This has been a long time coming. As days turned to weeks, and months passed, the idea – a pebble dropped into an empty chamber somewhere in my brain – rattled ever more noisily as our lives have tumbled this way and that.

I can no longer stand the echo of the pebble. I think it’s time I tilt my head carefully and let it fall out into the world – this idea of mine.

This idea to end my blog.

Typing those words feels deeply personal. Incredulous Mom will always be an alter ego present in the miserly quadrant of  my mind, where skepticism, pessimism, and sarcasm bloom like dandelions. I love her. It was she who decided that chronicling was therapeutic and fun. It was she who was so overcome by the experience of Motherhood that she had to write it all down and share it. She’ll always have a place at the table of characters in my head.

But, truth be told, I’ve grown as a parent and a person since the creation of Incredulous Mom. I’m no longer incredulous. I blinked and here I am: unincredulous. Is that a word? I want to write and share and express ideas beyond “mom” blog stuff – to stand on my tippy toes and peer beyond this wall where I live as Mommy.

And my muse – my little blond-headed tornado – is morphing into a boy before my very eyes. His limbs are no longer pudgy and soft. No. They’re scuffed and scrawny poles, protruding with scaly knees and elbows that speak daily of magnificent messy adventures.

He’s a boy. A kid. Beyond his weakness for a good tickle-fight and his preference for a well-timed fart joke,  he’s notably adept at articulating his thoughts, feelings, and opinions about the bigger things in life. He’s no longer a baby. No longer a toddler. He has a voice, the kind used to advocate for one’s self. He is slipping into a gray area of in-between-ness, where I struggle to know the rules. I find myself increasingly addled about the integrity of sharing him publicly with others.

And what of the other whirlwind that dwells in our house, tearing book pages and scribbling on surfaces-that-ought-not-be-scribbled-upon with her faithful purple crayon? What about her? What happens when you build a blog around your first-born, and then a second comes bursting onto the scene, so fierce and beautiful and mighty and absurd that you simply find no words because she allows you no time to find them, let alone write them down in any pattern of coherence.

As these thoughts have manifested themselves into tendencies to write about other things – things that don’t feel true to this blog – I’ve recognized the need to just be done. And I want it to be done by official proclamation because it hurts my heart a bit to let my little blog sit idle and alone – waiting. Sometimes bonds and cords and ribbons are for cutting as much as they are for tethering.

I don’t know what tomorrow will bring. Perhaps I’ll never write again. Perhaps I will. Maybe I’ll start a new blog. Maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll just live life without narration. For now, I choose to put this fairytale-in-words on hold and focus on living it in real life, in real time, together with my loves.

A writer named W.H. Auden said, “The way to read a fairy tale is to throw yourself in.”

And I want to be all in.

Onward. And farewell.