Now that I’ve claimed to emerge from it, I find that I really don’t want to be so exposed right now. Wasn’t the period of hibernation—that is, winter—supposed to last longer?

A few things have changed abruptly in the recent weeks, most significantly including a new job in the family. This has altered our routines and we’re doing alright. For the first time in my experience as a parent, I’m responsible for getting all of my children out the door in the morning. I feel like such a mom doing it. And I even manage to include our neighbor across the street, who goes to the same elementary school. Filling the minivan with four kids and trekking to two schools would have seemed daunting some years ago. Now that they’re older, it’s not so bad.

Today, my kid afflicted with toxic synovitis (see previous two posts) was acting like it was bothering him again, limping heavily around the house, complaining that he could not go to school. My other kid has a bad cold and was all pathetic and snuffly. I gave them both medications and trucked them off to school. Ordinarily I am a sucker for this kind of behavior, but lately I just haven’t felt I can tolerate their efforts to pull a fast one. I’m too much of a mess. So I stand up to it and sometimes overdo it. All day I’ve been wondering, are they okay? No spine have I.

Meanwhile I’m spinning my wheels. My husband heads off to work each day and he’s happy as a clam. His only problem is that he doesn’t want to stop working. He stays up late to get a little work done and he gets up around 6:00 or 6:30 am, without an alarm, already thinking about work. I’m pleased for him… oh so pleased… and yet my fear of single parenthood is eating away at me. I’ve been so afraid of single parenthood in fact that I have been afraid to let go of my husband in the slightest bit.

His new job takes him on a bit of a commute and so he is gone for just a bit longer now. I think of it as about eleven hours but it’s really slightly less. Sometimes it seems like an eternity.

I have been blogging a lot lately for my city blog, daily Monday through Friday, and I find this immensely rewarding. However, it is not all I want to be doing. Many other pots are simmering on the proverbial stovetop and I keep wondering where the intersection of different interests is going to line up. I’ve targeted education, journalism and urban studies. I’m dabbling around with other professionals in each field. But I want to connect all of the above, not necessarily just delve into one in a pattern others have established before me. I feel pretty strongly that my own journey is going to require some additional trailblazing, or at least heavy-duty research into what a few other people out there have done. Blogging is a very good step on that journey. But it also asks a lot of me—it’s so public, so transient. Where is it going, exactly? Sometimes it feels as though it doesn’t mean anything until it’s added up a lot—i.e., I have to write for at least five years for it to mean something. And most bloggers burn out after a year or less. Or so I imagine.

So while our family has turned a corner with River’s new job, it’s also sent me into an area of more confusion, perhaps more freedom, and more choices, even while I’m still tethered to home with small children and the duties that parenting entails.

This June I’ll be attending a journalism and democracy conference at UMass, which promises to be very interesting and rewarding, but it will take a couple of solid days and a few hundred dollars to get there. The conference is aiming especially at people in crossover fields and that pretty much includes me. It will feature a special track on citizen media which is right up my alley, as a journalist and photographer, editor and educator, urban and media studies and geek type.

I’ve also been talking a little bit with someone about a new possible publication. I’ve been dreaming about starting a new publication for a short while—one of those projects I’d start if I had some seed capital and a few others to work with in a focused way. One thing I love to do is start publications; it’s carrying them through in a sustainable fashion that I find challenging. (It’s having a team to work with that’s key.) Anyway something “hyperlocal” is what interests me most, and there’s a precedent for successful Web publications like this and even funding for them if you dig around.

My current publication, One magazine, is floundering a little from lack of seed capital, lack of team focus, and absolutely no hyperlocality—instead it’s global. I think our lack of focus with it may be emerging as a bit of a liability. My own lack of focus, really. Thus I’m at a turning point with it, not sure if I’m trying to take it away from the demographic I was originally trying to reach, or what. If it’s just a phase I’m going through. I’m a month late releasing the next issue and I keep wondering when I’ll come around, and what needs to shift. There’s a huge block in the way.

Part of the block includes the work I recently did on a new global site to reach a similar, though slightly younger audience, with an interactive, slightly-educationally focused effort. I gave plenty of time and energy towards some strategy meetings around that site, and while it was partially my inspiration for starting up One again in an online format over a year ago, it was simultaneously depressing to think that what I’ve done with One may suffer from any further effort I give toward a new and similar project. When it comes down to it, I have to narrow what I can do, because I have only so much time to give. Especially volunteer time.

I swore to myself at one point recently that I would not take on any more volunteer work. And then I got asked to do more volunteer work. I keep asking “Can I get paid for that?” and I listen to myself and realize I probably sound horribly greedy. If only folks knew my history.

My history. I look back at my work experience and wonder what I have been doing with my life. Right out of college I took an NGO job at the UN. For a year. Left it to get married, then got odd jobs and graphic design experience at a yellow-page-ads place. Learned Illustrator, Photoshop. Cranked out ads. Founded a design business. Why did I do these things? What I really wanted to be doing was publishing. But how do you make money doing it?

Where is that rock I was hiding under? I need it for more ruminating.

Posted by Heather B on 9 May 2006 at 3:02 pm.