This, by the way, is the point at which blogging experts say you shouldn't blog. You should always put your best stuff out there and dazzle the Internet multitudes. But I say... Um... Ah, whatever. I don't have it in me to come up with a dazzling response to that either. So, here, my friends, are your bullet points:

• I was working on a guest post for a blog on disability and spirituality that I think many of you will love: Amy Julia Becker's Thin Places. The post won't be up for a week or two. I'll post a link when it is, but do feel free to poke around and get to know Amy Julia in the meantime.
• I've been working on my 1st Step, in depth this time, which has consisted of writing up a history of my life and relationships. I've used a lot of blog material, and it's about (gulp) 50 pages long, which is awful and fabulous. Awful, because I need to edit it down to about 8 in order to present it to my 12 Step group and fabulous because I started this blog with the idea of writing a memoir about my marriage and I've found I have a really solid foundation for that. When I read it to my cosponsor, she and I both cried.
• I have been celebrating! My husband and I have 7 years in recovery, and since many of you know that discovery and recovery happened when I was very pregnant with my daughter, you can probably guess that we've been preparing to celebrate the anniversary of Janie's birth. We've also been celebrating a sobriety anniversary for my husband, who has 4 years since his last major slip. Yay!

So, I'll let you poke back through the archives yourself if you're interested. There's lots there. After all, I've spent the past few years writing here nearly every day. And it's probably because of that I'm finding that I need to take a break away from the screen. I'll be back, renewed and refreshed, in September when the kids are back in school.

Hope you all are having a great summer. I know I am.

July 4th is Independence Day here in the United States. It is also Israeli Girl's birthday. My husband's relationship with Israeli Girl was his bottom: it was what finally caused him to admit his sexual behavior was out of control, that he was an addict. I began calling her Israeli Girl contemptuously: while not technically a girl, she was only 19 when my 30+ year old husband met her on a business trip abroad and began a several year long relationship with her. I don't feel the same contempt anymore, yet I still cannot quite bring myself to grace her with a name. Somehow, giving her a name gives her some humanness, some power, that I don't yet want her to have.

For years, Israeli Girl was one of the most worrisome splinters in my brain. I remember one year, on July 4th, Mark spent $70 of our money (I was furious when I saw the price) on a single international phone call to her, to say happy birthday. I listened to the entire call, jealously, edgily, because something seemed wrong, suspicious, off. I listened for any hint in his voice of anything beyond friendliness -- some trace of desire, seduction, attraction, deep caring, love -- but I didn't hear them, although I knew the sound of them well. And I settled back into a dissatisfied uneasiness, which persisted, until years later, everything fell apart, and made sense.

After my husband admitted his addiction, admitted that one April day he had finally hit bottom with Israeli Girl, July 4th was tainted. I imagined all of those beautiful fireworks going off to celebrate her birthday. I remembered the phone call, imagined what he must have written to her in those years e-mail messages they exchanged, and I couldn't stand to leave the house. This night four years ago, new in a black place of crushing, disbelieving pain, I cringed at each pop of a distant firework, each whistling rocket, and felt they were searing and exploding inside of me.

The next year, Mark and I were wondering aloud whether or not to go out and try to see fireworks. He was tired, and I was still angry and depressed. We both understood that subtext, although with the kids listening, we simply said to each other, "Should we go?" My son heard us talking and said, with verbal skills newly developed after a year of speech therapy, "I want to watch fireworks!" So, it was decided, and I declared it my Independence Day. I was not going to let a tyrannical past rule my present; I would not let the past cast a shadow that blotted the fireworks from the skies my children saw.

We didn't have a destination that year, we simply drove around until we saw some fireworks and parked the car by the side of the road to watch them. There is a Schoolhouse Rock song my son liked to listen to that contained a line, "Red, white and blue fireworks like diamonds in the sky..." As he gazed up into the sky, my son echoed it back, gasping, "They look like diamonds in the sky!" He was thrilled to see a smiley face in the sky, and to watch the blaze of fireworks that marked the end of the show.

As I was putting him to bed afterwards, I told him that he could go to sleep and dream about trains (which were his obsession at the time). When he said he didn't know what dreams were, I told him they were pictures in your head while you sleep. He looked thoughtful, and said, "We can go to sleep and see fireworks in the sky, and we can see that face and then lots and lots like diamonds in the sky."

See, I worried about Israeli Girl's birthday ruining the fireworks, when in fact, my son's joy, and the magic he saw in the sky, threw a light on that night that no dark memory could blot out. I wouldn't think of missing fireworks after that year.

