“I’m determined to salvage the comfortingly wonderful customs from my heritage while, for lack of a better term, “taking out the trash,” so to speak. Example: Karo syrup makes a really good, easy topping for breads when mashed up with butter on a fork. Fantastic taste to that. However, eat too much of it, and I know I’ll have a heart attack. It’s all in the moderation. I have bipolar disorder and PTSD and I struggle with massive doses of anxiety. Generally, though, I am a pretty happy person. Except when I’m not. :) It’s pretty much just like that. And then I feel like the world is caving in. But the good news for you is that if you know me, unless you spend a lot of time and I really let you in, you won’t have to deal with any of it. Because I put on a really good cover and generally don’t let many people close. I’m slow to trust people right now. Otherwise, I’m mommy to two really funny little boys. They keep Jared and me really busy. My living room is overrun with matchbox cars and little boy-sized desks and chairs.”
This was the “about” box on my very first blog.
I finally got up the courage to go scouting through archive.org to look at old blog posts that are now defunct. I pulled this “about” quote from my blog as it was on February 3, 2011.
And I can unpack quite a lot that goes unsaid between the lines now, 15 years later.
And it is still, indeed true, 15 years later, that despite living what appears to be a fairly transparent existence online, it is true that I let remarkably few people close (pretty much 1 to be exact), especially in person, and I have learned indeed to put on a really, really great cover.
In that paragraph, I hear the angst in my writing. I hear the quiet despondency and horror of having had my social sphere knocked out from under me just the year prior.
On February 3, 2011, Porter would have been four and a half and Liam would have been not quite three. We were indeed in the thick of it with two very funny little boys. I was in no way prepared to give them the attention they deserved.
In 2011, the world was falling apart in just about every way possible.
And so, in 2011, the boys went to daycare despite me not working.
Jared kept all of us going, day and night.
I had visions of a “Mommy Blog,” and was not-so-quietly desperate to get back to some semblance of a professional life.
And for sure, whatever beginnings of a social life we’d had the year prior was long gone. Church was kind but most people were distant.
I was taking on the full identity of “sick Caroline.” And, quietly dying, horrified and terror-filled, inside.
And in that paragraph above, I was trying to not betray that any one bit of that was actually happening.
Over the next little while, I’m going to revisit some of those old posts, with updated commentary.
February of 2011 was the quiet beginning of a new sort of lifestyle: a different kind of childhood for my boys than I imagined, a different sort of marriage dynamic than I’d imagined.
A different kind of life than I’d grown up dreaming about.
And it’s been beautiful in its own way. Arguably, my boys had a more present mother because of that season of life.
And if I could go back and tell the girl, who probably drafted that “about” paragraph in between sobbing episodes, anything at all, it would be this:
Those two little boys that you worry about: they will grow up to be stellarly wonderful men in spite of whatever shortcomings you have. That man you married, that man that you feel growing ever distant with the stress of life right now: this marriage that is being tested is going to find its own comfortable peace and that man is your safe haven. And the career days may very well be done, and that will always hurt. And you, dear girl, your tears are not in vain. There’s a beauty in the growth going on right now. Do not lose hope.
That is what I would tell my 15 years’ younger self today. Because it is the same thing I can tell myself today, in 2026.
