The Po Show

Accomplishments

So it's not everyday that you see the word "Blog" in a headline in the Boston Globe, so my eye was caught to the front of the Business section the other day (Attention!! Attention!!! Freudian slip alert!!! As I was just typing section right now, I accidentally typed "sextion." AND, when I just tried to type section in the previous sentence, I did it again! AND, when I just typed the last sentence, I did it AGAIN! This is bordering on pathological! Okay, not so much bordering...)

ANYWAY, I was attracted by the word blog in a headline, which headed an article about how some blog writers are being awarded press passes for the Democratic National Convention here in Boston this summer. All an example of how blogs are becoming so mainstream, I guess. The part that struck me was a description of one of the guys who's been given a press pass. He's one of the writers on pandagon.com, which is a poliblog that Ross reads fairly regularly (I find it telling that all the blogs he reads are political and economic, whereas all the ones I read are personal blogs by moms). This guy, whose blog gets like 15,000 hits a day and is highly regarded, is 22 years old. His partner is still a junior at UC Santa Cruz (go, Banana Slugs!!!).

I am always startled when people radically younger than I am show themselves to be highly accomplished (okay, so having a popular blog isn't the hardest thing for a 22 year old to accomplish, but it's just one example of many). It all comes back to my extreme ambivalence about what I've "accomplished" in my life so far.

I always say that if you had told me when I was 17 that when I was 37 I wouldn't have a "real" career, I would have thought you were nuts. I was destined for great things. People had always told me so. I was going to be fabulously successful. In exactly what, I wasn't sure, but boy was it going to be fabulous. I was going to be fabulous.

So here I am, and I have a job that I hate, and previously I worked for seven years in a job that I was good at, but never felt like a career, never felt right for me. What the hell happened? What happened to my fabulous accomplishments?

Their names are Matthew and Tessa, and I don't discount for a second the magnitude of the accomplishment I have achieved, and still achieve, by being a good mother. I tell myself that there could never be a fricking *job* that was as important as my kids.

But there is still something missing, and I'd be lying if I said there wasn't. Something still to be accomplished.