Last year my daughter was awake and old enough to appreciate the fireworks for the first time. As she walked outside, she saw the moon, which was quite a new and exciting sight to her, since her bedtime was 7 p.m. She asked if the moon could come with us to see the fireworks, and I promised her it would. During our car ride, she looked out the car window, checking to make sure that the moon was following us to the fireworks display. When we arrived, she was thrilled to see the moon, still there, watching. She sat with her mouth open wide through the whole show and was too excited to fall asleep, even so long after her bedtime, on the way home.

She and her brother have been chattering all day about the fireworks, about sitting outside and eating cookies and having the moon there and seeing lots of them explode at the end of the show and waving our flags and singing love songs to our nation, like "America the Beautiful," which gives me goosebumps (truly) every time I hear it. My life may not always be perfect, and my country may not always be perfect, but both of us are free.

Happy Independence Day. Enjoy the fireworks.

I was going to write this post about Facebook.  And Privacy.  And Privacy's evil twin, Secrecy.  And how when we say Privacy, we often really mean Secrecy.  Because not only do well-intentioned but befuddled people confuse the two, but addicts and other evil-doers also (gasp!) use the sacred name of Privacy as a mask for the nasty, putrid character of Secrecy.

I was going to tell you to learn to recognize Secrecy. (It's the one with the goatee.  Oh, and also the one you've lied to someone about, explicitly or implicitly.)  And I was going to ask you to think carefully about whether you are really, really talking about nice, clean-shaven Privacy or if you are actually sporting evil facial hair and hiding from people for fear of being judged.  And that being worried about how it will look if people know that you are who you are is not Privacy, it's illness. And I was going to tell you to live well and without secrets.  And not be both so scared and so freaking judgmental.  And if you live with secrets anyway (you devious person!), then Deal With It if you are outed.  Because it's your fault for having them.

And as for Privacy online (or Secrecy online for that matter), I was going to inform you that it's an illusion.  Nothing on the Internet is really private; it's on millions of computers around the world, forever.  If it's truly private, don't put it out there or at least recognize the risks, because demanding Privacy online is the equivalent of yelling at people for walking into a public restroom while you're using it with all the doors wide open.  Good, honest, non-goatee wearing Privacy is what the confines of our own Real Life are about. (It's all the stuff I don't post on the Internet. Whatever that is.) *

And I was going to tell you all this as someone whose life and marriage has been marred by secrets, so that I can see the difference between Privacy and Secrecy in the big, ugly gash burned through the middle of my existence.  And as someone who has this secret blog with a secret identity.  And who litters the Internet with posts about whole bunches of stuff that, really, I'd rather people in my Real Life didn't know.  All of which makes me one of the World's Experts on Privacy, Secrecy and Stuff Not to Post on the Internet.

But as I was writing that post, being all opinionated and you'ing you about how to do stuff right, you whiny and incompetent Facebook users, I saw that all that stuff about you was (surprise!) really stuff about me.  And not just stuff about me, but putting all my worst fears and worst character defects right out there in your face.  I mean, really, that kind of bossy, judgmental, know-it-all-ism -- telling you about how you shouldn't be bossy or judgmental because it makes me have to deal with my uncomfortable feelings about Secrecy and Privacy and how they've gotten all mixed up in my life to the point where it makes me want to punch them both square in the nose -- that's me at my total worst.  And that is the very kind of secret I shouldn't post on the Internet.

For some time I have been turning an idea for a novel around and around in my head...

Oh, I know.  Who doesn't want to write a novel, right?  Nearly everyone who has luxuriated in the feel of taking pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) and shaping the words out like clay has toyed with the idea of a novel.  Yes, I'm no different.  Blah blah.  Like all the rest of you, I was going to write a novel someday.  And sometimes I have started, but always I've stopped.

So, yesterday I started something new (again).  This idea that has been bouncing and turning around turned itself into an opening line, an opening scene.  And I wrote it down.  Scrawled and scribbled and scratched out some words on one side of a sheet of notebook paper.  (Old school!)  And I got excited, and then I started to panic.

I mean, what name am I going to publish it under?  My real name or MPJ?  What if I have to do media appearance?  How could I go on book tour as MPJ?  And won't my MPJ readers see the hidden bits I've stolen from my real life?  But if I write as Real Me, I don't get to talk about it with all of you and...

