There are things we shouldn't talk about.

Blogging honestly is hard. There are certain things people aren't supposed to talk about in public. When I told my husband I was starting a new blog he wasn't particularly excited. He suggested I try writing fiction instead. He's not the type of husband who tries to control what I do and say and I'm not the type of wife to let my spouse be the boss of me so his worries didn't deter me.  Still, I understand my family's reservations about being reduced to characters in my narrative. Some stories aren't mine to tell and it's difficult to straddle the line between protecting someone else's privacy and sharing my own perspective. It's even harder since I have no friends or family close by to confide in. There's social media, but that's more for recording the good parts - the smiling family pics, like-worthy statuses, artsy photos, and cat videos.

I'm not supposed to talk about the company that left our family stranded in another country because they made my husband sign an agreement stating he wouldn't tell anyone how inept they were. I'm not supposed to talk about consultations with lawyers and how we pursued suing them and how in the end the company promised to give us money to go away quietly. This is an integral part of how we ended up here, but I'm legally obligated not to talk about it. 

I shouldn't talk about how upset I am at my husband for bringing us here.
I shouldn't talk about how guilty I feel for uprooting the kids... again. 
I shouldn't talk about how my son is struggling with anxiety and depression.
I shouldn't talk about how I am too. 
I shouldn't talk about how much I hate Toronto.

On my old blog a patchwork world I chronicled kokoleo and my kids early childhood in Los Angeles. I often showed pictures and told stories about how fun and cute they were and photographed them in the clothes I made for them. They're still funny and cute, but they're older now and they don't need me as much. They've outgrown those handmade clothes and are less willing to let their lives to be my blog fodder. When we moved to Seattle my blog posts, few and far between, focused more on the things I made for kokoleo. I started a new blog called Out and About Around Seattle that documented our adventures around the city and camping trips in the Pacific Northwest. Now that that time in our lives is over I wish I would have recorded more. I don't feel up to writing an Out and About Around Toronto-type blog. The endless city blocks and restaurants and shops don't bring me the joy that canoe trips and mountains and the Pacific coast once did.

Of course, all of this angst could be avoided if I was like most people who don't have blogs.  It's a lot easier to let life go unrecorded - there's no struggling to put stories into grammatically correct well-punctuated paragraphs, no feeling guilty for skipping days and weeks and months not writing, and no spending weeks revising one simple post (this one) that few people will ever read. But also, there will be no photos to look back on, no random days saved for posterity's sake, no vague thoughts and feelings and struggles worked out through the act of writing them down, and nothing to look back on when life is better and say, "Whew! I'm glad we made it through that time in our lives. It wasn't so bad after all." (I'm still not there yet.)