What Happened in Cyprus

I've spent the past several days wondering how I was going to keep this blog going. 

I felt like the first step was to figure out why it died in the first place. 

The most obvious reason is that I am too busy and can't find the time to write. Elise tells me if it is important enough to me, I will find time to for it. And I have been busy before. Namely, when we were in Washington and I was working shifts. But as busy as I was then, I feel busier now. I literally don't know when I would write. From the moment I get up in the morning to the second I lay my head down at night, I am going. Every second of the work day is filled with...well...work, and when I come home, every second is spent fulfilling my responsibilities as either a father or husband. No collapsing into the recliner in front of the nightly network news. By the time we put the kids to bed, Elise and I are both exhausted ourselves. The last few waking minutes of each day are spent reading or watching a mindless food network show on Netflix. 

I knew, though, it had to be more than that. I think both Elise and I recognize that my writing has been a little less thoughtful since my mother passed away and we moved to Jordan. When I do post to the blog, I share photos of the kids and a fairly benign and pained run through of the day or an itinerary of some trip we recently went on, an itinerary without any commentary or context, "We went here blah blah blah we did this blah blah blah..." 

I became especially discouraged upon our return from Beirut as I really wanted to capture that experience here; it was an important event, but I didn't immediately sit down and right about it and -- in not doing so -- I immediately felt it start to slip away. The sights and sounds and what the trip meant to me all immediately started to fade. So much so, I wondered what the point would have been trying to capture whatever remained, remnants of memories, just jigsaw puzzle pieces that may or may not fit together to make a bigger picture. What was the point? If it couldn't be the clear, HD version with every sight, every sound, and every memory captured perfectly in crisp, clear words and pictures, but faded photos one finds in a shoe box at the back of a closet several years later, was it even worth it?

I wondered if I thought I'd lost my audience when my mom died. I know there are others who read the blog, but was I really writing it for her and now that I know she's not reading it anymore did it become a little less purposeful?

The real audience has always been the kids, in hopes they will one day want to go back and read about what their mom and dad were thinking day in and day out when they were little, what was really going on behind the scenes of all those moves, new countries, baseball games and tennis practices. 

What happened in Cyprus was that I realized I didn't want to let them down. It's been several days -- almost a week -- since we've been back and I still haven't found anymore time to write but I have found that it is still important to me. 

If only for the kids.