I have written one page.  One!  One really rough and unready page.  That's it.  But in my head, I'm already several thousand miles down the road.  In my mind, I've skipped over all the hard work of writing.  And rewriting.  And editing.  And running by writer friends.  And polishing.  And querying.  And rejection after rejection.  And rethinking.  And retooling.  And querying.  And more rejection.  But forget all that!  My mind has not only got the novel finished, it's got the agent, and the publisher, and the media appearances and book signings to worry about and maybe the movie deal, because it will be that good, of course.  Will David Letterman have me on his show?  Does he usually interview the authors when the movie is released?  Let's see if I can recall...

Seriously?  You think I'd have learned by now.  All that is craziness and fantasy and pain.  All that is what got me to a rock bottom crying on my bathroom floor seven years ago because my perfect life of fluffy, pink, marshmallow cloud wonderfulness had dissipated and left me falling, like the cartoon character who looks down and realizes he's not running, but hanging in the air over a ravine.  All that is pushing a hammer higher and higher to try to escape its inevitable fall.

What's good and real is what is right here, right now.  The hammer is lying on the ground as long as I don't pick it up, and I can't fall from those clouds when I'm sitting on the ground too.  I had fun writing a page of words.  That's all.  And that's all I need.

Happy birthday to me!
My blog's turning three!
Happy birthday, happy birthday!
Happy birthday to me!

Three years ago today, several forces serendipitously conspired to get me to pick up a keyboard, dub myself MPJ and write my very first ever blog post. Now, three years later, it seems appropriate to do some sort of retrospective -- you know, like those summary episodes of TV shows that air after a long break to refresh the memories of loyal viewers and to pull new ones in.  But since I never watch those things anyway, I won't subject you all to anything like that.

Instead, I will say that I am deeply grateful for this space and all it has brought me: from the ability to flex my writing muscles and share this crazy journey I call my life, to all you out there reading -- some silently, some maliciously, some spamming, some supportive and (best of all) some very dear friends (both old and new).

Now (resisting the sore temptation to add a winky, smiley emoticon to the end of this) I'm going to blow out my virtual candles and wish my favorite 12 Step wish: knowledge of God's will for my blog and me and the power to carry that out.

"I hate that you don't have a blog," said a woman about to undergo heart surgery, as she gazed sincerely up at her boyfriend, "I hate that I don't know what you're thinking."

Mark and I burst into raucous laughter and had to pause the episode of House that we were watching to wipe away our tears of glee and catch our breath.  Seriously?  "I hate that you don't have a blog?" Really?  Yep.  That's what we personal (and dare I say it, female?) bloggers are all supposed to be like.  So divorced from real life connections, so caught up in deluding ourselves about these supposed "friendships" we have online, so obsessed with our hit count, so eager for an audience, so narcissistic, that we can't even talk to our partners or parent our children, at least not unless there's a screen between us.

The comments on the recent Motherlode post on "mommy blogging" back up this perception. There are lots of women there talking about the community and connections they've made and about the therapeutic release of writing.  And there are plenty of others saying those connections aren't real and that the children of these deluded, self-obsessed women are being sorely neglected.

And it makes me wonder, why do people think bloggers and other social networkers are so crazy and scary and dangerous and delusional?  Why is an online presence portrayed as something that precludes, rather than enhances or supplements, other relationships?  What makes friendships "real?"  Why do we believe that people don't know what "real" relationships look like?  Why does it matter so much how people (particularly women) spend their free time?  What makes us believe that online time is not, in fact, free time, but time that is being taken away from more important things?  For that matter, why do we always have to be doing something "important?"  What makes something "important" in the first place? (From what I read "important" is anything from things I'd count as truly important -- like spending time with loved ones -- to things I consider not at all important -- like making sure the house is tidy and/or we're making more money.)  What makes it ok for a published author of personal essays or a memoir to write in detail about herself, her life, her children, her friends, her family, but not ok for bloggers to do the same?

If there are any universal answers to those questions, I don't know them.  What I do know is that there are hundreds of people who have passed in and out of my life and have all seen a sliver of me, both online and offline: sitting next to me in a movie theater, driving me a few miles in a taxi, clicking on a link to my blog and clicking right back out again.  I know that there have been dozens to hundreds of lurkers in my life, both online and offline, who have seen bits and pieces of me (and not always the nice bits, nor for that matter, always the nasty ones): the neighbors who (assuredly) heard Mark and me arguing or laughing or having sex through the thin walls of our old apartment just the way we heard them, the folks at the next table in the restaurant listening to our conversations, the people silently reading my blog.

