I need a donut … and I don’t even like donuts!

“You’re gonna blog? So what’s next? You’re gonna travel the world to find yourself?”

These are the kind, encouraging words my teenage daughter said to me last night when she saw the how-to blog books sitting in front of me on the kitchen counter. Nice.

So why am I blogging? For several reasons:

1. I like to give new technology thingies about 10 years to settle in before I engage; therefore instead of living with the pressure of being cutting edge I can rest in the corner like a dull hacksaw.
2. People keep telling me that I should. Not sure why. Probably just to see if they can make me do stuff – like when my classmates dared me to drink the paintbrush water in second grade. Yeah, this is a lot like that.
3. Some idiot once said that you should do something you’re afraid of at least once a day.

So now I have to pick something to blog about.I’m told it works best that way. Since I have a website called “Laughing at Spilled Milk” I use for my speaking gigs, thought it would be a nice tie in – and something I would really enjoy digging into. Pretty much every talk I give somehow references the “spilled milk” in our roles as women, wives and mothers – an expectation versus reality thing; the messes we want to cry over that are better laughed at.

My thought is to do this by blogging little letters to the Jamison of all those years ago – the chubby, newly married, habitually pregnant, and totally unsure 20 something, who tended to be lazy and had really bad bangs.

See, I had always wanted to be a wife and mom, but the reality of these roles turned out differently than my fantasies. Troy, (my husband) was a pretty nice guy, but didn’t know what he was doing any more than I did. We had no money and rented a tiny house in a gang-infested part of town. I grew up in a family of three girls and had no idea what to do with a boy…which is why I got three. We didn’t understand birth control (“Oh, so you actually have to put it on? It’s not enough to buy it?”), so had four kids in 4 years and 9 months. It was like falling down a flight of stairs with no landing to break things up.

Anyway, I was clueless. How do you raise great kids? How do you stay married – even happily married to the same guy when your parents have a full 10 marriages between the four of them? How do you turn yourself into a woman who is decent at housekeeping, getting to places on time, following through with pretty much anything, can cook without cream of mushroom soup, and has the willpower to lose 60 pounds?

I expected perfection from myself, my husband, and our offspring. What I got was a huge mess, but over time I learned to both embrace the mess and to make the mess a bit less messy.

So, hope you enjoy eavesdropping on what I would say if I got that wish that we all would love – to go back in time and tell the young, ignorant version of you what the older, wiser version of you knows now.