It’s been so long…

Peg McCarthy/ OShoot Photography

Well, it has been awhile.

Almost four years to be exact since I decided to blog and send my words into the Internet ether. Hello, is this thing on? Can you hear me?

I know I am not the first and certainly won’t be the last blogger or writer who once feverishly wrote up a storm and then faded to the background.

What’s been going on since we last interacted?

Easy answer: Life.

Marriage, a new city, an ever-expanding career (I could or maybe should start a blog about management of a B2B newspaper in the ever-shifting world of journalism) and the latest, incredible addition, a baby son who is on the cusp of turning one.

It’s that last factor which brings back. I have honed a career and life where the written word, being accurate, telling stories and capturing images has been the main driving force. The lessons learned in those pursuits I know have shaped me but this new force of nature, a baby boy, has been an awe-inspiring change which lit the wordsmith fire…well…for today anyway.

As my awesome wife and I tackle the journey of parenthood, it has been amazing to see and feel how this little person we created is a game changer and the main reset button needed for a life which became too fixated on a career and getting ahead.

None of the observations I make now and going forward will be revolutionary or different from the other mommy and daddy bloggers out there but all the same, here we go…

While watching my son grow over the last 11 months I have caught myself at times looking at him in wonderment as he takes in the world around him, recognizing, remembering and experiencing new things on almost an hourly basis. I have said he is like “an open nerve”, experiencing and feeling everything right now as he lives in the moment.

Trying to reset this adult brain, which worries about the house, hiring and firing staff, traffic congestion, bills, politics, friendships come and gone and an ever slowing metabolism, to see things around me as a child does, has been refreshing and much needed…more than I would have ever acknowledged before or even expected.

What will my legacy be, I often wonder, for my son to learn about? He will figure me out in due time but I sometimes wonder, will he be curious about what his old man obsessed about most of his life? Where will he find those stories and photos? Will he wonder, “Why didn’t you write about me?”

My wife has dutifully kept a journal for our little guy during his first 11 months and I am so thankful she has. I have obsessively taken pictures (which parent hasn’t in the age of the smartphone?) in order to document his early years but I really have not written much. Then again, even before he joined us, I had pretty much forsaken any type of personal writing. The energy wasn’t there. The time was nowhere to be found. The passion was essentially gone.

I think things are changing now.

The blog has been dusted off, as has the keyboard, for how long I am not sure but surely there is time between diaper changes and getting down on all fours, to see the world as he does, where I will be able to write into the ether again.

Thanks for that little man.