I know that I have hundreds of people I've talked to and spent time with each day over the years, who've shared a workplace or the classroom or the social space, both online and offline: coworkers, high school and college buddies, neighbors, moms at my kids' schools, folks in online discussion groups, blog readers, fellow bloggers.  Some I know well, have fun with and consider good friends.  Others are acquaintances whom I don't know, and still others I don't really like at all (and vice versa, I'm sure).

Then I know that there are people in my life, both online and offline, who are my soulmates: the ones who are family or like family, the ones who would know my voice (spoken or written) anywhere, the ones I call first when I have joys or sorrows to share, the ones who can come into my house and help themselves to a drink or a snack, the ones I laugh and cry and eat ice cream with, the ones who see me -- as me, all of me -- and get me, and are there for me, as I am for them.

Some of those soulmates are people like Jay (whom I've known for almost a decade now) and JW (who is my son Austen's absolute favorite person in the world to talk to long-distance (just don't tell his grandparents)); people I met online.  I didn't know what they looked like or what their voices sounded like or get to see or touch them in the flesh for years.  And some of those soulmates are people like my husband Mark or my friend Kelly; people I happened to meet "in real life."

I also know that I am fortunate enough to have six hours a day free when my kids are in school and my husband is at work.  I know that I spend the vast majority of that time on housework, household administration and errands that are unseen by the and unacknowledged by people both in and out of the blogosphere.  And I know that I take some of those six hours, as a gift to myself and a support to others, to write.  I know there are people who don't respect that or see it as useless and "a waste of time" because I either don't get paid (or don't get paid much) for that.  I also know that I love my life and the way I spend my days, and that although what I contribute to the world (whether in doing the dishes or feeding my kids or blogging) may seem small, it's important: just as, in my favorite movie, It's a Wonderful Life, George Bailey's life and work in his small town was as valuable as anything he ever could have done if he'd gone out and built those bridges and skyscrapers he dreamed of.

No doubt there are people out there who become so obsessed with some aspect of their life or group of friends that they ignore other relationships.  No doubt there are people who can't tell the difference between a genuine friendship and the high of a falsely instant connection (I'm married to someone in recovery for just that, remember?).  No doubt someone, somewhere in the world, has to conduct a poll of everyone she knows before making major life choices.  No doubt there is a mom out there somewhere who is ignoring her kids while she does something else.  But all of that is hardly new to the Internet, just as "real" friends in my life haven't been confined strictly to people happen to have met in person.

And that's why Mark and I laughed as we listened to that fictional blogger on House.  We laughed knowing that I blog (about intimate details of our lives) and he doesn't.  We laughed knowing that we were snuggling on the sofa watching House after talking for over two hours -- about everything from mundane topics, like scheduling the kids' doctors appointments, to quite serious matters about our marriage -- during which I never once wistfully opined that it would go better with a keyboard in hand.  We laughed because Mark knows me better than anyone, online or off.  And we laughed because we both knew exactly what bits and pieces of those few hours spent talking and watching TV would go on the blog and what never would.

For the past year and a half, I have been a regular contributor at the recovery website The Second Road. I learned today that The Second Road will cease operations this month. The content will remain available but unfortunately the site will not be regularly maintained. I am grateful to The Second Road for introducing me to many wonderful people and allowing me to share my journey more widely than through my blog alone, and tonight I drink a nice sober toast (of sparkling apple cider) to all the folks over there.

While I'm saddened, I'm also excited to spend some time right here, tinkering around behind the scenes, maybe answering some of those (ahem) year-old messages piled up in my inbox and of course, writing.

I had a dream last night that I was in a temple and one wall was a curio cabinet filled with tiny statues. I was in a group of people and as we filed past the cabinet, we were each supposed to choose a figure to serve as our spiritual guide and protector. I choose a figure seated in meditation, carved from purple stone. It sat above a small white label with black type that read: "Ananda." When I left the temple, I found I had forgotten to take the figure with me, and I felt lost, until I remembered that in choosing it, it was with me always. And what do you know? Today turned out to be (like every day) a day of losing and finding, of forgetting and remembering. This old room of mine is still here, open like a flower, and I'm ready for whatever the universe has in store for me next.

"We should write a book," Mark said. "We can't be the only people who have struggled through all this and I think we have a lot we could offer to other people in sharing our journey."  This was a few years ago, back before I started this little blogging venture, and we were driving home from meeting with an educational advocate who was helping us navigate the tricky world of services for special needs children.

