I want you to understand why I read your blog.

By which I mean, the active, continuous reason why I read your blog.  Of course I came over in the first place because something piqued my interest.  You had a similar situation to mine.  Or you had a thought-provoking post that someone linked to.  Or you had an interesting blog name that made me click over for a moment.  There are plenty of reasons I could catalogue that make me give a blog a first look.

But what makes me keep reading a blog and add it to my blog reader?  Because there are lots of blogs that I visit once or twice.

There is really only one reason why I would keep reading a blog, and that is because I connected in some way with the writer and his/her voice.

I like the way the person writes — their choice of phrasing, similar to why I like certain book authors — or I feel like there is something in the voice or ideas presented that makes me think that if the person lived in my town, we’d be friends.  So I add their blog to my reader because I respect them as a writer, and as long as their writing style doesn’t stray too far from why I originally liked them, I’ll keep reading.  I expect their subject matter to change, after all, we are all in flux and have different aspects of our life come to the forefront at various times.  Some topics resonate with me more than others, but there is no one I read who writes solely about one thing and one thing only.  By which I mean, they may think they write about one thing, but really, they write about their life.  Or they write about cooking, but they throw in a lot of stories about their dog.  Or they have an adoption blog, but they also sometimes get a little political.

Yes, I will admit that I sometimes skim a post if the subject matter doesn’t hold my interest, but overall, my continued reading of a blog is directly tied to the voice.  The only constant I need is whatever drew me to your personality in the first place.

*******

There have been a lot of posts lately worrying about changes in the blogosphere and whether or not to keep writing and whether readers have floated away.  These are all legitimate thoughts, but they’re sort of touching-the-elephant musings.  We all have our personal observations, but they’re coloured by our own personal experiences, and that includes what we are doing or not doing.

The first thing I always ask when someone comments that the blogosphere has changed is “has your writing and reading habits changed?”  That usually points to the issue: they’ve become self-conscious in their subject matter and stopped writing, they’ve felt uninspired for topic ideas, they’ve run out of time to write, they’ve stopped commenting as much because they’re reading from a phone.  Actions have consequences: if you change the way you blog, you will see a change in the way people read.

And those actions are what you are feeling when you’re touching the elephant.  It’s easy to feel that trunk or tail or tusk and use it to describe the whole animal.  But elephants and the blogosphere are both huge.  You can’t really get a sense of them if you only look at your own experience or that of a few people around you.

If you stop writing, people will stop reading.  If they suspect that you’re not comfortable in your own space, they will not be comfortable in your space. (Have you ever been to a party where the hosts have obviously fought right before you arrived?  And they’re sitting around in frosty silence?  It affects the party; it has to.  And the same goes for writers who don’t feel comfortable with what or where or to whom they’re writing.)  If you stop commenting, new readers will stop finding you and your readership will drop.

Luckily, there are answers too: Write.  Build a space where you are comfortable.  Read other blogs and comment; regularly.

And also, along the way, recognize that even if your blog has changed with age, underneath it all, regardless of whatever feelings you have to the aging process, it’s still your story.  Just your life; in word form.  We’re all like that too: I may have more grey hair than when I started writing in this space, crinkles around my eyes and lines in my forehead.  I look older.  But I’m still me.  And this blog is still an extension of me, a receptacle for my thoughts.  So no, nothing really looks like how it looked back in 2006.  But that’s okay because the important things — the spirit of this blog and the readership at the core — hasn’t changed all that much.

And all of this is to say that I don’t think that blogging has changed as much as people fear.  Has it changed?  Of course.  Again, everything — including blogging — is in flux.  But anyone who fears that the end of blogging is nigh needs to ask themselves if they’ve done anything to change their blog or the way they interact with the blogosphere.  And as a test, go back — for an extended period of time since change always takes time — to reading and writing as you used to read and write, and see if blogging now resembles blogging of yesteryear.  I’m willing to bet that at its core, it does.

I’m writing this in case you need reassurance to find your voice again.  Your voice is why your loyal core readership reads you.  Are there people who come to blogs when a person is experiencing something difficult because they thrive off the drama?  Yes.  But those aren’t the people you want to cater to or worry about because they aren’t sustainable or retainable.  They will float away to the next blog and feed off the drama there like a mosquito drinks blood.  And just as you wouldn’t work to actively keep mosquitoes biting you, there is no reason to attempt to keep that sort of blog reader.

