by Grey Mccallister

Created on: January 11, 2009

I've always said that the style and location of one's tattoo (i.e. tribal/bicep, sun/ankle, wings/shoulder blades) serves as a sort of coming of age indicator for an individual, their own personal blip on the age map. I recently, however, realized that more than any "bull's eye" tattoo or generational slang, it was one's desire to post, to blog, and to spill the sordid details of their otherwise personal life online, that would serve as the date stamp for this generation.

In starting a blog, I was a bit uncomfortable with the idea of exposing my own technological crow's feet. The laugh lines burrowing deep in my online profile. You see, up until recently, I had no idea why people wrote blogs, how they posted them, and how or why other people read them. All I knew was that after a decade long hiatus, I was ready to write. I was tired of the constant mind chatter, as endless stories and countless characters marched by during my daily attempts at grown-up life. Granted I was no longer the grad. student with MFA dreams. My days of rallies, and marches and writer's workshops had long been replaced by the realities of work, and raising a family. But while many aspects of my younger life had faded, some things remained the same. I wasn't cut out for a life of Doritos and the remote. I wasn't born to be mentally sedated.
A couple of years ago, I found myself confined to bed recovering from surgery and miserable. Taking pity on me, my oldest child crawled into bed with me, armed with a stack of her little girl picture books. Waving one in front of me, she said "Look I have Eloise!" She knew how much I missed those early days, as she had since moved on to YA novels, and her two little brothers had more masculine character book inclinations. After Eloise, she pulled out Madeleine and then Curious George. When she left my room, I sat there alone in bed thinking about just how much I missed our storybooks, and how much I feared the day when her younger brothers would also outgrow our bedtime reading rituals. But even beyond that, I was struck with the numbing awareness of just how badly I missed writing.
I'm not sure if I'll ever forget that day. The day I picked up a pen and scribbled the words ASingleMotherofThree Production on a notepad. That was the day that I took my very scary first step back into writing. That was the day that I decided to figure out just exactly what was a blog.

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