Kari from MamaBloo here sending a blog post your way while Me Ra is off with the family.

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I sit here and stare at the Word Press screen.  For those of you who have never blogged, the Word Press screen is a gray mass of boxes of varying sizes.  The one that magically turns into your blog post is about 6 inches long and 2 inches high and you type your “story” inside this box — you can only see a few sentences at a time.  It is perhaps the least appealing forum for writing something meaningful, and today I feel like I need to come up with something meaningful. I can literally hear the screen yelling at me through its ugly interface to type something funny with just a dash of wisdom.  And all I can come up with is my grocery list:

Okay, so I am going to try the age-old approach of  staring  a little more at the screen on the off-chance that something will just sorta, ya know, COME to me. If it doesn’t I will have to call Genie on the phone and tell her that “I got nothin’.”  So, I persist.  A little more staring.  A bit more. A bit more.  Yup. Nothin’.

The only other time I was at a loss for words was when I was sitting on the set of the Oprah show at some god-awful hour of the morning while the director did a lighting check.  I looked around and saw my entire family to the right of me on this huge couch.  But there was an empty seat to my left.  “Um, Mr Director???” I ask, “WHO is going to be sitting there…??” I point to my left.  Oprah.  Crap.  And my mind went blank.  All hope of being verbose, pithy, and wise just bloooooppppp went right out of my brain into some other place, some other universe.  I can actually remember the feeling of not being able to put together a coherent thought that I could then expel out my mouth into words.  I felt totally blank.   I knew Dave was going to be almost no help.  And the kids were shell-shocked.  It was going to come down to me.  Me and my incoherent, thoughtless brain in another universe. Great.

Okay, so this isn’t as bad as that….

I can hear the author Anne Lamott practically yelling at me to just WRITE, for the love of God, and stop worrying about being perfect. Something will come, she says. Instead I hit SAVE (although what I am “saving” I am not sure is worth my time… ) and go make french toast for dinner — that I can do and all the kids like it (not an easy feat…).

But as I am flipping the french toast on our new griddle, it occurs to me.  Whether it be writing or photography or parenting or cooking dinner or just plain ol’ life, there are days when we are going to feel totally and completely uninspired.  But we are called to keep going, not by staring at the screen and waiting, but by trying, pushing, remembering, trying again, putting something OUT THERE that isn’t our best and trusting that it’s good enough anyway, and by admitting that sometimes we just aren’t in the moment the way we wish we were.  That maybe we feel it’s a cop out to cook french toast for dinner until we remember that all the kids love it, that dinner together generates a rollicking game of telephone where the message passes from kid to kid and we discover that “vanilla palm trees eat pickles,” and that sometimes just by pressing on we can find a place of self-love that is even better than sitting next to Oprah.

Cheers!