Do you know how every person has a base weight that your body strives to return to; a happy weight that is easy to maintain?  Your blog has a base readership.  The numbers may go higher or lower based on external factors such as people linking to a post or getting a lot of Google juice or taking a blogging break, but overall, there is a base readership your blog strives to maintain.  That is your core.  When you push too hard to try to get that readership to go up, the core pulls you back down.  If you go away for a long time, starving your blog, your core pipes up when you return to remind you that your blog has gotten too thin.

Every blog has a core, even if that core only consists of five people.  And they read you because you are… YOU.  Isn’t that a powerful thought?  That there are people out there who care what you have to say.

Think of all the people you meet in your life that you don’t retain as a friend.  All the hundreds of people around you that you don’t connect with.  The same goes for blogs.  There are hundreds of blogs out there written by Jewish women or vegetarian women or mothers of twins or those experiencing infertility: all topics which resonate with me.  But I don’t read them.  Because for whatever reason, I didn’t connect with the voice.

So if you ever believe that people only read you for your situation, think again to all the people around you who share your interests and yet aren’t your close friend.  We don’t connect solely over shared experience because there are way too many people out there who share our experiences.  We connect over shared experience coupled with something else, a je ne sais quoi, that tells us that we like this person; we like their voice.

I like your voice.

Keep writing.

Last one. (I think.)  So the party posts brought up some interesting thoughts about reciprocation.  What we expect of others or what we do because we think other people expect it.  That murky grey area where you wonder if you’re doing enough.  If you’re pulling your weight.  If you’re a good friend or community member or neighbour.

I have some pretty amazing friends, and it’s hard to keep up with their amazingness.  They do a lot.  It makes you want to do a lot too; not to compete but because you know how good you feel being on the receiving end of someone else’s care.  It makes you want to step up your care game so you can make someone else feel like that.  So you can let someone else know you have their back or you want them to be happy.

When I say reciprocation, I don’t mean keeping a spreadsheet where you look at the times when you’ve borrowed a cup of your neighbour’s sugar and balance it against the times when you’ve shoveled their walk.  It would be an odd relationship if it was always perfectly balanced.  Give and take isn’t like cars alternating lanes in a merge; it isn’t even.  But a good friendship is sort of like a good diet: you don’t look at an individual day to see if you’re eating well; you look at the entire week.  And you don’t look at a single day to see if you’re doing enough; you look at the scope of a friendship.

The reason you need to look at a long length of time is that some people do hundreds of tiny things while some people do two or three huge things.  And, of course, the weight of each act rests in both the hands of the giver and the receiver.  What I might perceive as the greatest thing ever done, the other person may not see as a big deal.  And vice versa.

So no, I’m not talking about keeping score, but I think we all do note from time to time whether we feel settled in the friendship; and sometimes we think to ourselves, “am I being a good enough friend?” or “are they a good enough friend?”  And invitations are mixed in with all of that.

 *******

I think if you’re waiting to receive back exactly what you give, you’ll be disappointed.  If you’re waiting to receive back the sort of thing you give — for instance, you cook meals for others when they are ill, and you expect some sort of care like that when you are ill whether it be a meal or someone helping with your errands — you’ll be disappointed.  People answer you in their own care language.

Sometimes Josh says something to me in Hebrew, but I answer him in English.  English is the language I feel most comfortable using even though I understand what he’s saying.  That is a lot how our interactions with other people work.  We speak to them in our caring language, even though we understand theirs.  My caring language is food.  I like providing food for others.  It’s a way I show a person that I care about them, whether it’s offering to bring food to a party or cooking for them when they’re ill or making mishloach manot for Purim, I feel very comfortable silently conveying how much I care about another person through food.  I am less comfortable with other ways to show care; sometimes they don’t even occur to me until I’m on the receiving end of one of these actions.  And then I understand that is their way of saying they care about me.  But I tend to answer back in my own language.

And just as it is nice that we have so many different languages in the world, I think it’s a good thing that we don’t all show care in the exact same way.  It means there is almost always someone out there who fills a specific niche for you; who is your go-to person when you need comfort in a certain way.

