Excuses

One of the reasons I haven’t started a blog is because I know myself. I’m a perfectionist and a procrastinator. If I can’t do something brilliantly, I don’t want to do it.

That’s why the few pictures on my walls are the same ones that have been there since we haphazardly hung them after moving in almost seven years ago. I don’t know how to decorate.

That’s why the nice long patch of dirt in our backyard, set aside (with cement curbing, even!) for a garden many summers ago, is growing nothing but rocks, weeds, and an assortment of Tonka trucks. I don’t know how to go about growing things.

I could go on and on (Painting my front door! Learning to oil paint! Organizing my storage room!) but we’re talking about blogging here. I don’t want to have a blog that just languishes, never updated, never visited. But I also don’t want to have a blog that I hate because it’s not good. Hence the urge to let it languish.

I want to squelch that urge. I want to write lots of subpar blog posts (“Congratulations!” you say, “You’re well on your way!”) so I can get over myself. I want to break through my self-imposed stupor and strike down the excuses that arise when I feel the need to write: It’s too messy in here, I can’t express myself when there’s Play-doh under my fingernails, the sunshine is giving me a migraine, I can’t think when there’s a person on me, I need to pluck my chin hairs, I can’t say no when Ellie is begging me to read Harry Potter with her . . .

Actually, I’ll never rise above that last one. The girl has found my weakness. All she has to do is show me the book and raise her brooding little eyebrows and I’m hers. Until way past both our bedtimes.