The Truant

I’ve been absent from this blog for some time. There are reasons.

Chief among these is my iPhone. The precious. A wonderful tool, but also a shackle for the easily distracted. As so much of the rest of my day is spent attempting to focus on other things (work, children, etc.), when I find myself with an hour or two of free time, I tend to reach for the mindless at worst, simply unproductive at best amusement that is the iPhone. I chide myself for this habit, but despite what I claim, I never really put it down. It’s the kind of thing that, were it more destructive in my life, I’d call it an addiction, but the net negative at this point is simply that I end up poking and swiping at it instead of writing or just plain doing nothing during my downtime.

While the phone is the most clear external reason I have not written much in the blog, the other reason, more internal, is a lack of motivation. It’s not for lack of topics. The boys remain a treasure trove. It’s for lack of answers. In writing this blog, I have always thought of it as a how-to or practical advice forum, rather than a simple chronicling of events and thoughts. I want to have a point, but also to have that point be in some way actionable or useful to others. To get to that point, though, I need to feel a sense of conviction that my way of handling things is worth proselytizing.

I’ve had 4 draft blog posts sitting in the queue dating back to January of this year. 3 of those drafts are my trying to write down my thoughts about Joshua’s tantrums. They are not gone. They have not gotten milder. Matthew tries to have them as well, but he is smaller and less forceful and we are wiser and also do not have time for that bullshit anymore. Joshua’s tantrums tend to be roadblocks, performed at times when we cannot simply work around them and done at a volume that makes them difficult to ignore.

The fact that they continue with such fervor has me question a lot about my ability to say anything about parenting. I don’t mean this in such a dramatic fashion as to suggest that I think I’m not a fit parent. Both boys are bright, well-behaved at school (and generally at home) and are happy and healthy. Some of that is surely nature, but Janelle and I can most definitely take credit for plenty of nurture.

It does suggest, though, that only in somewhat distant hindsight can any parenting technique really be called effective. And this is where I find myself: hunkered in the trenches, lobbing grenades blindly and hoping they hit something critical.

Janelle told me, in much more elegant terms, that I’m just being emo and I should keep posting things. So, I’ll lob some more grenades your way soon.

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