Putting up stories

I’ve got it down now. I crack the egg into the small stainless steel frying pan that’s been warming up over low heat. It takes a bit longer to cook this way but it makes for a superior over-easy egg. There’s nobody else here so I have the time.

Funny how after shunning breakfast for nearly my entire adult life, here I am making a sacred ritual out of frying an egg in the morning. It’s also kind of funny to have the house to myself most mornings after seven years of having small children under foot almost all the time. But I do, every morning for about two hours, barring illness which has been nearly constant around here for the past couple of weeks. And then, once my two hours are up, I’m back to juggling emails, lunches, potty training accidents, homework, housework, and assorted other never-ending tasks.

I looked at that egg this morning, egg whites nearly firm, quite ready to flip. I nudged an edge loose with the spatula and watched it slide around effortlessly. It would be the easiest thing to ease it over with the spatula and slide it onto a piece of toast a minute later, the perfect just-barely-oozing egg. Instead, I put down the spatula and picked up the frying pan. One, two, three, I moved the pan in small circles getting the egg to turn so the yolk was closest to me.  Then I jerked it forward, the egg flipping up ever so slightly and landing in a mangled mess in the pan.

“Oh for fuck’s sake.”

I plonked it onto a cold piece of toast, splashed some milk into my coffee and headed down to the office.

You know, they say blogging is dead. I mean, I’ve heard that being said generally, though I don’t have any sources to link to. Facebook’s the new personal blogging. Or people only go into blogging to make money and get free stuff. It’s all true. Social media and smartphones have made the internet more accessible. They’ve given everyone more outlets. And it’s easier than ever for anybody to take decent pictures and upload them to a blog to try to turn their hobby into a business.

Hell, my motives haven’t always been pure. I blog for money and exposure and the instant gratification you can only get from 37 Facebook likes, five shares, two retweets, seven favourites and three actual blog comments. This blog has been a space to chronicle my experience of parenthood and to capture some of our family memories. It’s occasionally a place to open up and air my true feelings and often a place to wring some humour out of my tears. It’s been a great means of growing as a writer and developing my voice and also offers me a platform for sharing big, important opinions. It’s been a bit of everything, but I’ve been worried that it’s been slipping away.

Those couple hours every morning and the chunks stolen away during the afternoon and after bedtime are swallowed whole by paid gigs that I hoard desperately, always scrambling around looking for more, afraid they’ll disappear forever if I stop to catch my breath.

But blogging isn’t dead. I had a room full of bright, funny, heartwarming and talented writers share their stories at my last Diaries and Dissent open mic blog reading event. Blogging is alive and well; it’s just harder to see past all the pictures of mason jar salads and Buzzfeed quizzes. And maybe I stopped looking.

And I need to breathe. I don’t know how long this blog will be around, but as long as I’m holding onto the URL and bothering to delete those spam comments, it’s mine and I want it to be good. As I said to a friend the other day, “I don’t want to go out on a tidal wave of advertorial.” I want to keep telling stories.

So I’ll start with my fried egg on toast this morning and see where that takes us.