Once upon a time, I had a blog. It was called Make It Stop!, subtitled “Baby Book, Bereavement Journal, and Rough Draft For My Magnum Opus,” and if you’re reading this now, as we’re just getting started, then chances are you read that one, too. Its existence was bookended by the two most cataclysmic losses of my adult life: the death of the mother-in-law, and the departure of my husband. Several years ago, I started listening to Anderson Cooper’s podcast series on grief, All There Is. He said something early on that reminded me of what Cheryl Strayed has said about Dear Sugar—that Sugar is the temple she built in the place where her mother had been, the monument she created to that love and that loss. I think that this is one of the most important exercises in the work of grieving: to create something out of our devastation. And that got me thinking about what I have created out of my own grief.

I started the original Make It Stop! on a whim one January day in 2009 after my ex and I had taken all three kids to the Baltimore Aquarium. It was an exhausting, hilarious, ridiculous day that surely accounted for the epidemic of strep throat that burned through our household the entire month of February, and I absolutely had to tell someone about it. But the person I would normally have told about it was dead. Helen died on June 24, 2008, and though I didn’t realize it until many years later, I emailed her almost every single day. On the days I didn’t email her, I probably talked to her on the phone. She was the person I brought all those stories to, and there was no one else in the world besides my husband and my mom who cared as much or was as invested in those stories as I was. Helen was my mentor, my advisor, the person whose input mattered most to me, because she was a mother who I felt had done it right. Which is not to say she was perfect, or that she never hurt my feelings or did things that irritated me; she did. But far more often than that, she made me feel like I could do this too; I could be the mother I wanted my kids to have. That’s not even the most important part, though. The most important part was that she loved my kids as much as I did, and so sharing their lives with her was a way to reexperience and (if necessary) transform every moment of joy or frustration I had with them, like a prism refracting the sun into all its gorgeous wavelengths. Helen was never going to sit there blank-faced at the end of a story and say, Huh. That’s weird. She was going to feel my outrage or my delight or my complete fucking bewilderment exactly as I did, and then she was going to put it into the larger context of motherhood in a way that reassured me we were all going to be alright.

When we lost her, that need didn’t just go away. Those stories kept happening, and the words kept collecting inside me with nowhere to go until I got to a point where I knew that if I didn’t let them out, they would strangle me. So I started my blog, and for the longest time, Helen was the person I spoke to in every entry. Each post was directed to her, and the ones that weren’t to her were about her. That was the temple I built in her absence. That was where I took my grief. For the next two years or so, I wrote vast, rambling essays about motherhood, grief, life in the DC suburbs, politics, current events, and everything else I had an opinion on. I didn’t promote my blog much, because I was always worried about who might read it, but it enabled me to continue to feel like a writer even when every moment of my waking life (and a great deal of my sleeping life) seemed devoted to tiny people whose needs were endless and who definitely did not give a shit about my work. It gave me a place to put things that happened to me and things I felt, and it enabled me to produce some writing that I am, to this day, really proud of, and really amazed to be able to say I did. I credit Helen with all of it. 

And then on November 28, 2012, my husband told me he was moving out of our house. Although he wouldn’t come out and say he wanted a divorce for another ten months—and a memoir’s worth of events transpired in just that interval—it was clear from that first conversation that my life was about to change. I took a new job that day: Chief Over-Analyst at Can This Marriage Be Saved? It paid nothing, the hours sucked, and in the end, my position was eliminated, but I killed myself at it for almost a year. Until October 3, 2013, when I received some news that put an end to that contract, and also others far more dear to me. I wrote a lot during that year of separation—nearly 200,000 words in my journal, almost all of it about my marriage. But I never wrote another word in my blog. In early December, 2012, I posted a final entry in which I let my readers know I was going away. I knew there was no way I could write publicly about what was happening, and I also knew there was no way I could not write about it. So I closed up shop and went back to writing only for myself.

It was a necessary move, and in the decade that followed, I wrote multiple memoirs’ worth about divorce, adultery, and betrayal; I completed probably a dozen short stories and essays; I finished a novel that is, in fact, long enough to be two; and I also continued raising three young children and living a life that’s included some of the deepest grief and the realest joy that any human being has a right to hope for. So I was busy. I was happy. I was bereft. But I missed blogging dearly, and I missed all of my friends who read my work, and so ten years later, I started a new one.

The second blog was also, in its way, a response to overwhelming grief. For all that I am grateful for in my life today, all the things I have now that I couldn’t have imagined or hoped for, I will never stop grieving the loss of the family I waited my whole life to have: the one I created with the person I loved, trusted, and wanted for my own right up until the very end. That it ended the way it did will never be ok. But that ending also helped make me the person I am today, and gave me the life I have now. It is, as Stephen Colbert so beautifully described it in an interview I have reread a hundred times, the miracle of learning to love the thing you most wish had never happened. What punishments of God are not also gifts?, he quoted Tolkien as saying. Those two losses—my mother-in-law and my marriage—are two of the greatest gifts in my life. They enabled me to find myself again in Make It Stop!, to write the novel I’m so proud of, and to produce a lot of other work I hope the world will one day see. And then they enabled me to write a lot of new work in my second blog, some of which we are already revisiting here (like this intro! Now new and improved for blog #3!).

But there was always a problem with those first two projects, and that problem was that they were only for a very select audience. I wrote about things that were deeply personal, but that also involved other people. And I always feared what would happen if the people who featured in those writings ever read them. Anne Lamott famously said You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should’ve behaved better. Which is all well and good, except when you have to read their emails, or answer the door when they show up on your porch. I wrote some more things I’m really proud of in that second installment–not just about my divorce, but also about my family, my creative process, and my mom’s death. But I think after her passing, I was kind of burned out on writing about my life. I moved on to other projects: a second novel, some more short stories, and also a comically absurd amount of traveling. And then This Motherfucker, the 47th President, actually won an election and I think I can speak for a lot of us when I say that for a while there, I just kind of went within. There was a long stretch of just trying to keep my head above the ever-rising waters of terrible news, and then suddenly it was 2026, and I don’t know; something shifted. I decided it was time. For what, I’m not totally sure.

Here’s what I’m thinking right now: more of this—meandering meditations on whatever happens to be on my mind (it’s kind of my specialty…). Probably a lot of screaming into the void re: American fascism. Thoughts on the administration, the resistance, and hella posts about abortion. But still some memoirish stuff, travel writing, blasts from the past, possibly even the occasional poem. Who knows?! Life has a way of throwing curveballs; we could wind up anywhere. Whatever it is, my commitment to this newly-revised version of Make It Stop! is that I’m done trying to curate who sees my work. I’m done hiding and writing in secret. Whatever I write here, it’s here for the world. Welcome to you new readers, I hope you’ll help me figure out where we need to go. And welcome back to all of you who’ve been with me from the start. I’ve missed you ❤️