In the fall of 2003 I returned arrived home to Massachusetts to live for the first time since I had departed for college in 1994. In those nine years I had collected: a bachelor’s degree; a husband; work experience as a press secretary and radio and print journalist; and a baby.
We moved into The House – Ducky’s seaside summer place of dark old wood and battered floors and a hundred years of family history. The House needed a caretaker and we needed a place to live. We had to be responsible for the care and upkeep, and promise to depart in the summer so other family members could have their time there. It was beautiful, desolate and wild and unspoiled. But in the winter, it was grim living. Only two rooms were winterized, and by “winterized” I mean that the cold wind that blew in from the cracks in the wall could be combated with the thirty year-old heating system. While Cute Husband studied law, I raised our baby in those two rooms, keeping her warm with long johns and hot cereal.
My career was foundering. I was writing and selling stories, but it wasn’t enough. I asked a contact at the Boston Globe how to make a living writing from home. She told me newspapers were dead and the future was in — gee, what was that word? Blogging. Yeah. Ever heard of it?
I felt like she’d told me to dip my work in poo. Or maybe she was telling me it was too late, my work was already poo. Whatever, it bummed me out. But I do really try to take advice, so I started blogging op-ed pieces, hoping I could break in to syndication.
That summer, Ducky came to live with us. She and Mary lived in perfect sympathy in some other dimension from the rest of us. Their world was visceral and raw and lovely and they could sit together on the porch in perfect silence eating lunch and admiring a duck on the water. She became Mary’s best friend, and it was one of the most beautiful things I had ever witnessed.
I wanted to write about that. I wanted to write about the absurdity and banality and sheer joy of motherhood. I started a second blog, and the first post was about Mary waking up Ducky for breakfast.
“I have no problem knowing what the best part of motherhood is,” I wrote. I described Mary hopping down from the table where she was waiting for her oatmeal, stomping over to Ducky’s bed.
Come and eat oatmeal, Ducky! Sit with me in your jammies, and Momma will bring enough for two. (She gives extra raisins if you ask nicely!) and then maybe we can color together and take a jump into my deck pool.
“Hiiiiiii Ducky!!”
That’s the best part.
Those early posts were filled with a sort of feeling-my-way-throughness. I was learning how to be a mother and also how to be a – what was that word? A blogger. (The word “Mommyblogger” was still two years away.)
I wrote about the long blizzards cooped up in those two rooms and the stupidity of taking a storm-addled toddler out to a Chinese restaurant. (No. She will not sit still while you eat your Kung Pao. Zero chance, moron.)
I wrote about struggling to find friends, and about the friends I did find. I wrote about being sad and happy that she was growing up, about hating my life and loving it, too. I tried not to write about poop, but I did once when Mare had her first orange juice just before we ended up in the tiniest ski shop in all the land with the tiniest bathroom and she was wearing snowpants.
My op-ed blog was getting fewer hits and I was updating it less frequently until soon I had to admit surrender: I didn’t want to write about politics any more. I was a young mother in love with motherhood and that was what I wanted to write about. To my astonishment, people wanted to read it.
By January of the first year, I was pregnant again and barfing all the time. I found out people were reading my blog when I wrote this little funny post about morning sickness. Aunt Zeze called Franklin and scolded him for not telling her personally. He totally deserved it. Welcome to the brave new world: I was writing on the Internet, and people were reading. Sometime in this spell I achieved a thousand hits in a day. It was bizarre!
In July, The House was found to be contaminated with lead dust and we moved to Lenox, Massachusetts, to the home of my aunt Emily while we waited for remedition. I wrote about living in the country with goats and no friends and no cash and the challenges of parenting a toddler while very pregnant with the second child.
The first year ended in Lenox, while we waited to get let back into The House to have our baby.
To celebrate that first year, what else could there possibly be but: Starbucks!
Our town had a Starbucks drive through and my $3.57 magnum was a double tall latte. That was so incredibly much money. Friends and family used to send me Starbucks gift cards. Mare’s first sentence was, “Momma coffee?”
To celebrate Year One, Starbucks has donated gift packs of their new Via instant coffee. I really love this stuff. It doesn’t taste like instant, and I keep it on hand for the days I accidentally run out of beans. Also, Cute Husband drinks only decaf, and only once in a while, so this is the stuff we keep on hand for him. I highly recommend keeping Via in the diaper bag, in the glove box, wherever. You can even make a passable cup from very hot tap water.
Speaking of which, they have an iced coffee version, too.
I’m giving away one of each – caffeinated, decaffeinated and iced. Leave a comment telling me which you want.
I’ll draw all the winners for all the prizes at the end of the week. Once you win one prize you are disqualified from the others, and you can only enter each drawing once.






