But I don’t think it’s too much to expect to see something in return.  In the same way that no one wants to carry on a one-sided conversation, I don’t think many people look to carry on a one-sided relationship.  We expect to see some outreach on the other person’s part, even if that outreach differs greatly from our own.  Hence why I said that we still invite people who don’t invite the twins to their party.  If the friendship is there, I don’t see why you wouldn’t invite the child along.

But here’s a question: suppose you extended invitation after invitation to the same person — to see movies, grab a drink, go on a trip.  Every invitation originates with you, and while your friend is enthusiastic to go along with your invitations, she never picks up the phone and calls you.  She never tells you about this great preview she saw and would you like to see the movie when it comes out.  At what point would you start to feel a little confused: does she like you?  Does she sort of endure you?  Why is this relationship lopsided?  Is it possible they really like you but they lack the confidence or social savviness to extend invitations (this describes me sometimes)?  Would you let this friendship go on indefinitely in this manner?  Would you give it a handful of invites before you started turning your attention to someone who seemed a little more eager to have your company?

In the currency of kids, the party is king.  As adults, we have a thousand ways of telling the people around us that they are important to us.  But a party — for a kid — is an important tool for conveying to their friends that they enjoy being with them.  Yes, they can ask them to play at recess, they can ask them on a play date if that fits into their parent’s schedule, they can share their Halloween candy.  There are other options, but the birthday party one is easy.  And at a certain age, they know the weight of a party.  To have or not have a party was a pretty easy internal question when they were five.  To have or not have a party is a trickier question at nine.  Obviously, the end answer will be different for each person, so it isn’t as if there is one “correct” answer.

But I do think that one of my jobs as their parent is to be their friend coach.  To help them understand how to navigate the social world.  How to be a good friend, a good community member, a good decision maker when it comes to spending social capital.  This helping-someone-else-grow-up thing is hard.  Keeping a kid alive: pretty easy.  You feed them, water them, give them a little fresh air, and all is usually fine.  Turning a kid into a good person: much harder.  It means a lot of tears, a lot of letting your child fail so you can help them do it better next time, a lot of talking out situations and role-playing and listening.  So if I maybe think too closely about parties and the like, it’s because I feel that is part of my job.  At least, the way I see my job, which may have very different tasks from another parent’s job.  Just as there is more than one way to be social, there is more than one way to parent.

*******

I didn’t have an easy time socially as a kid.  My parents had a lot of work to do as my friend coaches.  I spent a lot of time in tears, a lot of time feeling left-out, a lot of time working really hard and not seeing the pay-off.  They were great coaches, but I had shitty luck as a social player in elementary school.

When Josh met me, I was teaching middle school, and he couldn’t understand how I could stomach it.  How I could chew my sandwich and listen to child after child after child dump their middle school woes on my desk.  He didn’t even like to visit me there because it reminded him of how much he hated that time in life, but honestly, as much as my middle school years sucked, being around middle schoolers never phased me.  I was like a surgeon who could look at someone’s festering insides and then consume a steak dinner.  Their problems usually didn’t get under my skin.

Fast forward to my own children going through elementary school, and I seem to have lost all my coping mechanisms.  I mean, yes, I can still work with middle schoolers and feel unphased.  But when it’s my child coming home from school with that lip trembling, and they ask if they can talk to me alone… my heart stops.  I think back to all the times I pretended to be sick at school so my mother would pick me up and let me fall apart in the car.  Growing up is hard.  Navigating friendships when you’re a kid is hard.  And then, if you’re lucky, you get to go through it all over again with your kids.

Yes, it’s their problems and their social skills to learn, but I feel those growing pains too.  That why-aren’t-they-my-friend pain and that how-can-I-be-a-good-friend confusion and the how-do-I-make-someone-a-friend learning curve.  I’ve been there, done that.

When they were little, when they discovered that they weren’t invited to a birthday party, the only angle they considered was that they were missing out on fun.  They were missing out on Chuck E Cheese games or pony rides or jumping inside an inflated piece of plastic.  But somewhere around six, the twins started realizing what not being invited to a birthday party meant: you didn’t make the cut, friendwise.  And sometimes they totally get why they weren’t invited, but sometimes they wonder what the lack of invitation means; have they misjudged how close they are to the other person?  Is their friendship real, or did they misunderstand what playing together meant?

