My family gets a daily newspaper delivered to our home every morning and, as we all stumble down and pour our coffee (everyone down to Jules, who’s 12, have a morning cuppa), we call out who gets the comics first, second and so on. The kids read most of the strips I don’t (or don’t often), such as Garfield. I read ones that they don’t, such as Doonesbury. I get it. When I was in college in the late 80s-early 90s, I had friends who read Doonesbury regularly, but I couldn’t keep track of all the characters and didn’t know their histories and it didn’t seem worth trying. That is until George W. Bush was president and was depicted as a floating and frayed Roman helmet.  I still don’t know the storylines of most of the characters prior to the Bush II administration, but I have continued to read Doonesbury daily.

And as I start this blog, my first that is not a class assignment or private loop to connect with other writers, but a put it out there public blog, many of Gary Trudeau’s latest strips concern a previously successful writer, Rick, who now finds himself blogging for free on Huffpo. His wife is a successful political operative, his ne’er-do-well son has a runaway bestselling (wholly fictitious) memoir, while Rick struggles to even gain access to interviewees. So blogging is like hitting bottom for writers, or traditional writerly types.

Which raises a question: Does anyone else in their 40s feel caught between the new and old? I wrote my high school, and many of my undergraduate, papers on an electric typewriter. We had to look things up on the card catalog in the library (remember how they smelled? Closed up trays of paper, exuding the possibility of anything you wanted to know), haul books home and search for the facts to back up our assertations. But computers and the internet came while we were still young enough to grab on and switch gears. Today my own children have to do something called “dialecticals” whenever they have a reading assignment in high school. Very busy work, in which students must cite usually 30 passages in the book and explain why they are important to the piece, which is designed to minimize oh-so-easy online cribbing. Are paperbound Cliff Notes even still published? I can no longer write with pen and paper for any length of time, but I agonize at the thought of publishing becoming an entirely (or mostly) electronic media. I once crafted an entire (Flintstone-esque) living room suite of furniture using all my boxes of books I had yet unpacked after moving. I had a couch that could seat four, a coffee table and a recliner. I should have taken a picture, which would have been with a camera containing film (sigh).

But back to blogging: Unlike the fictitious Rick, I don’t have a successful writing career in my past. I’ve written successful academic papers, grant applications, newlsetters and so on, but I haven’t received paychecks strictly for my writing. I’m starting at the bottom. Many of my big plans have shifted over the nearly 19 years I’ve been a mother. Most recently, Max and I decided to have one more baby so that two-year-old Leif would have a sibling to grow with at home after all his older brothers had gone off. We assumed that before this last baby was born I’d have fulltime employment with benefits–career employment. We assumed incorrectly.

So here I am trying to write with small children at my breasts and knees (at least my breasts aren’t at my knees, not yet). I’m not an overachiever, try as I might to be one, so blogging feels about right. And since I started Whoopsie Piggle, all of a week ago, I find I’m thinking once again like a writer.

My 18-year-old son is coming home from college this weekend and I plan to have him help me with the technical aspects of this new endeavor. Unlike the blogger in Doonesbury, my boy won’t make me feel out of touch. Of course, my boy hasn’t published a runaway bestseller either. Not yet.

Blogs, hmm, who does that?

I have found the few mom blogs I’ve viewed are often intimidating or annoying–who has the time to cook fresh meals from scratch (locally grown, organic ingredients), hand wash cloth diapers and start a charity for children and their families? Hippie Martha Stewarts. Right, except there is that fantasy lurking in the depths of my soul too. Clean, yet quirky home. Artistically talented, yet always polite children. Very accessible mom who also has a successful career. Whoa, so what I don’t like about these blogs is probably what I want but haven’t managed to manifest. I stopped looking almost instantly.

Besides, who wants to be boxed into a mom-blog? Ah, Doris Day in Please Don’t Eat the Daisies is told by her husband, David Niven, that she is so much more than a housewife. “All housewives are,” she tells him. That was in 1960. Does anyone call themself a housewife today? I doubt it, but the bill of goods my generation was sold was have it all–career, children and great style. And make your parenting attachment style. And your career creative and lucrative and your style flippin’ creative as hell. Yeah, well, it seems the sales force was setting us up for failure or at least abiding frustration.

Here’s my reality:

I’m a 46-year-old mom of four boys, ages 18 to two years old, and one daughter who is six weeks old. Truly, had the two-year-old been a girl, I’d have stopped there. But I just knew this one would be a girl (yeah, so what if I’ve been wrong before?) and when our daughter was born last month the first question I asked the midwife was, “Is there a vagina?” She told me to just look myself. Yep, the ultrasound had not lied, girl, girl, girl! Yippee! I held our girl and we looked at her. Bluish, alienesque newborn, as they all are when they first pop out, we quickly noticed some other things. “Her eyes look Downsy,” I told the midwife. She calmly told me she’d do a newborn exam in a few minutes. The skin on the back of her neck was voluminous, when she turned her head she looked like she had a handle of flesh back there. And her pupils were ghostly white.

Our girl was born with Down syndrome and bi-lateral cataracts. She has been the primary focus of life this past month and a half, but not our only focus.

My oldest son, the first three children are from a previous marriage, went off to the University of Michigan ten days after his sister was born. The second boy is in the throes of marching band season and puppy love with a young woman who lives in Montreal (we are in O-HI-O), the third boy is working through hard issues with his father while the two-year-old is just that, replete with tantrums and an explosion of language and ideas.

Claude, Hugo, Jules, Leif and Lyra. Until I was in my late 20s, I swore I’d never have kids. I was my mother’s only child and neither of my parents impressed me with their parenting. Frankly, I was afraid of becoming a mother. But the urge kicked in when I was in my late 20s (hormones perhaps, mixed with a crazy love) and now here I am, the mother of a family considered large by most American standards.

I’ve been looking for fulltime work for five years. I received my MFA in creative writing at the end of 2010 in the worst economy I’ve ever lived through (and unless you are 90+ or from Brazil, it’s the worst economy you’ve lived through too). Last year, I worked at the local Waldorf school, where my kids  attend(ed) but the cost of two babies in daycare is $300 more a month than I was making. So I’m telling myself I’m on Maternity Leave (italics make it more official). I’m figuring out what’s next as things feel like a new segment of life is unfolding. One child launching, one arriving with a genetic disorder. I love having a job, feeling useful, collecting my pay. But if I’m on Maternity Leave I can ease up on the job hunt and start this blog, clean some closets, maybe even read some books. All while learning what Lyra’s needs will be long term.

It was a month before Lyra was born when a friend suggested I write a blog. It was all I could do to not impolitely dismiss her idea out of hand. But the idea geminated and I was given encouragement by my partner, Max (who is Leif and Lyra’s father). Claude started a blog as part of his homework for one of his college classes using WordPress and said it was easy to set up. And other than getting past all the ways I can give WordPress money, it was.

So here goes (yeah, the first post is mom-blog-ish).