Are You Freaking Kidding Me: Two Years Edition

I started this blog two years ago today. I was a fresh out of grad school newlywed living, not with my husband, but living with my maternal grandparents. My grandmother was dying from frontotemporal dementia (or FTD) and I was taking care of her.

It was a difficult time in my life. Marriage was initially was not an easy adjustment for me. I was unemployed. My father had died less than a year earlier and that pain was still raw. Now, here I was living with two octogenarians in Louisiana, in the hot humid summer, surrounded by quarrelling family, providing the most challenging and intimate kind of care to someone I loved dearly, but who was no longer herself. She was stubborn and suffered from paranoid delusions. I was emotionally and physically exhausted all the time.

But there were sweet times too. Blow drying her hair after I had bathed her. Massaging her feet before she went to sleep. When she would ask me for perfume, which she always called Bulgari. Making her root beer floats.

The last thing my grandma ever told me to do was to be a writer. When I lived in China, I had had written her long emails about what I saw, did, and experienced and she, a world traveller herself, had loved it. She wanted me to keep writing. So, I started this blog. I write about what I would write to her about: my life, my opinions, my ideas, and my likes and dislikes.

It's not the most popular blog. It's not the prettiest blog. It's not the most well written blog, but it's mine. My secret little record of my thoughts and ideas and memories. Only my husband even knows I have a blog and I've never even told him the name of it. Keeping it secret and keeping it anonymous allows me to share my feelings without embarrassment. I write it for myself and for my grandma and I'm perpetually amazed that anyone else bothers to read it. But I'm glad you're here. You're all so nice and without ever having met you, you have become my dear friends. Thanks for sticking around. I owe you an ice cream cone.