They are figuring themselves out, figuring the social thing out, and I can see them internally debating on a daily basis how much they want to keep up with the Joneses.  Or really, how much they want to speak the same caring language as everyone else and when they’ll be ready to develop their own caring language.  Right now, that party is an easy way to tell another group of kids in no uncertain terms that they really enjoy hanging out with them.  They’ll say that in other ways such as talking with their friend on the baseball bench or letting the other kid pick the game at recess.  But with one big act, they can reciprocate all the good feelings of inclusion they’ve gotten to feel this year from other people.

In the future, they’ll figure out other ways to say that.  And they’ll learn that it’s better to say that to a committed, small group of people vs. trying to say that to a lot of people who don’t really care all at the same time.  And hopefully, by that point, I will have done my work well and I’ll be sending good friend material into this world.  The world needs more good friend people.

How much do you care about reciprocation?

Okay, I lied.  There are two more thoughts I want to unpack from the party posts.

Yesterday, we went to a Purim carnival, just as we do every year.  The twins got dressed up in costumes, ate cotton candy (okay, that was the ChickieNob; the Wolvog would never touch something the consistency of cotton candy), and played carnival games for plastic prizes or stuffed animals.  They jumped inside the bouncey castles and hurtled down the inflatable slide.  And I spent some of the time thinking, “how many more of these will we get to do?”

Because that’s one of the problems with kids: they age out of things, and usually before you are ready.  This blog started with giving up the bottle.  When I wrote that post, I truly didn’t believe that I would still be writing here, eight years later, without another child.  I thought I would get to go through everything again.  But years ago, we switched mentally to, “we will likely not get to experience this again,” and since, I have noted each last, usually after it happened since you never seem to know when your last is going to be your last until it is your last.

So I have watched them age out of each childish thing, and that is a good thing.  You wouldn’t want a person to stay babyish forever.  But it’s still a hard thing to go through again and again.  If you’re terrible at having your child age, you never get better at it.  And if you’re fine with having your child age, this post probably won’t make a lot of sense to you.  So I guess I am writing it for people like me; people who are constantly looking at the moments they love and wondering how many more of them they’ll get to have.

There is no part of parenting I dislike (well, except maybe the tantrums).  I like combing the ChickieNob’s hair. (How much longer will she let me do it?  I stopped having my mother do my hair by 12 because she couldn’t get the hairsprayed bangs quite right.)  I like clipping their nails and making them costumes and reading them books.  I like driving them around to activities.  I like birthday parties and Purim carnivals and trick-or-treating.  And I know that all of these things will run out, dry up.  They will need me less and less as they age, or need me in a very different way.  They will want to do these activities less and less as they age.  How much longer do I have with birthday parties and Purim carnivals?  A year or two?  Maybe more?  Maybe less?  This could be the last one but I might not know it until it’s the last one.

We have a lot of ticking clocks in our life right now, and these intangible clocks tick very loudly.  I think about time all the… time.  We’re waiting for things to happen, waiting for things to be over.  Dreading things coming up, dreading things to be over.  Having a lot of clocks ticking at once makes it pretty damn loud in my head.

Sometimes I mistake the ticking sound from the mental clocks as bombs, and I cringe, waiting for the explosion until I remember that they’re just ordinary alarm clocks.  Everyone has them in their life.  No one gets unlimited, unfettered time.  The ticking is not indicating an upcoming destruction of my life.  The most important things in my life will still be here after those alarms go off and I need to wake up and start the next day of my life.  Because the reality is that the bombs in life are mostly silent, and they don’t give you a warning tick before they explode, bastards that they are.

What we’re hearing right now is just the good, old-fashioned passing of time, marking what we are waiting for and what we are wistful to have come to an end.

So I’ll grab whatever last Purim carnivals and birthday parties I can before it’s too late and we leave this stage of life.  The next stage will be interesting too, but it won’t be like this one.  The celebrations will be more subdued, more grown-up, smaller, less chaotic and less colourful.

Maybe that is why I think so hard and work so hard to throw parties: because I am already mourning the end of them.

I was standing in the exact same space, next to my bed, when I learned that my most valuable friendship at the time was over and that Kurt Cobain had died.  Actually, only the physical space was the same.  The friendship ended in the fall.  Kurt died in the spring.  In between, we continued to live with one another to ride out the end of our lease.

