Monday, October 20, 2008

My Name is Jonas...

Many thanks to my 2007-8 1st period class at AMS for giving me a theme tagline...

My (married and adopted) name IS Jonas - and I guess I do carry the world for my family (if not for the Guitar Hero 3 audience)! Many thanks to Weezer, their lead singer's brother, and Jacob T., who asked me to play the song each and every one of our 180 days together.

THIS Jonas is... well... a MOM. I was many things before, and I expect I'll be other things again, but I am first and foremost a MOM.

What's a MOM?

You can scour the internet for a definition, or look a little closer to home. I've joked often that MOM stands for "Mean Old Mother"... and that I learned from The Best... SHE took that as a compliment. That's my MOM for you.

But what am I, this being and blogging entity who posts her occupation plainly on her license plate as "JSJ-MOM"?

Well... I'm a born-and-bred New England outsider, someone who claims places as home which mightn't claim me. I was born in Maine and raised in part of NH that few people know - few politicals even visit my North Country before a presidential primary. I was raised again at an accessible NE boarding school (as a day student!) and yet again at a VERY accessible state university... and yet again as a Bright Young (Female) Engineer in an aging paper industry. All my life I was taught, told, and subsequently believed I could do anything.

Today I live in SW Virginia, on the edge of a different Appalachia. I truly can do almost anything... cook, sew, write, read, light carpentry, even some rudimentary plumbing... anything except, so it seems, get hired. My education, degrees, training, and life experiences don't impress anymore - perhaps these credentials even intimidate some. My husband's impressed... thank goodness, because if I relied on the neighbors, the community, or the family for much support, I'd be destitute.

So... why blog now? Good point... particularly as this life I lead at home seems so dull. Perhaps this blog is an attempt to document a simple life, albeit in an upscale, electronic form. Perhaps I reach out now for affirmation, or simply to document both the easy yet hardworking life I knew, adopted, and now hope to bring to my corner of the world.

The trouble with this, then, is narrowing a focus.

A hardworking family woman does it ALL... and somehow manages to teach that hardworking ethic to her progeny. Maybe that's the hook... figuring out how to pass that ethic on to generations to come, by sharing the load.

Instead of doing it all myself... maybe we can learn to do it all together.