilton and this idea of the legacy you leave behind.  What will you be remembered for?  How will your close friends and family describe your life?  How will a stranger describe your life?  Can we really control the narrative?  I’m not sure.

Image: Bruce Guenter via Flickr

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A friend and I were recently talking about how much of your story you tell other people.  By not telling something, are you sending the message that you’re ashamed of that aspect of your life or trying to sweep it under the rug?

There is a lot I don’t tell you.  Some of it is because it’s boring.  I spend about 40% of my waking hours worrying.  Do you really want to hear my looping anxiety?  I feel like you get enough of it organically without having me subject you to the full tidal wave of my neuroses.  Probably 2% of my waking hours is spent seething with jealousy.  It doesn’t really make for good blog fodder.  5% of my waking hours is spent pestering the people in this house with various “what ifs,” contemplating getting a dog, and reading about new video games.

I just don’t lead that exciting a life.  I don’t tell you about a large chunk of it because I don’t want to put you to sleep.

Some of it is just to have a delineation between inner life and outer life, inside the house and outside the house.  There needs to be a reason to be close to another person, and part of that comes from being let into an inner circle.  I’m in Josh’s inner circle.  He’s in mine.  He should therefore get more than me than the general world.  And while there are friends that I’ve made through this blog, there are also thousands of silent readers who shouldn’t get as much of me as people I converse with off-blog.

I described it to my friend as determining who is important to you and therefore wants to know you, as opposed to who just wants to know something for the sake of knowing it and not to be closer to you:

I think of all the moments that happen in my day that I don’t feel guilty not sharing with the world.  I’m not doing so to be deceptive or to lie or to pretend otherwise.  It’s just that it’s also important to get to decide what we share and what we don’t.  I don’t know.  I would bet that you tell the story to the people who are important.  Everyone else is important in THEIR story, but they’re not important in YOUR story, therefore they don’t get all the pages.

I guess I don’t see nefarious reasons for only getting part of the story when it comes to the online world.  I assume I’m only getting part of your story.  I assume there are people closer to you — either in physical proximity or emotional connection — who get more of it.

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The twins are nearing an age where they could write about me if they wished.  They certainly have the skills, though I don’t think they see me as interesting subject matter.  I am super interested in them, and they are super interested in me being interested in them.  But I’m only mildly interesting in my own right.  I am like a 3 on the interesting scale.

I’ve been very circumspect when writing about them because I knew this day would arrive.  When they would want to write about their own lives and I would be a character in their story.  How would they portray me?  A screechy woman who is always telling them to clean their room?  A slightly agoraphobic woman who bleaches the sink and vacuums daily?  An attentive woman who still reads to them and is willing to answer any question?  A silly woman who often tells them to drop everything so we can go play video games?  Because they’re all true, to an extent.  I am a screechy, agoraphobic, attentive, silly woman at times.

Have you thought about that?  That the people you write about — even in a loving way — can turn around and write about you, too?  Isn’t it sobering to think that when that happens, you won’t be controlling the narrative.  But you’ll have to live it, the way the world sees you, through someone else’s eyes.

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Maybe that is the best reason to keep a blog.  Tell or be told.

So are you telling your story?  And what is the narrative?

I applied for a grant.  When I got the thin envelope in the mail, I knew it was a rejection.  Nothing good comes in a thin envelope, right?  It was a ridiculous reach that I wasn’t really counting on getting, and it cost me nothing but time and ego to apply.  But still.

It hurt to see the thin envelope.

No one wants the thin envelope.

I texted Josh a picture of the rejection letter so he would know what a loser he was married to that I didn’t get the grant, and he wrote back all of the other things I have achieved recently.  And he’s right — I am only focusing on the thing I didn’t get vs. the things I did get — but thin envelopes do that to you.

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We’ve started taking the twins to college campuses.  I know this seems ridiculously early, and we’re certainly not making special trips to see schools.  But if we happen to be near a college they may want to apply to one day, we swing by the campus to get a sense of the space.  They’re mentally making a list of what they like or don’t like.

I think a lot about their senior year and how they’ll have to apply to schools.  They’ll get into some — I hope — and they’ll likely get rejected from a few.  Those rejections are going to suck.  This grant — it was nothing, a little ego massage and money — but not getting into a school?  That’s like having someone torch a bridge, cutting off one of your possible life route.

I know I would have been a different person if I had gone to a different school.

There’s no way to protect them from that, unless they don’t apply at all, which doesn’t sound like the best way of dealing with the problem.  You’re probably going to tell me that rejection is a life lesson they need to learn and it will make them more resilient and yadda yadda yadda.

But here’s the thing: I’ve experienced this life lesson, and I have learned nothing from it.  Thin envelopes still hurt, even when they’re low stakes.  Even when they come the same week you sign a new book contract.  If resilience is not hurting when rejection comes, I have not learned resilience.

J.K. Rowling just posted two of her rejection letters online.  You don’t save things that are meaningless to you.  I’m not inside J.K. Rowling’s brain, but I would hazard a guess that if she saved those rejections, they probably bothered her at the time.  Regardless of what else she has accomplished in life; despite moving millions of copies of her books.  Rejections still hurt.

So, no, I don’t believe you can learn anything from rejection except that after you lick your wounds you need to be like Hercules Mulligan and get the fuck back up again.

Licking my wounds now.  I’ll get back up soon.

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

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I am currently working my way through Ben Aaronovitch’s books based on a friend’s recommendation.  They’re fantastic — Harry Potter for grownups.  It’s a series, which is nice because if you like the characters in the first one, you know what you’ll be reading next.

Though I know that — like the True Blood books — I’ll probably take a break after three books to read something else, and then dip in and out of the series the rest of the way, even though I always start out with the intention to read a whole series back-to-back.  I didn’t think about how I read series until The Paperback Princess asked whether you read your series back-to-back or dip-in-and-out.

I’m a dipper, but I’m the worst sort of dipper because I pretend to be a back-to-backer so I can purchase the whole series.

How do you approach series: back-to-back books or dip-in-and-out?  Or does it depend on the series itself or the number of books in it?

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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 posts.