But I was standing, both times, on the same side of my bed to receive the bad news.  And both times, it was my friend who delivered the news: that our friendship was over and that Kurt Cobain was dead.

Lightning is not supposed to hit the same space twice.

In my head, the end of my friendship and Kurt Cobain’s death always goes together despite the two events being many months apart.  The day he died, we sank down onto the sofa together and watched hours and hours of MTV’s coverage.  At some point, I popped a tape in the VCR.  I still have 6 hours of MTV footage from the day that Kurt Cobain died.

He died — they think — on April 5th, but his body wasn’t found until April 8th, which is when the rest of the world learned about it.  This April will mark 20 years — 20 years! — since I sat on that junky sofa and stared at Kurt Loder telling me over and over again that Kurt Cobain was dead.  20 years since my best friend told me that our friendship was dead.  We’ve long passed that tipping point when we’ve been not-friends longer than we were friends.  But two decades: that feels like an ocean of time.

It is always odd when your personal monumental moments get mixed up in larger world-scale events.  Our wedding intersected with September 11th, the twins’ birth coincided with the Olympics.  Since humans like to keep marking anniversaries, coverage of these world-scale events keep reminding you over and over again of the distance time has taken you from the personal.  We’ve been married twelve years.  The Olympics has rolled around yet again.  It has been 20 years since I lost that friendship.

I’m sure that next month will bring a plethora of Kurt Cobain memorial articles; a re-airing of MTV’s Unplugged concert.  We’ll keep thinking about him again and again; his music will start playing in all these spaces where his music hasn’t played in years.  Every time I hear a Nirvana song, I’ll think of her and sitting on that sofa together, the desire to watch the coverage transcending the fact that our friendship was dead, too.

I’m thinking of getting myself the Unplugged album off iTunes next month as a 40th birthday gift to myself — it’s the only one I don’t own.  I deserve it, right, for getting through 40 years?  In the meantime, I can keep watching the concert off the VHS tape, or on YouTube.  If you’ve never seen it, it’s probably my favourite performance of their songs:

Letting the last of the comments trickle in on the party posts, and then I have one last thought I’ll post this weekend.  Just waiting until everyone else has their say first.

*******

I recently started drinking almond milk, and I love it.  I’m not really an almond milk sort of person.  I’m not sure what sort of person is an almond milk sort of person, but I’m fairly certain it isn’t me.  But my sister coached me on a brand to try, and I started eating it over cereal.  It’s amazing.  I don’t know if I’d want to drink a whole glass of the stuff, but over cereal?  It’s like dessert.

Why am I telling you this?  Because a friend told me about it, and then I asked my sister about it.  And… look at me… now I’m drinking almond milk.

*******

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:

• “The Golden Ticket” (Serenity Now!)
• “The Flood and After” (Invincible Spring)
• “The Mom’s Club: Outside Looking In” (Waiting for Baby Bird)
• “Infertility’s Waiting Room” (No Kidding in NZ)

Okay, now my choices this week.

It’s Baby Day for MoJo Working.  Any time you’ve followed someone’s family building path for so long, you can’t help but be awed with them that the moment has arrived that they’ve been waiting for so many years to reach.  She admits, “I’m both terrified and excited, while in a suspended state of disbelief. I’ve just never really allowed myself to ‘go there,’ at least not in many, many, years. It’s been a decade of ‘one step at a time’ and living moment to moment, trying to just make it to the next milestone. The last milestone is here, friends.”  Congratulations!

Life and Love in the Petri Dish has a post reflecting on her experience with infertility.  It’s an interesting post (and a lively discussion in the comment section) about the chiasm that occurred for the author between reaching that lowest point in the journey and the gratitude she feels today.  I like the comparison she makes to the stages of cancer and surviving a life-threatening illness.  Very thought-provoking post, and all who know me well know that I always fall hard for a palistrophe.

Lastly, it’s cryptic and I was very intrigued by My Lady of the Lantern’s post about her dream connection with her mother.  She writes, “I have never stopped myself from hovering over those months ever. But it appears to me that I automatically skip tracks. I don’t plan to tell my mother over the perspective I have developed lest it hurt her. Dreams are therapy.”  The writing in the post is dream-like, lending an unreal quality to the words as if you’re about to wake.

The roundup to the Roundup: One more thought on birthday parties coming soon.  I love almond milk.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between March 7th and March 14th) 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.