That idea of Mark's — "we should share all this" — stuck with me and was one of the reasons I started this blog: to share those experiences with a larger audience.  Now I share those experiences, but to feel safe, I have to take on a secret identity, like a super hero.  The secret identity lets me share, but it also prevents me from sharing.

I run into situations regularly (I ran into one just today, in fact) in which it would help someone for real life me to share a little bit of blog me with the rest of the world.  Because I've created a place where I feel safe sharing, I've also created this reservoir of writing and online resources and contacts to draw on, but I can't share that with the rest of my life or direct people in my life here for help for fear of outing me.

I was feeling bad today that MPJ was holding me back from sharing all that I should be grateful MPJ has allowed me to have.  I saw MPJ as the rock and the hard place between which I've been trapped, when I'm seeing now that what really traps me is a combination of my own lack of trust or fear of judgment and my drive to personally be the one who helps people, rather than trusting that that help will come.

Whew!  I tell you what, this writing stuff helps.  Go figure.

Earlier this year, I read an article about technology that would allow us to record and store every moment of our lives. Imagine: our whole lives stored in a single searchable archive. We could settle those arguments with the boss by replaying what was actually said. ("See, you did tell me you wanted this by Thursday, not Tuesday!") We could go back to that first kiss over and over again. In fact, if I were recording my whole life, I'd even be able to figure out where the heck I read this elusive article (The New York Times, maybe?) and link to it.

Maybe it's the year (and the first decade of the 21st century) drawing to a close, but the idea of a life archive was on my mind the other night.  My memory is flawed — as memories are —and ever since I was a child, I have wanted the ability to go back and reconstruct the past if I need to.  It's one of the reasons I write so much: not just here on my blog, which is a relatively recent occurrence, but in the thirty plus years of journals I have stacked up in my closet and in the copies of letters I have in file drawers (yes, years ago, back in the days when people did things like write letters on paper and send them to people in the mail, I started fastidiously making and keeping copies of my outgoing correspondence) and in the e-mail archive I have dating all the way back to the early 90's.  And I'm not just an obsessive chronicler, as Mark can attest from the paper laden state of our bedroom/office, I keep nearly every scrap of information that passes through my hands: from calendars to holiday letters to post-it notes.  And it's still never been enough.

My craving for a complete record of every moment of my life reached a height when I discovered Mark's sex addiction.  I went back over what I had and found it scandalously lacking.  How could I not have written anything at all on what turned out to be several major dates of acting out?  How could I not have a copy of some of those suspicious receipts that caused me so much angst?  And how could Mark have deleted all the e-mail in the secret accounts he used for contacting other women, so that, when at last I discovered them, I would have no way to verify dates and times?

I wanted to weigh every word he had written to someone else.  I wanted to compare each date and time to other events in our lives so I could thoroughly revise our history together based on what I now knew to be the truth.  I wanted to go back to each instance of his acting out and see what I had missed.  Did he look different when he came home after having sex with someone else?  Was there some way I could have known?  Now that I had all the information about what was happening at the time, would our lives together look different to me?  I wanted to go back to those sections and play them over and over again, like a detective in a crime drama, ready to pause it and say, "There!  See that!  The way he raises his eyebrow right there.  That's the tell."

I believed that somewhere out there was some objective reality that I'd failed to completely capture, and if I just knew how to access that, if had a more complete picture, if had more information, everything would be different; I'd be safe.  I would have something to point to in my self doubt and say, "I'm not crazy!  There was something there, something wrong, I just didn't know how to look for it."  I believed the whole truth was knowable by me if I just tried hard enough, if I had all the pieces to the puzzle.

What I didn't realize at the time was that the information alone was not enough.  The security of some objective truth is an illusion.  I still need the ability to interpret what I know and the confidence to believe in my own interpretation, my own truth, in the face, not of contradictory facts, but of contradictory interpretations.  There were times I did have evidence of my husband's addictive behavior, but I didn't have the ability to understand it or the confidence to hold to my feelings in the face of contradictory spin from Mark.  If I could play back the movie of my life, it wouldn't appear the same to me now as it did then or as it will in ten years or twenty years, not because of new information, but because of new experiences.

Still, I'm pretty sure that, given the chance, I'd totally buy something that would record my life.  After all, the fact that I still don't know where I read about all this in the first place is going to bug me for at least the rest of this year.  And wouldn't it be nice to just look that up rather than do all this tiresome letting go?  Maybe if I check my e-mail...