I‘m back at my desk for the first time in six months. The view outside my window has changed in obvious ways: it’s officially autumn now, not spring, although the leaves are still that late-summer shade of green, faded and weathered by the third-hottest summer on record.
On the other side of the window, I’ve changed, too: a new scar, a new appreciation for my body. And a whole new person, my son, who we named Art.
I’ve felt the need to look back on this time as I transition out. But how exactly can I measure it?
There have been hundreds of bottles to wash, dozens of sleepless nights, stroller walks around the neighborhood, hours spent rocking and holding and feeding a baby. Inspecting tiny fingers and toes, hangnails. Folding baby blankets, putting away tiny socks. I watched our tiny newborn become an infant, slowly at first and then, somehow, all at once.
The months contained so much other life, too. We picked blackberries and I planted my first (successful) container garden, full of tropicals. We rented an RV for our family camping trip, making the necessary upgrade from a tent. I got to teach a journaling workshop at our local community center. And I became a regular at a dance class where I’m approximately 30 years younger than everyone else.
We swam. We played card games. We traveled, we stayed home. The summer passed.
And through all of it, I kept a journal.
When my first son was born, I had been keeping a daily journal, too. But when I look back now, those early months of motherhood are difficult to reconstruct. There are entries, of course, and thousands of photos in my camera roll, but much of the experience itself is still blurry. I underestimated how much my day would change, and that my journaling routine would need to change with it.
This time around, I wrote more. Not every day, and almost never under the conditions I once thought I needed to write well. My journal was simply always within reach because it was on my phone, in Day One. I thumb-typed entries while feeding a baby at two in the morning. I added photos and a few sentences when that was all I had time for. I jotted down things I heard, quotes, song lyrics. Again, journaling was the anchor that kept me living, really living, even when all I wanted was for things to get easier.
Somewhere in these six months, I finally let go of the idea that keeping a journal has certain requirements. The only thing that mattered was that I was leaving myself a trail.
***
In many ways, these six months have felt like a return — to myself, to movement, to my journal, and now, finally, to work.
I’m especially grateful that Automattic gave me six months of fully paid parental leave to experience all of this: to recover, to be with my family, and to have a stretch of time I know I’ll continue to understand differently as the years pass.
And now I’m back at Day One, which feels meaningful in a whole new way.
Next month, I’ll travel to Barcelona to speak at the Barcelona Journaling Festival about capturing the everyday details of our lives. After these six months, I have a different understanding of what that means — how to keep paying attention through the big, life-changing moments and the tiniest ones, too.