Matt, my faithful and most hardcore, editor looked over my column before I submitted it yesterday. He made very few changes.
"It's really good. I mean, I wouldn't publish it but it's good."
"How good can it be if you wouldn't publish it?"
"I mean, I wouldn't hang myself out there like that."
"Ahhh. Yes, we are different that way."
I suppose I'm different than a lot of people, what with my willingness/compulsion to put it all out there as I see it, as it happened, even if it doesn't paint me in the prettiest light. I guess I'm not as into being pretty as I am about being honest. Raw, even, if it helps others know they're not alone hanging out there at the edge of sanity.
I owe no small debt of gratitude to the author Anne Lamott whose book, Operating Instructions, I read long before having children was really on my radar. Reading her controversially truthful account of what her experience was like as a new mother made me feel like I was really going to be okay being a mom as I am, when the time came.
That was huge for me. If my writing publicly about the challenges of parenting puts me under the microscope for judgment, so be it. I'd rather take a little extra crap from people lucky enough to know it all and help a few other folks along the way than censor myself just in case it offends, or upsets, people who don't agree with, or understand, me.
